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A Garden in the Bronx
How a small urban farm is helping one community eat well without leaving the neighborhood.
Along Third Avenue in the center of the South Bronx, the street is filled with McDonald’s and commercial fried chicken joints that fit neatly among rows of low-income apartments. Though the fast-food enterprise rakes in billions of dollars each year in the U.S., it has a particularly overwhelming presence in poor communities such as the South Bronx. The neighborhood boasts the highest rates of asthma and diabetes in the city, according to the city Department of Health’s 2006 Vital Statistics Summary. Growing up on greasy hamburgers and high-fructose soft drinks, residents often find themselves with little understanding of healthy eating and where to find better options.
Just around the corner, on 165th Street and Boston Road, there is something surprising for this area: A once abandoned lot overwhelmed by rubbish and drug dealers has been converted into a community garden called the Jacqueline Denise Davis Garden, or the JDD. This community garden is part of an initiative called Learn it, Grow it, Eat it, started in 2006 and funded by the Council on the Environment of New York City to educate teens about their health and their community.
“Community gardens are becoming a trend,” says David Saphire, the project coordinator of Learn it, Grow it, Eat it, or LGE. The venture was partially based on other urban farms that have experienced great success, such as Added Value in Red Hook, Brooklyn and East New York Farms in East Brooklyn.
While there are over 600 community gardens in New York City alone, Saphire says that LGE is one of the only initiatives that incorporates health education in high schools. The JDD, Wishing Well Community and the Model T gardens in the Bronx are all part of LGE.
In Saphire’s office, on the opposite end of New York City, located just across the street from City Hall, he explains how the idea developed. Saphire was teaching a nutritional program in local high schools in the South Bronx, touting healthy alternatives to the common fast-food pitfalls. Saphire, a self-educated nutrition guru who has been an environmental educator and researcher for the last 10 years, is a thin man, one who looks like he practices what he preaches.
Working in the South Bronx, it didn’t take long for Saphire to notice a gap between what he was teaching in his nutrition lessons and what foods were readily available to his students. The solution Saphire proposed: Teach the kids about healthy alternatives by having them grow their own fruits and vegetables. And, as an added bonus, make it free.
Saphire, in collaboration with Lenny Librizzi, assistant director of the Open Space Greening Program in New York City, ran with the idea and started what is often called an urban farm. Urban farming focuses on creating gardens in which neighborhood residents plant organic food on unused plots of land in the city. They donate or sell the food to other community members while also enhancing the beauty and value of the land. Making students an active part of their community allows them to see that they can make changes to their streets.
“To me this project is a community gardening project,” says Librizzi who prefers to use this phrase. “Urban farming could be done by one person. Community is the operative word here. The community is working together to accomplish something together.” And that is what Saphire and Librizzi hope to build through their crusade for healthy eating—an enhanced sense of community.
In the classroom, Saphire teaches his students the importance of reading labels on food they eat from the corner bodega or a fast-food restaurant. By paying attention to the nutritional content, often for the first time, the teens are shocked by the kinds of processed ingredients they regularly put in their bodies. Saphire devotes lessons to freshness and pesticide issues with foods that are not locally grown. He also talks about energy issues involved in producing and transporting produce hundreds of miles across the country.
“I try to break this down to plain language and everyday eating,” he says.
Saphire hopes that he is broadening his students’ awareness of what they eat and where and how to seek healthier options. While the kids don’t necessarily abandon unhealthy options, Saphire’s lessons are having some impact. One exercise has them measuring out the quantity of sugar (10 teaspoons of sugar or the entire daily recommended amount of calories from sugar) in a typical 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola.
“Especially after finding out how much sugar is in soda, I think about what I eat before I eat it,” says Jose Lara, a 19-year-old who works in the garden and attends Bronx International High School. “I’m aware. I look at the labels now.”
For the teenagers, the program not only offers an education in eating well, but also offers job opportunities. After extensive time in the classroom, Saphire and Librizzi train the students in the garden. During the school year, seven students from Bronx International High School spend five hours each week for school credit, maintaining the garden during the winter months and prepping it for summer crops as the weather gets warmer.
As a visitor enters the gate to the JDD garden, there is an unused children’s play area, with a slide and a climbing block. Off to the side, there is a picnic area with several benches and tables, covered by a wooden construction that can shield picnickers from the rain. Seven high school students and Saphire and Librizzi are tending the 14,000-square-foot space. The land is mostly just soil now, but by summer the garden will be teeming with fresh produce.
During the summer, interns work 24 hours a week and are paid $9-per-hour. They plant a variety of vegetables including tomatoes, squash and zucchini to eat themselves, bring home to their families or donate to food pantries and soup kitchens.
Though the majority of crops have not sprouted yet, Lara and Jemmy Hernandez, a 16-year-old who is also in the program, are raking what will be the vegetable patch. They mix fresh piles of compost into the soil to add nutrients for the garlic, tomatoes and eggplant that they will plant during the early summer months. Outside the vegetable patch, two other students are tending to the compost. One boy is trimming an overzealous tree that has wrapped itself around a striking archway made of tree branches.
Hernandez says her weekly tasks include cleaning the garden, adding compost into the soil and planting garlic bulbs. “It is hard work, but it’s fun,” she says.
Taking part in the program has also given students opportunities for creative expression and has enhanced their communication skills. Lara gets excited when he talks about his illustrations for a student-generated calendar, starring hand-drawn fruits and vegetables each month with information about their nutritional value. Lara enjoyed giving presentations with his peers for Parents’ Day at school about the benefits of healthy eating. Saphire and Librizzi have also taken the kids to local farmers markets and to food conferences, including one held at Columbia University in April, 2008.
Even though urban farming is valuable for building a sense of community in New York City’s neighborhoods, space for these farms is often quite limited. Residential and commercial real estate is a major industry in New York City, and it is difficult to find room to build these gardens when every square inch of land has a price tag.
Even when a space becomes available for a community garden, maintaining it is often the most difficult and burdensome task. Though gardening is a popular hobby for many, Librizzi says that when it comes to these community efforts, it is easier to get people excited over building a garden than getting them to continue with the day-to-day work. This can often be tedious and unglamorous.
Librizzi points to the rubbish surrounding the garden. Keeping a large enough community interest in the garden isn’t the only problem. Neighbors of the space can wreak havoc on it as well. Librizzi says many residents who live in the two high-rise buildings that face the JDD throw their trash from their windows directly onto the soil. Coming back after only one week away, garden volunteers filled three bags of trash just from garbage tossed out windows. At first, Saphire and Librizzi decided not to grow vegetables close to the sides of the buildings because they knew hurled trash might destroy newly seeded beds and fresh produce. This foresight has been the best solution to the problem.
Despite the setbacks that a community garden faces, the JDD has come a long way since it was just an abandoned lot. When first evaluating the space, Librizzi described walking through weeds that were up to his knees. Two years later, the garden has become an asset to the community.
In fact, the program has been funded and will soon expand to schools and community plots in other neighborhoods, such as East Harlem and Central Brooklyn. The hope: More gardens will build healthier communities.
Tags: 165th Street and Boston Road, Bronx Education, Bronx International High School, Bronx Living, Bronx Neighborhood News, Bronx News, Bronx People, Coca-Cola, Columbia University, Council on the Environment of New York City, David Saphire, East Brooklyn, East New York, Eat it, Environment, food pantries, Grow it, Jacqueline Denise Davis Garden, JDD, Learn it, Lenny Librizzi, Model T garden, Open Space Greening Program in New York City, South Bronx, Third Avenue, Wishing Well Community gardenRelated posts
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