More than 26 community gardens are cultivated within the city of Syracuse – maybe more. It’s hard to be sure when the city doesn’t technically allow for them.
But a growing network of resources available to community gardeners, along with new efforts by the city to encourage productive land use, is bringing the urban agriculture movement home.
Syracuse Grows is growing
Syracuse Grows is a grassroots network that hopes to help Syracuse reach its urban agriculture potential through advocacy and education.
The group is entering its fourth full year as an organized effort and held its 2011 annual meeting Monday March 21 to preview what the upcoming year would hold.
Evan Weissman, a doctoral student at SU and a founding member of Syracuse Grows, said in 2010 the group helped facilitate two new community gardens in Syracuse, one each on the North and South Sides.
Syracuse Grows strictly helps community members and other organizations start gardens, always in collaboration with other entities, he said.
The coming year would see a new growing season, new programs to give community gardeners a direct line of communication with Syracuse Grows and other groups, and – hopefully – more support from the city to continue urban agriculture movement.
Incentive, not red tape
More than 1,600 acres, or the equivalent of 1,430 football fields, makes up empty lots in the city of Syracuse, said Katelyn Wright, a land use planner with the city.
That’s roughly 10 percent of land in the city. And the city spends up to $1 million annually mowing and maintaining 1,000 of those vacant spaces, she added.
Yet when people walk into City Hall asking for the go-ahead to start a community garden, they’re technically not able to do so.
Wright said the city zoning codes don’t explicitly allow for community gardens. And if something isn’t expressly permitted in Syracuse, it’s prohibited.
“We’re working on fixing that,” Wright told the Syracuse Grows meeting. “Is this allowed in the zoning district, well, technically no … but we’d like that to not be a technicality.”
But permitting community gardens means the city will be obligated to keep an eye on the gardens and make sure they’re being maintained. It also means establishing rules and regulations for those parcels, turning what used to be no process at all into a bureaucratic one.
Wright is confident though that if the city can offer potential community gardeners incentives like water hookups and liability coverage – and a relatively simple application process to get started – the formalization won’t deter people from turning vacant city space into productive land.
Along the same vein, the Syracuse Urban Renewal Agency is working to streamline the process for homeowners to acquire vacant adjacent land. SURA can sell land at below its appraised value, “if someone is going to do something good with it,” Wright said.
Urban agriculture utopia
Eleven of those vacant parcels of land in the city are well on their way to becoming the first urban farm in Syracuse, after years of planning and red tape.
Jubilee Home’s Urban Delights Urban Farm project already has a home on Bellevue Avenue between Midland and Lincoln Avenues, and this spring will see its first crops planted.
Modeled after highly successful examples in Wisconsin, Massachusettes and Michigan, the urban farm is a multi-pronged partnership with Jubilee Homes, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Onondaga County and SUNY-ESF to grow fresh produce that will be sold at Urban Delights summer produce stands and donated back to the community, while beautifying and improving the neighborhood landscape.
Greg Michel, project manager of the farm project, said seedlings would be raised over the next few months in the city greenhouse in Onondaga Park while the site continues to be prepped for planting. In late May, planting will begin on the farm site, in raised beds to eliminate the possibility of soil contamination from the existing earth.
Between now and then, though, there’s still a lot to be done. Building a fence and garden shed, laying down mulch and filling Filtrexx tubes with soil, as well as a resource drive to gather donated materials.
“There is a lot of excitement that something productive is going to be done with the land,” Michel said of the community’s reaction to the farm plan. “Certainly there’s been, ‘You’re gonna what? A farm?’ But generally people are excited that something positive is happening.”
No quick fix to the problem of food
With food prices on the rise and projected to stay that way, are community gardens the answer?
If the question is, “Can Syracuse feed itself?”then gardens are only part of the solution, Weissman said.
Entire communities are isolated from being able to access fresh produce and nutritious food by more factors than the lack of a community garden, said Weissman.
These “food deserts,” are areas defined by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control as areas lacking access to affordable fruits vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk and the other components of a healthy diet.
Successful community gardens do more than produce vegetables a few months out of the year – they can become a tool to teach people about nutrition, and help spark a conversation about “food justice,” the idea that everyone deserves access to safe, affordable, nutritious and culturally appropriate food, Weissman said.
If you’re interested in starting or getting involved with a community garden in your neighborhood, visit syracusegrows.org .
Looking for a plot of land to start a garden? Click here for the list of tax delinquent properties subject to seizure by the Syracuse Urban Renewal Agency.
