Urban Farming: Co-ops Join the National Trend Toward DIY Food

His building's garden, a mix of flowers plus an apple tree, strawberry vines and dill, has been in place for three years. This puts it ahead of the curve: As the Sacramento Bee newspaper wrote in April, echoing a consensus, "A mix of bad economics and a desire for good food is driving a new boom in home vegetable gardening. … Suddenly, growing vegetables is all the rage…." Steven Peck, president of the Toronto-based Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, told an interviewer it "was standing room only" at an Atlanta session his organization held last May on the topic that has come to be called urban agriculture.

"I have to give the board president a lot of credit," says Andrea Bunis, president of Andrea Bunis Management, the building's property manager. "We had a tremendous sinkhole in the back yard. The board said, 'Why can't we do something there? It's deserted and ugly.' We filled in the hole with cement, and then planted back there." The roughly70-foot x 15-foot space also contains (see below) a table and chair, a shade umbrella, a barbecue, a bird bath and a dart board.

The garden came "in baby steps, with a plant here and a plant there and trips to Home Depot," says McManus. "It wasn't really [a board] approval situation, but an organic process. People saw what was happening and it grew from there," so to speak.

McManus' co-op is far from alone in this. At the six-story, Lower East Side co-op of board-member Paula Crossfield, the 1,000-square foot roof houses a 400-square-foot vegetable garden that cost the building just $3,000 for planters and a paved walkway, according to The New York Times . Crossfield herself bought seeds and provides the gardening labor, and all the neighbors in the small walk-up can share in the amaranth greens, Brussels sprouts, butternut squash, chard, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, watermelon, zucchini and herbs.

At McManus' building, "There's free access for everyone" to work in the garden, he says. "I've seen just about everyone in the building there at one time or other." To help prevent overwatering by volunteers unaware of each other's effort, the super "helps manage the process of coordinating what everybody's doing — sort of big-picture project management." In terms of access, "You reach it through the laundry room, and our laundry-room power is on a timer, so [garden access] sort of followed suit with the laundry room [access]." As for the, well, fruits of their labor, "You take what you bring and leave a little for everyone else," McManus says philosophically. "It's been a very respectful process."

Why not create a communal space

we can all enjoy and use, and that

adds value to the building?

That's mostly strawberry and dill at this point, he says. "Because the tree is new, it only started to bear fruit this year. We've had plenty of strawberries, though — usually two or three bushels. They'll start after the Fourth of July, and then you enjoy them all through September — and if there's Indian summer, even October."

The choice of plants, he says, came through trial and error. "We struggled with the shade element" that precludes growing sunlight-hungry tomatoes — and besides which, "tomatoes are sloppy and messy, they attract pests, they stain the cement. We tried tomatoes and it didn't work. But we've had more successes than failure. Strawberry is great ground cover. Dill is quite hardy."

It's still prime season for planting. Gardeners say that beans, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers and tomatoes are easy to grow, but that broccoli and cauliflower take a bit more expertise. For peppers and tomatoes, use seedlings, such as those you buy in trays; raising them from seeds takes a long time. Radishes, on the other hand, can grow from seed to maturity in 20 days, cucumbers in 50.

So feel free to unleash your inner Oliver Wendell Douglas. With a little more green thumb than Green Acres, you might soon be residing in a garden of eatin'.