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Chicago Sun-Times: October 10, 2002 Gardeners Planting Movable Feast in the City by Brenda Warner Rotzoll Imagine this--market gardeners growing top-quality organic vegetables on temporarily vacant city-owned lots, then literally picking up their dirt and moving the garden to another lot when their first lot is ready for redevelopment. It's happening right now on a 1-acre lot on the northwest corner of Division and Clybourn in the shadow of Cabrini-Green. Come next spring, that garden should be doubling to 2 acres, piling more dirt on an area now covered with rubble from the repaving of Division. The move-along garden concept is the brainchild of Ken Dunn and his nonprofit Resource Center, which for 30 years has been pushing recycling, composting, and now portable gardening for profit in Chicago. The center has developed a job training program to work with homeless shelters and others serving the economically disadvantaged to teach them how to grow and sell produce. "Gardens should be wherever the sun falls and nothing else is taking place," Dunn said. He stressed that gardening on city-owned land is not a permanent commitment of land use, just for one growing season at a time until a purchaser comes along. "The soil can be picked up and moved. The soil at Division and Clybourn came from a place given up to housing last year in Englewood. Then when this land goes to some other development, the soil can move on," Dunn said. "I think it's a good idea when we have sites like this to have an interim use for them," said Bennett Haller of the city Planning Department. "We will be developing it for mixed housing in the near future, but it is temporarily vacant land." Haller drafts ordinances that allow temporary land use by local entrepreneurs who will plant and run gardens and sell the produce locally. He said the program teaches people about urban farming and provides landscaping of vacant land at no cost to the city. Most of the produce is sold at farmer's markets or to upscale restaurants such as Tobolobampo and the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton. Chefs from the restaurants provided an array of appetizers and fall salads made from food grown at the Clybourn garden for a news conference there Wednesday. "It's really important to us to support local farmers," said Richard James, a chef at Rick Bayless' Topolobampo and Frontera Grill. He said the Resource Center farmers "come to the back door, and we pretty much buy what they have." So far the program is small, with a couple of gardens on the South Side, where one entrepreneur earned $15,000 in a season. Two gardeners were hired by the Resource Center to establish the Clybourn garden this year. |
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