Community Garden

Some Sunday mornings in the growing season at 33rd and Race streets, the atmosphere takes on the aspect of a revival meeting. Gospel music and the exhortations of preachers fill the air from small radios. Men, women and children in work clothes fuss around the green sprouts of plants that might seem more at home in the soil of South Jersey than the dirt of a vacant lot in Powelton Village. And there is a revival going on. At 33rd and Race, what had once been a debris-strewn lot, like so many similar and equally useless eyesores that intrude upon the city's rowhouse neighborhoods, has been revived into a fertile and productive truck farm.

"Every inch you dig," says Meredith Nix, "you find yet another brick, but that's just about what you'd expect if you garden on the site of an old hotel. " After watching the pleasure that her friend in Trenton reaped from participating in a community garden, Nix, who works for a Center City real estate developer, determined that she, too, was ready to search for a piece of land on which to garden. Nix's garden is a narrow slice of Philadelphia land, and this year, its second in production, there are 15 families gardening there.

No address is listed in the phone book, and, because of past thefts of vegetables, fruits and tools, members don't freely disclose the location. But the scent of strawberries and blooming flowers is bound to draw visitors in Bryn Athyn to a flourishing community garden. Since 1945, when the Council of Defense encouraged families to plant "victory gardens" to save money, the popularity of community gardens has wavered. In 1974, however, community gardens were given fresh encouragement in Pennsylvania, when Gov. Milton J. Shapp proposed a plan to turn over unused state land to the elderly and low-income families.

A COMMUNITY GROUP that has gardened on vacant lots in Grays Ferry for 60 years won court approval on Tuesday to halt the sheriff sale of two lots that were scheduled to be sold Wednesday. "This is a real victory for the community," said Amy Laura Cahn, a lawyer who represents the Central Club for Boys and Girls. Cahn said Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker ordered the sale postponed for six months. During that time, Cahn said, the Central Club hopes to get approval of its tax-exempt status from the city Office of Property Assessment.

Alta Felton learned a lesson yesterday. She learned that no matter how many hoodlums destroy what you care about, there will always be people out there who will help you rebuild. "I look at it another way today - that if you're in need and down and out and if someone sees that need and sees you're trying, they'll try to help," said the 86-year-old South Philadelphia woman. "That's what I saw today. It really enlightened me a lot. " She had a far different attitude on Sunday morning when she awoke to find that vandals had once again torn through her beloved garden at 25th and Dickinson streets and ransacked it. But after the Daily News ran a story about her plight yesterday, offers of help poured into her rowhouse on Taylor Street near Dickinson, which backs up to the large urban garden she founded 20 years ago and still oversees.

The children found the softening cucumber lying on the ground beneath a bean bush and took it to their leader for inspection. Dave Johnson, facilities coordinator at the Brandywine Valley Association on Route 842, took the vegetable in both hands and pulled it in two. "What we have here is a cucumber . . . that has rotted!" Little hands clapped over eyes, faces and mouths as yellow, pungent liquid poured out of the cucumber and streamed over Johnson's hands and onto the ground.

Mother Earth has come undone. Vanoka Morris-Smith, known by that moniker among her young charges, is crying. She never cries. A deep crater of red dirt, two lots wide, has rent the award-winning children's garden at 30th and Berks. "I would rather go through FBI questioning than try to tell my children why their garden is being torn up," she says. For nearly a decade, students from Blaine School tended the garden across the street to learn about plants, food production, and seed propagation.

For 19 years Warren Harrison grew potatoes, beans, corn, and tomatoes in the community garden across West Venango Street from his home. "I had the biggest spot over there," Harrison, 83, recalled recently. Then in June 2008, the bulldozers arrived. Next came the concrete mixers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. By fall, seven rowhouses had sprouted where 20 vegetable patches once stood. "I didn't know anything about this," Harrison said. Now, when summer comes, he just grows "four rows of collard greens on my front lawn.

The lure of the soil and of nature brought people from all walks of life - and from all over the city and suburbs - to the Benjamin Rush Gardens in the Far Northeast the other weekend. They came to plant their own vegetables and herbs, which they will tend throughout the summer, and harvest. Russell Fama, a retired barber with a penchant for painting and gardening, has traveled to Rush from 11th and Mifflin Streets in South Philadelphia every summer for 18 years. Seventy-year-old Lera Moses drives from her home in West Philadelphia to maintain a garden at Rush.

A COMMUNITY GROUP that has gardened on vacant lots in Grays Ferry for 60 years won court approval on Tuesday to halt the sheriff sale of two lots that were scheduled to be sold Wednesday. "This is a real victory for the community," said Amy Laura Cahn, a lawyer who represents the Central Club for Boys and Girls. Cahn said Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker ordered the sale postponed for six months. During that time, Cahn said, the Central Club hopes to get approval of its tax-exempt status from the city Office of Property Assessment.

NEIGHBORS in South Philadelphia who worked all summer to restore the Manton Street Park can finally celebrate. The park's four lots had been purchased by a developer at a city auction of vacant and surplus property, but a deal has been reached to retain part of the land as a small "pocket park. " Hercules W. Grigos, the lawyer for the developer, US Construction, said his clients "had no idea this was a park. " "We had no idea of the neighbors' actions [fixing up the park]

Browse through garden catalogs. If you're not on these mailing lists, Google "garden nursery catalogs" and myriad choices will come up. Some companies have moved to full virtual catalogs, but I still like to feel the paper versions in my hands and look through them with a cup of hot tea. Compose a plant list. Make sure to include cool- as well as warm-weather vegetables. And try at least one new fruit or vegetable each year. How about peanuts in 2012?

Designating a "quiet car" on PATCO trains may strike some riders as a quaint, if not preposterous, notion. I think it's great. Starting March 1, cellphone use and loud conversations will be prohibited in the last car of specially marked weekday trains between Lindenwold and Center City. If the three-month experiment succeeds, my colleague Paul Nussbaum reported Thursday, PATCO may make this eminently civilized amenity permanent. Amtrak, SEPTA, Metro-North, and other transit agencies also are rolling out quiet cars.

IT WAS a "trash mob," not a flash mob, out at a vacant lot in Kensington yesterday. Volunteers with Occupy Philly and Philly Food Forests came out to a trash-strewn lot on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to haul away rocks, tree limbs, concrete and used syringes. They plan to grow a community garden for use by neighbors. "We found quite a few syringes and bottles," said Meenal Raval, 49, with Occupy Vacant Lots, a group that evolved from Occupy Philly's environmental working group.

Where there was trash, now there are peaches, sweet corn, and homemade lemonade at a farmers market that opened this summer in the Hunting Park community. The remarkable, ongoing transformation of the 87-acre park, as reported Monday by Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, is a testament to the persistence and vision of the city's neighborhood activists and institutions. Leroy Fisher, Catalina Hunter, and neighbors spent years trying to improve the park. With the help of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, which raised $3.3 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others, the park is finally on the mend.

A weekend morning in Hunting Park used be the time for Leroy Fisher and Catalina Hunter to assess the damage to their beloved neighborhood green, the flotsam of needles, condoms, and trash that had washed in from the previous night's revelries. But the only serious trash on this broiling Saturday was neatly tucked under the tables where an Amish farmer was stacking blushing peaches, fresh sweet corn, a cooler of homemade lemonade, and bricks of goat's-milk soap. Yes, a farmers' market has come to the so-called badlands of Philadelphia.

Libby Goldstein can't stand the "3-H's" - hazy, hot, humid - for even one more summer. And quite frankly - which, quite frankly, is all this firecracker can be - she's sick of the politics. So after 35 years of intimate involvement, Goldstein has retired from the Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden at Third and Christian Streets, which she founded in 1976. Back then, community gardens were a political act, more about feeding the poor than growing heirloom tomatoes. Unlike hundreds of other gardens from that era, this one survives and thrives - in large measure because of Goldstein, who is both revered as icon and mentor and remembered as "pot-stirrer" and "pain in the a--. " Now, Miss All-of-the-Above has given up her vegetable plot, though not her key to the gate.

LAGUNA WOODS, Calif. - Joe Schwartz is a 90-year-old great-grandfather of three who enjoys a few puffs of pot each night before he crawls into bed in the Southern California retirement community he calls home. The World War II veteran smokes the drug to alleviate debilitating nausea and is one of about 150 senior citizens on this sprawling, 18,000-person gated campus who belongs to a thriving - and controversial - medical marijuana collective operating here, in the middle of one of the largest retirement communities in the United States.

In Philadelphia, people pilfer peonies, hijack hydrangeas, and abduct azaleas. Victims don't usually report this dirty crime, so no one knows how common it is. But every spring, neighbors trade tales of purloined plants. "It's just irritating, because you're like, 'Really, they're going to steal plants now?' You almost can't have anything nice in front of your house because it's going to get smashed or ruined," said Tara Martello, an occupational therapist who lives in the city's Fairmount section.