Grid Philly - April 2009 - (Page 20) borhood Gardens Association (NGA), this is how it’s always been done. “[Neighbors have to] get organized and put in the sweat equity first,” she says. “Getting legal control of vacant land is a long, slow process.” Planting on vacant land has been the accepted way to create a garden in Philadelphia, a city of over 40,000 vacant lots covering 146 square miles, for 50 years. Urban gardening used to be such a part of our city’s DNA that, for decades, Philadel- phia had a harvest show each September. People brought their best specimens of the usual vegetable suspects and occasional mini-crops of cotton and tobacco, part of the agricultural legacy of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who migrated to Philadelphia from the Deep South between World War II and the early ’70s. That generation of “guerrilla gardeners” was supported from all sides. In 1976, Penn State received funding from a Carter Administration anti-poverty program modeled on the Victory Gardens of the ’40s, which supported urban gardening to improve nutrition in poor communities. But the program also had an educational agenda—for city residents to understand how hard it is to grow food. The money funded eight demonstration gardens—at least two of which are still around today. Mushovic started the Awbury Arboretum garden in east Germantown in 1977, and it has been continuously cultivated by the community—and doubled in size twice—since. Down in Queen Village, Southwark/Queen Village community garden is on a city-owned plot of land that is permanently leased to NGA. But the Penn State program also supported gardeners in more personal ways. Sally McCabe, who now runs the Garden Tenders program at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, used to grow enough grapes to make wine in her old community garden in Northern Liberties. However, she knows that gardening is about more than just plants, and that it takes chutzpah to actually put shovel to earth in a vacant lot. “Gardening is less about plants and more about community organizing,” she says. “Some people just needed a blessing to get started.” The workshops and encouragement paid off. In 1995, there were over 500 community gardens growing approximately 20 g r i d p h i l ly. c o m ap ri l 2009 http://www.gridphilly.com
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