the GoodEater Collaborative

Author: Kenji Lopez-Alt (41 Articles)

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is a contributing editor for Cooks Illustrated Magazine, runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and writes a weekly column on burgers and food science for SeriousEats.com. He is also an occasional co-host of America's Test Kitchen . Kenji holds a BS from MIT and lives with his wife in Harlem.

Editor’s Note: Two new contributors in one week! Liza Katz is a senior at Boston University studying creative writing and literary translation. She is a member of Slow Food BU and has worked with BU Student Food Rescue and the Food Project in Lincoln, MA. Welcome!

So you’ve been hearing your friends lucky enough to have a yard with lots of light wax poetic about their own sweet peas every year. Maybe you’ve even been lucky enough to have a slice of their watermelon, and you’re finally willing to take the leap and start growing your own vegetables.

Don’t have a yard? no problem. Community gardens, prevalent in large cities where people have less yard area to work with, are green areas that are cared for by multiple people but consist of individually worked plots. The Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN), affiliated with the larger-scale American Community Gardening Association, owns 40 community gardens throughout Boston and provides support and advocacy for 150 more, impacting over 10,000 individuals in total.

For a fee ranging from $15 to about $30, you can get your very own plot, ready to sow.

Sounds great, but here’s the rub: A quick internet search for urban gardening will have you believe that all you need to produce a bumper crop of heirloom tomatoes is a garden and a seed catalog, but in fact, the productivity of a garden plot is directly proportional to the gardener’s skills and experience, and let’s face it – you’re no green thumb.

That’s where BNAN comes in, providing a slew of programs that help gardeners use their plots to their full potential, most of them for free. For instance, the Gardeners’ Gathering, which takes place every spring just before the start of the gardening season, is a city-wide event that includes workshops such as vegetable seed starting, raised bed gardening, and culinary companion planting, while Students Learning through Urban Gardening, or SLUG, is a new classroom-based gardening program in the Boston Public Schools. The Learning Garden is maintained by volunteers and gives beginners an opportunity to learn about and practice gardening before purchasing plots of their own. And finally, Sounds of the Garden is a series of concerts held in the gardens themselves.

Though for many people, the quality of food alone is enough to get them to start gardening (as anyone who’s tasted a tomato fresh off the vine can attest), There are many other positive aspects in the urban gardening programs around Boston, such as:

- It saves money. A fruitful garden helps people to augment their food budget.

- Gardening builds a stronger community. It is not uncommon for neighbors to work together on a common plot, or share the fruits with each other, allowing one to trade in their overflow of zucchini for their neighbor’s Halloween pumpkin.

- It makes safer neighborhoods. Users of urban gardens report that it encourages people to congregate outside of their apartments, which in turn reduces crime.

- It creates more beautiful neighborhoods. More time spent outside also gives incentive for communities to take more pride in their appearance.

One of the upsides to the current economic downturn is that urban gardens have never been in such high demand. Unfortunately, this means that most gardens in the area have waiting lists 20 to 30 people long. Because of this pressure to prevent their plots from being given away, those with plots have been more committed than ever.

Any of you GoodEaters have urban gardening tips?

Editor’s Note:
Here’s our advice for those who still want to do it:

Second, talk to your friends, neighbors, and landlords. You will most likely find that at least one of them has an unused corner of a back or front yard that they will be more than willing to give you access to in return for a share of your produce. In fact, when Joshua and I were living in the same building, Joshua, living on the first floor had access to a yard, while I, living on the third, didn’t. After a quick deal, we decided to put a garden in together. Our rewards were zucchini, eggplants, runner beans, orange cherry tomatoes, Purple Cherokee heirloom tomatoes, summer squash, English peas, herbs multifarious, watermelons, Kirby cucumbers worth pickling, and a friendship worth keeping.