Local foods and the urban farming movement get a lot of attention these days. We hear about rooftop tomatoes and backyard basil so often, you’d think the supermarket itself has an expiration date. But the truth is, running a community garden in the New York isn’t easy.
In Astoria, Queens, a group of people decided to turn a half-acre of abandoned parkland in their neighborhood into a vibrant community garden. Over the next couple years, its membership grew so fast that now there’s a wait list of people wanting plots. But with all those people sharing the same small space, it's often hard for them to agree on how it should be run. And the louder the voices inside the garden grow, the more some people outside its gates feel excluded.
Now, that once overlooked space draws a lot of attention, including from a city councilman who is pushing to convert it back into a park. In this three-part series, Jenny Shalant reports on the power of community gardens to bring people together and divide them, all at once.
Related Pieces
Piece Description
Local foods and the urban farming movement get a lot of attention these days. We hear about rooftop tomatoes and backyard basil so often, you’d think the supermarket itself has an expiration date. But the truth is, running a community garden in the New York isn’t easy.
In Astoria, Queens, a group of people decided to turn a half-acre of abandoned parkland in their neighborhood into a vibrant community garden. Over the next couple years, its membership grew so fast that now there’s a wait list of people wanting plots. But with all those people sharing the same small space, it's often hard for them to agree on how it should be run. And the louder the voices inside the garden grow, the more some people outside its gates feel excluded.
Now, that once overlooked space draws a lot of attention, including from a city councilman who is pushing to convert it back into a park. In this three-part series, Jenny Shalant reports on the power of community gardens to bring people together and divide them, all at once.
Transcript
PART 1
NARR: Towards the end of spring, Joseph Balint was in the garden, admiring his vegetables.
ACT: Look at that. I have peppers already, and what is it—May? Right? You can see two peppers.
NARR: In June, Liza Nicolai had begun her spring diet of beans.
ACT: Beans with butter, beans with ghee, beans with yogurt and garlic.
NARR: By the time July 4 rolled around, Edith Hsu could already count 28 tomatoes on her vines, plum and cherry.
ACT: I come here and I move the soil and I water them and everything, and I guess, I talk to them. (laughs) Anything that is dead I take out the leaves and make sure my babies are okay. That’s what I call them, my babies.
NARR: Balint, Nicolai, and Hsu care for their crops at Two Coves Community Garden in Astoria, Queens. The garden is a half-acre sliver of land near the neighborhood’s industrial waterfront area. It’s wide in the middle and poi...
Read the full transcript
Intro and Outro
INTRO:We pass empty lots in New York City all the time — filled with trash, paved over for parking, or growing forests of weeds. These spaces rarely give us reason to linger, but in fact, as public land, they belong to us.
In Astoria, Queens, a group of people decided to do something with a half-acre of abandoned parkland in their neighborhood, and turned it into a vibrant community garden. Now, that once overlooked space draws a lot of attention, including from a city councilman who is pushing to convert it back into a park.
In this three-part series, Jenny Shalant reports on the power of community gardens to bring people together and divide them, all at once.
