Feature Article I

Urban Gardening in New Orleans, 5 Years After the Storm
By Marlo Barrera, July 2010

Muscadine grapes have the slip skin, the kind you can’t eat. They have the seeds. Some of them taste so much like a grape and some have a very distinctive taste that I can’t explain to you but I’ll put your name in my log book and when you come back next season, I’ll give you a few pounds so you can try.
Ronald, one of the mentor gardeners at Hollygrove farm, knows the plants in his plot so intimately he could tell you exactly how many pounds of fruit each plant will yield as the garden matures. Next season the Muscadines will produce 50 pounds of fruit and the seasons after: 80 to 120, which is hard to believe when looking at the weak and tenuous vines parallel to the ground with their fresh, new leaves baking in the sun.

The Hollygrove farm and market began in 2008 in order to provide accessible and healthy food to the area off of South Carrollton in New Orleans. Since Hurricane Katrina the Hollygrove area is part of the 87% of the city that is considered a food desert—an area defined by its lack of access to healthy, fresh food when considering poverty level and access to transportation. Before the hurricane there were 30 supermarkets in New Orleans and nearly five years later there are 20, each serving 16,000 people—nearly twice the national average. To fill this gap urban gardening and farming has become part of the rebuilding efforts in the city with leaders like Parkway Partners helping to start and re-establish more than thirty gardens just on their own. Urban gardening is becoming a part of the culture of the city, not just an underworked side note.

Paul Barricos, the general manager of Hollygrove market, watches over the small, air-conditioned space full of the scent of fresh basil. He collects money from the customers who, every Saturday, pick up their bag of seasonal produce that is grown at Hollygrove farm itself as well as other local farms. This week, blueberries and small black tomatoes are part of the package and recipe cards detail how to use the week’s produce. Barricos explains that the Carrollton-Hollygrove Community Development Corporation, a board of all Hollygrove residents, started the farm as a functional community center—a place to not only have access to fresh food, but also to learn the skill of gardening and become more involved in the community through the gardening itself and the meetings that are held in the space. And it’s easy see how both the communities of Hollygrove and broader New Orleans are invested in the market, a welcome green area in the midst of car exhaust and sighing homes.

It looks good from the street, says Ronald, but to the trained eye, you can see the disease in the plants, the bugs eating up the leaves. Outside, Ronald moves his hands over the land, saying the whole area was swamp when he got to it eight months ago, before they put down $2,000 worth of topsoil and he began to plant his crops of antioxidant berries.

Imagining the changes that this space has undergone and is moving through now, it is not hard to imagine the other 700,000 vacant lots left four years after the storm bringing the city even closer to its food. This is a civic-driven effort with different groups around the city trying to turn many of these vacant lots into gardens and farms. The effort is effectively creating a map for other cities in the country with food justice groups creating networks to explore new ways of gardening in different cityscapes. Other cities are currently exploring gardens on the sides of tall buildings and skyscrapers in order to take advantage of the plane of light that is wasted daily, which could potentially be an option in downtown New Orleans. All cities though that are inclined to incorporate urban gardens into their cultures are striving to create a more sustainable land base, to create equal access to healthy food, and to create communities where you not only know your neighbor’s name but also their favorite thing to harvest.

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From the entrance of the garden you smell the green of the plants. You can see residents walking down the street toward the market, the children with their gangly bodies barreling down the road, all limbs and flailing like a windstorm. You see the long rows of cars leaning in the heat lining both sides of Olive Street, their license plates from Louisiana and Mississippi and from the north too. Walking down the rows of the smaller plots reserved for community growers you see the small signs labeling peanut, tabasco, lemon verbena, okra. Most of the visitors are in the small building that houses the market, but outside in the garden, three gardeners work on their plots. You see the man with his wide-brimmed hat clipping the long stemmed zinnias and handing them to a woman with dusty hands who puts them in plastic cups full of water. On the other side of a walk way are two larger pieces of land where the two mentor gardeners have their plots. And there is Ronald pulling weeds among the blackberries. He says they get a lot of Yankees here. He says he comes out here every day to see what needs to be done. He lists the names of the blackberries that are high in antioxidants like they could be his ancestors: Apache, Navaho, Arapaho, and Ouachita, which is pronounced witch-it-auh he says, but it does not start with a ‘w’ like you would think.