Urban gardeners sow seeds of sustenance

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Fernando Faria, at Brighton and Knight streets, where he and his neighbor have planted flowers in all the treewells.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

Mid-July, beans and greens, lilies and lavender flourish across the city. A young man practices bio-intensive agriculture in a vacant lot. Neighborhood-minded citizens spruce up street tree wells. A communal farm forms in South Providence. Fantastical caterpillars and three-eyed trees energize a garden mural in the West End. Take a glimpse:

PROVIDENCE –– Two years ago, Dauna Noble and a friend were sitting around, fretting about economic insecurity and whether the planet could someday run out of food.

“We thought, the world is going to hell, what can we do?” Noble recalled. “The most immediate, pro-active, hands-on response was to build a garden.”

Thus began the social experiment known as “The Fertile Underground Communal Garden.”

Noble, a muralist, said the idea “grew out of our social circle,” primarily artists. “We decided to go communal. A lot of us don’t know how to grow food and some of us do. There are those of us who had knowledge, and those who don’t, and those who had a few dollars to buy dirt, and those who had muscle. We decided to collaborate.”

On May 1, 2009, they received the keys to the gate of a 6,000-square-foot lot on Pearl Street, owned by Yarrow Thorne, who is also involved in the garden. One month later, “we had food growing,” said Noble.

One year later, membership is up to 40, a diverse group of men, women and children. A new greenhouse built by members out of recycled storm windows and lumber occupies part of the plot. A mural curls along a back wall. “It’s really loose. You sign up, pay $80 for the year, and you are expected to put in 8 hours [of work] a month,” Noble said. “Then you come and take vegetables, as much as you want, as much as you can eat. So far, we’ve had enough.” In fact, the group that gardens together often holds communal suppers with their abundant produce.

Andrea Starr, one of the people who came up with the garden’s name, said, “It’s like a grass-roots thing. A lot of us are artists and not exactly mainstream.” She adds, “I think we all value sharing, and feeding each other.”

The garden this year made it onto the South Side Community Land Trust roster, which affords tax-exempt status. Noble said, “We did it by proving in the first year that we mean business.”

Nathaniel Wood named his Front-Step Farm after the sole remnant of a house [destroyed by fire] that once stood on his rented city lot. His garden, on Westminster Street in the city’s West Side, affords a front-row seat to urban theater, and attracts passersby who say hello or shout unsolicited advice, such as the erroneous “Don’t plant the corn until September!”

Wood, a rangy 25-year-old who lives in the neighborhood, searched all winter for an unused lot. “Some people were weirded-out by a kid who wanted to grow food on their land,” said Wood.

He eventually found a willing lot owner “who everybody calls ‘Big Tony,’ ” who agreed to lease the lot to Wood for $80 a month.

Wood’s path to city gardening started in an apple orchard, where he worked during a one-year break from Hampshire College.

He returned to school, earned a degree in ecology, came home to Rhode Island and began volunteering at South Side Community Land Trust’s City Farm. He spent a subsequent year being mentored as a City Farm apprentice, before striking out on his own.

Wood, who eschews a car for a bike and is all about living green, created raised beds with concrete edges from the former driveway. He’s building a mud oven, on a base of asphalt and other rubble he pulled out of the dirt.

“This type of agriculture is bio-intensive,” said Wood as he stood amid mounded beds. “That means you grow a lot of food in a really small space.” He uses companion planting, and started everything from seed, nearly all of it heirloom from a seed-savers exchange.

“This is my Swiss chard,” he said on an informal tour. And over here, “purple, red, orange and white carrots.” Here, a raspberry patch, there some Asian pumpkins. Dinosaur kale and Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears’ beans. Marigolds to keep away nematodes.

“Try the purslane,” Wood suggested, holding out a piece of vine with paddle-shaped leaves. The wild edible herb “is supposed to be a super-food, with more Omega 3 fatty acids than any other plant.” (Not to mention, it’s tasty and saves a bundle on fish oil).

Wood sells the bounty from Front-Step Farm at the weekly Armory Farmers’ Market, just blocks away from his garden. As for the rest, “I’m hoping to have enough frozen vegetables to last through the winter.” That will make up roughly half his diet.

Wood said, “I wake up every day really excited to come here.”

Fernando Faria’s lush urban oasis starts with riotous blooms outside his front door, stretches down the driveway, rounds a corner into a densely planted, peaceful alcove, and jogs again into a tiny alley where his late, beloved cats sleep eternally beneath the rosebushes.

Faria, 53, said his father required him to help out every day after school on the family farm in Portugal. That effort serves him well now.

A “trial-and-error” gardener, Faria sprinkles fertilizer by the handfuls in late winter. Come spring, “everything just blooms.”

His handiwork presents a pleasing jumble of color, shape and form, spilling and twining from every direction. Red bee balm, blue hydrangea, tobacco plants, coleus, succulents (“Some things, I don’t even know what they are”), potted plants, birdhouses and statuary.

“If the plant talks to me,” then it goes in, he said. “There’s a lot of meaning in here. I spend hours … I love to get my hands in the dirt.” Faria has also spread his talent to a collaborative spruce-up of tree wells along Brighton Street. Other residents have since followed suit.

He and neighbor Christopher Utter created a shady corner garden at Brighton and Knight streets, around the same time they began planting the wells surrounding new trees (obtained through the Peggy Sharpe Foundation, also through neighborhood effort).

“I was sick of looking out the window and having the house across the street looking really bad,” said Faria. He and Utter persuaded an out-of-state landlord to remove a chain-link fence to make way for the garden. The rented a Roto-tiller, tore up the soil, and away they went.

Utter, whose mother was a master gardener and whose grandfather raised and shared vegetables during the Depression, relocated an old birdbath from his parents’ house. Faria put a bench under the tree. They divided plantings from their own gardens or those of their friends: the corner is blooming with day lilies, brown-eyed Susans, daisies, foxglove and hosta; an inviting rest spot for passersby.

Faria said that over time, “this neighborhood has become very, very sweet. I want the people to say, ‘I like this area. I want to live there.’ ”

A wall collage of painted caterpillars, mysterious women and three-eyed trees [one armed with a shovel] overlook the West Broadway Neighborhood Association’s community garden on Bridgham and Westminster streets.

Three well-known local graffiti artists collaborated on the mural, said Yarrow Thorne, owner of Yarrow’s Cans on Lockwood Street, where he sells imported paint to graffiti artists and maintains an ever-changing “free wall” for artists who come from near and far.

Thorne, also involved in the Fertile Street Underground Communal Garden, is finishing a degree in industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design. Though not a graffiti artist himself, he studies and facilitates it, including an exhibit at Providence City Hall.

“I set up the relationships and managed the mural,” Thorne said of the colorful wall facing into the WBNA garden. That included obtaining permission from the building owner, providing ladders and paint, and overseeing the two-week production.

“The initial idea was having the wall not be flat, not just looking at cinder block … but an entry into a new world, a new way of looking at something. It’s very colorful, very geometric, and it adds a lot of value to the community,” he said. “There’s a sense of pride. We’ve had a lot of people stop and say it looks like Europe.”