by Elaine Richardson
It's a sunny, still-warm Friday in early fall, and in the heart of the West Side Austin neighborhood a small group is celebrating the harvest. The harvest?
For the Quincy Garden Project, the fall harvest is the culmination of a summer's worth of back-breaking work turning vacant lots into lush gardens. The once trash- and weed-ridden expanse between two large buildings on Quincy Street now hosts large beds of collard greens, peppers, tomatoes and cabbages. And at tables throughout, teachers, volunteers and Marshall High School students -- proudly sporting the royal blue corduroy jackets of the school's horticulture club -- nibble on the fruits (and vegetables) of their labors.
"In teaching agriculture, the problem is lack of respect. They need the power to respect themselves when other kids call them 'farmer,'" says Carol Williams, the Marshall teacher working with students on the project. "And when they see what they've grown they see that this is important."
But the project is much more ambitious and, project consultant Claire Nicklin says, offers a way to begin wiping out all the symptoms of urban decay -- from nutrition to beautification. "We keep a lot of [what we grow] in the community to help improve the health of residents by encouraging them to eat healthier food," Nicklin says, noting that low-income residents frequently have problems with healthy diets because their neighborhoods have more fast-food places than grocery stores. "We're hoping to do a farmers' market here next year where we'd sell things -- for a very small amount -- in the community."
This has also been a boost to participating students, who can take food home to their families. But there's so much -- Williams says they've harvested six times this year -- that they've started selling produce to Wishbone restaurant and packaging some into mixes for dishes such as jambalaya. Proceeds go back into maintaining the garden.
"At Wishbone the kids got cooking classes to learn how to prepare what they'd grown," Nicklin says. "The girls really got into it, and now they can take that home and do that for their families."
To date the group has done three gardens, two in Austin and another out in front of Marshall, and is hoping to further outreach into the West Side next year, Williams says. "These are good kids, they just need direction," she says. "This is a great way for them to understand that we're a great country not because we have nuclear weapons, but because we feed ourselves."
But it's somewhat ironic that Chicago, once a place thousands to get away from the family farm, might now be saved by its agricultural roots.
"We're re-energizing the area by using vacant lots," Nicklin says. "There are 80,000 vacant lots in Chicago and no supermarkets, this is a way to start dealing with both of those problems."
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