[M II A II R II K]

Counting the harvest: How numbers can save urban gardens


28 Aug 2012

By Christopher Weber

Read More: http://grist.org/food/counting-the-h...urban-gardens/

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In the past, protests have coalesced around the threatened farm or garden. Now, a loose coalition of scholars and activists is taking a different tack. They’re proactively surveying gardens in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago in hopes that hard data — servings harvested, revenues earned, and more — will make landlords think twice before summoning the bulldozers.

- In New York, a geographer named Mara Gittleman is completing the third year of a garden survey called Farming Concrete. Gittleman recruited volunteers, mostly gardeners, to record the weight of the harvest (using kitchen scales) and the number and type of plants being grown. In 2010, the survey’s first year, she found that 67 New York gardens yielded 87,690 pounds of food, with an estimated value of $214,060.

- In Philadelphia, a garden survey is being driven by hopes of connecting threatened gardeners with legal aid. This July, I spent a morning with two University of Pennsylvania students, Michael Paci and Swaroop Rao, attempting to count the city’s community gardens. They were doing it the old-fashioned way, by visiting every single garden. Squatter gardens are common in Philadelphia. On the way to the target neighborhoods for the day, we passed scores of illegal vegetable plots, sometimes six or seven to a block. Though some had been tended for decades, they had recently begun to wane. A 2008 study found that the number of community gardens in Philadelphia was declining, despite rabid interest in urban agriculture.

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