Young people cultivate a community through food

http://www.mercurynews.com/lifeandstyleheadlines/ci_9998306

Mark Anthony Medeiros was looking for a little patch of earth to grow a few vegetables to freshen up his college-student diet.

When he couldn't snag a plot in a local community garden, Madeiros put up some fliers in the Naglee Park neighborhood just east of San Jose State University, offering to create and tend gardens for homeowners in return for a share of the bounty.

The response was so enthusiastic — he heard from more than a dozen people offering space on their properties — that he recruited other San Jose State students to join the "Veggielution Urban Farming Project." Within a year, the volunteer group had four gardens in production.

This spring, they scaled back to just two so they could concentrate their efforts on an even more ambitious undertaking: a one-third acre farm at Emma Prusch Farm Park in East San Jose.

"We're educating ourselves about growing, but also are building a community around food," says Medeiros, 23. "There are few outlets for people our age to have this kind of activity. It's not part of most young people's experience to grow their own food."

Along the way, Medeiros and his tribe are sowing the seeds of a new sort of community devoted to empowering youth, promoting sustainability and eating and distributing locally-grown food.

These young people are at the vanguard of the locavore movement that is taking hold across the country — and which has its roots in the Bay Area.
Locavores advocate eating fresh foods produced close to home.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, where subscribers receive weekly deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables direct from growers, are becoming increasingly popular. Community garden plots have long waiting lists — even San Jose's newest, which won't open until this fall at Guadalupe Gardens, is already oversubscribed.

San Francisco is encouraging residents to plant edibles in postage-stamp city gardens as part of Victory Gardens 2008+. So-called "guerrilla gardeners" are digging plots in vacant lots, public and private, in cities all around the bay. An organic garden will be built near San Francisco City Hall as a part of the Slow Food Nation event in September.

A business called MyFarm in San Francisco can be hired to come install and maintain a garden, including a compost bin on site.

Even Sunset magazine has turned a big chunk of its expansive Menlo Park campus into a food-producing test garden and is featuring its "One Block Feast" — where everything on the menu was grown or produced on the property — in its August issue.

Amie Frisch, a recent San Jose State grad who is the project director for Veggielution, calls it a "perfect storm."

"People are afraid of their food," says Frisch, 25, citing food safety issues fueled by tainted spinach and suspect tomatoes in the nation's food supply.

Health-conscious consumers are increasingly wary of commercially grown produce and weary of paying high prices for foods that are grown far away and trucked to market in gas-guzzling semi trucks. And the country's obesity epidemic is causing people to be more conscious of eating fresh, healthy foods.

For Frisch and Medeiros, the Veggielution project is about more than just the joy of harvesting fresh produce to consume and share with others.

"A few of us are committed and we're confident there will be others," Medeiros says of the organic nature in which Veggielution has evolved. "Things just started happening, and the resources have come to us."

Work began in earnest at Prusch in April, when a dogged team of volunteers began the labor-intensive double-digging of the plot of land provided by the Prusch Farm Park Foundation. The city donated a small mountain of compost to amend the beds.

The group got some help planning and troubleshooting the irrigation system from Curtis Horticulture, a San Jose company.

The warm-season crops were planted in April. The Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County donated hundreds of tomato seedlings left over from its big Spring Garden Market. Payless Nursery provided pepper seedlings. Other veggies and fruits — including zucchini, corn, beans and watermelons — were started from seed.

The volunteers also have been given the gift of advice from experienced gardeners, including Walt Davis, who runs the Cornucopia Community Garden, one of two such gardens at Prusch, and various Master Gardeners. Guidance also has come from the staff and volunteers at Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale, a new 11-acre organic, educational farm in Sunnyvale that is producing fresh food for Santa Clara Unified School District cafeterias. Frisch works at the farm as its volunteer coordinator on an AmeriCorps stipend.

Most of the Prusch harvest so far this summer — cucumbers, peppers and a boatload of zucchinis — has been donated to Martha's Kitchen, a San Jose food pantry that serves low-income residents; some has been sold to Good Karma Vegan House, a downtown restaurant.

On a recent sweltering Sunday, Ryan Smith, 25, was helping corral some of the 230 tomato plants by stringing twine between pieces of angle iron that mark the four-foot rows. It was his first time volunteering in the garden, although he had visited previously with the young teens he supervises in the Summer of Service program offered through the Children's Discovery Museum.

"The kids come out here every other week, and it's one of their favorite sites to visit," Smith says. "I like the idea of growing organic, sustainable food. And it's fun being around people with similar interests."

Judy Nguyen, 22, works two jobs — in a dental office and at a pasta restaurant — but makes time to get her hands dirty in the garden. "I'm learning so much," she says.

It's a pretty place to work, once you get past the constant drone of noise from the nearby freeways. There's an umbrella-topped picnic table laden with fresh fruit and water that beckons the volunteers to take a break from the heat.

Sunflowers and vining plants surround the perimeter of the plot and soften the chain-link fence that was built to keep out the park's voracious chickens and guinea hens. Sometimes, Frisch says, truck drivers will honk out greetings as they pass overhead on the 101-to-680 connector ramp.

Medeiros, who will be a senior at San Jose State this fall studying sociology "with an emphasis on community change," says the group is "finding a lot of support for what we're doing."

Besides continuing a good relationship with the foundation at Prusch, Medeiros, Frisch and others are looking into grants and talking about partnerships with the university.

Sharon McCray, president of the Prusch Farm Park Foundation, says the board is "thrilled" with the Veggielution project.

"These young people have inspired these old people," McCray says with a smile. "They are learning a lot. We are learning a lot. It has been a pleasure to mentor them through this, but they have been incredibly resourceful with grants. We have not babysat them at all."

And Medeiros, who has joined the Prusch foundation board, is thinking big.

"A 10- to 15-acre farm is not impossible," he says.