Community gardens: A new 'back-to-the land movement' in the District

The Virginia Avenue Community Garden. photo by Stephen Weigand

Don't let the 90 degree-plus weather earlier this month fool you. It's still spring in the nation's capital and gardeners in the District are busy clearing planting beds and sowing seeds. 

This was the case at the Virginia Avenue Community Gardens on Easter Sunday, where members of the garden in Southeast Washington, D.C., were tending to their plots.

With the Southeast-Southwest Freeway looming nearby, Maggie McCarthy was setting up her space to start strawberries, peas, greens, wild flowers and oregano.

McCarthy, a researcher, said the only problem with the house she bought on Capitol Hill was that it didn't have a yard. She was able to get one of the 40 plots at Virginia Avenue last June after spending about six months on a waiting list.

Christy Przystawik said her husband, Tom, helped establish the garden about eight years ago. The Przystawik family has six plots and grows all kinds of vegetables and herbs, from chard, kale, spinach, lettuce and kohlrabi to lavender, chamomile, garlic and strawberries.

Przystawik and her husband co-own Food Matters, a restaurant in Alexandria, Va., that strives to educate people about the source of their food, according to its website. She said she's used some of what she grows at the restaurant— mostly herbs. Not surprisingly, Przystawik, who had three of her four children with her at the garden Easter morning, said it's important to her to teach her children about where food comes from.

 The gardeners at Virginia Avenue Community Gardens are a part of a nationwide increase in urban agriculture. There are an estimated 18,000 community gardens in the United States and Canada, according to the American Community Gardening Association. Some of the benefits attributed to community gardens include increased access to nutritious food, neighborhood improvement and preservation of green space.

Katie Rehwaldt, a program director for the America the Beautiful Fund, a nonprofit organization that promotes volunteerism and protecting the country’s beauty, said the increased interest in community gardens could be traced to environmental, health and economic factors. Although interest in organic food is on the rise, people try to grow their own since organic fruits and vegetables are more expensive, said Rewaldt. "Of course, the economy is a killer," she said.

But the renewed popularity of community gardens is not just about people looking to grow their own food, said Rewhaldt. People also are looking to be active outdoors and in their communities. "We're sort of having a back-to-the-land movement," Rehwaldt said.

In Washington, the DC Green Agenda Web site notes 23 community gardens operating in the city. A census of community gardens conducted last fall by the Neighborhood Farm Initiative, however, counted 35 gardens in D.C.'s eight wards — the bulk of which are located west of the Anacostia River and mostly in Ward 6.

The census counted about 26.5 acres of land used for community gardening in the District, which is a small amount considering other cities such as Detroit or Minneapolis/St. Paul have more acres of community gardens — more than 300 acres and 100 acres, respectively — said Bea Trickett, program director and co-founder of the Neighborhood Farm Initiative. The initiative is a nonprofit project of the America the Beautiful Fund that promotes improving under-used public green space, small-scale organic food production and better access to nutritious foods.

While conducting its census, Trickett said her group found that many of the managers of community gardens didn’t know who owned the land. The District-wide census was the first time there was an effort to coordinate all of the city’s gardens to share resources, according to the DC Field to Forks Network, which is a collection of organizations representing the regions urban gardeners, farmers markets and food banks, among other organizations.

Rehwaldt said it can be confusing for people to figure out which organization to speak with to start a new garden because ownership of public land in Washington is split among the District government, the National Parks Service and the federal government.

Trickett said the Neighborhood Farm Initiative will use its community garden census to measure demand and plan for future gardens in the District.

On Easter, Kitty Barksdale was planting carrots, French radishes, broccoli, cabbage and chard in her second year at the garden. She said she enjoys gardening because it’s nice to have a result for the work she puts into it. But for all of her work, Barksdale, a fundraiser, said she gives away most of what she grows.

“The neighbors like me,” she said.