I have a theory about Charlottesville. I say it is a mirage. If you are not convinced, let me tell you about the time I watched a gal named Angel wearing knitted, arm-length gloves with the fingers cut off as she talked organic gardening with a woman decked out in a business suit. Or when a young man wearing black horn-rimmed glasses stood in front of a crowd of kids and put on a show with homemade puppets made of organic vegetables duking it out with Tony the Tiger for “Little Billy’s” taste buds.
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VIDEO BY LANCE WARREN |
Do you believe this? Not me.
I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go in my life, but I can’t remember a time when gardening seemed the hip thing to do. Regardless of whether a fashion statement is being made here, more importantly, these folks are making an effort to think globally by acting locally. When I met with Wendy Roberman, who acts as public relations and mother-like figure to the budding backyard garden company known as C’Ville Foodscapes, she said, “You can’t get much more local than your own backyard.”
It’s a Sunday afternoon and C’Ville Foodscapes is holding its launch party at Random Row Books on Main Street. A loose quartet of musicians sits out front on metal folding chairs, playing bluegrass music on stringed instruments, while folks gather around bins of dirt, dry clay and seeds to watch a young woman named Kassia roll mud balls ready for planting. Inside, these modern hippies—young enough that their parents may have been born after Woodstock—sit cross-legged on a stage area and excitedly trade packs of organic seeds.
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READ MORE For more on growing a garden [with video!], click here. |
Angel Shockley describes herself as “an aspiring mistress of curiosity and a woman committed to making her wildest dreams come true.” After living and working on farms in California, Hawaii and Montana, Shockley came to Charlottesville in December 2008. Now she wants to offer her knowledge of gardening to anyone willing to hire her. She started C’Ville Foodscapes with her neighbor Patrick Costello, a printmaker by trade, as well as Roberman and three other horticulture enthusiasts.
C’Ville Foodscapes is but one of several recent groups to emerge that offers backyard vegetable gardening services. Another, Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest, is committed to growing fresh food without the use of synthetic or chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides.
If you count yourself among those feeling the financial pinch, but don’t know where to start in thinking about a garden, these groups offer their services and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
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C’Ville Foodscapes’ motto is best summed up by Wendy Roberson, left: “You can’t get much more local than your own backyard.” Her colleagues are, from left, Angel Shockley, Patrick Costello and Sky Blue. |
Two of the owners of C’Ville Foodscapes come directly from Twin Oaks in Louisa, one of the longest-running and most successful communes in North America. Kassia Arbabi and Sky Blue each attribute much of their knowledge of hands-on gardening to their time spent there. Reason for leaving? “I really want to bring the system and structure for resource-sharing into an urban environment,” says Arbabi. Call them naïve idealists or utopian star-gazers, but don’t let their leather sandals and hemp knitted sweaters throw you off. These two are skilled at what they do.
“When gas prices went through the roof a couple years ago,” says Sky Blue, “that’s when I felt there was a renewed interest for locally produced food. People become aware of things when it hits their pocketbook. It happened during World War II, it happened in the late ’70s and now it’s more pressing than ever.”
Yet before these two businesses burst onto the scene, local songwriter Adrienne Young’s nonprofit SurLie Foundation started a program, in 2008, called Backyard Revolution. That group is planning its first festival in Nelson County in May, and Young can be heard extolling the virtues of backyard vegetable gardens every Friday night on 106.1 The Corner.
Then there are Rivanna natives Cabell Cox and Hunter McPadden, whose Grow Co. pre-dates both Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest and C’Ville Foodscapes as a locally based vegetable garden design group. “It’s not surprising that two other companies have started up with similar missions,” says Cox. “Charlottesville is a trendsetting area, in many aspects, so the formation of these businesses point to something bigger and substantial in the food industry.”
“Historically speaking, UVA has always brought a lot to the area,” says Mike Parisi of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest. “The legacy of Thomas Jefferson and his experimentation with the garden at Monticello is felt all over the campus and especially with the architecture department and landscape planning classes.”
By the mid-1970s, Michael Clark’s Planet Earth Diversified became a pioneer in local organic farming for the Charlottesville area. These days, Clark is the host of the delightful “Meet the Farmer” TV program that examines the social relationships among growers, chefs and consumers in our area, while his company still stands as a successful business model and organic source of produce.
“The evolution of the locally grown foods movement here in Charlottesville has touched so many parts of the area,” says Guinevere Higgins of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest. “But taking that one step further, the freshest food you can eat doesn’t have to be bought at a market, but can come from your own sweat and toil in the backyard, and that’s often the most rewarding too.”
Higgins is a lifelong gardener, passionate about helping people grow their own food. She is the founder of the Charlottesville League of Urban Chicken Keepers (CLUCK), and lives with five chickens, three mushroom logs and a strawberry patch in her own downtown backyard. Higgins started Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest in 2009 by partnering with Matt Bierce, who previously worked at Monticello’s gardens and Blenheim Vineyards, and Parisi, a third-generation Italian-American who claims he is “as obsessed with growing the perfect tomato as he is with finding the perfect tomato sauce recipe.”
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Mike Parisi, left, Guinevere Higgis and Matt Bierce of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest: “With busy schedules and heavy priorities, a thriving vegetable garden in your own backyard can seem like an uphill battle,” Bierce admits, counseling that it’s O.K. “to go through that trial and error process.” |
“There was a time when having a vegetable garden in your backyard was a common thing,” says Higgins. “There is this sort of lost generation that has seen things fall off over the last 20 to 30 years.”
Yet, unlike the Victory Gardens campaign that the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged during World Wars I and II (periods during which the term “rationing” meant something tangible), this latest garden movement is more a reaction to the increased industrialization of food production over the last few decades.
“Backyard vegetable gardening is definitely counter to the mainstream,” argues Higgins, “because we’ve gotten used to jumping in our car and going to the grocery store to buy produce. But a lot of people are starting to question how things got to be that way. And in questioning it, people from all walks are saying, ‘Hmm, why don’t I have a garden in my own backyard?’”
“The whole way in which food is bought and sold today is so terrible,” says Costello of C’ville Foodscapes. “I grew up in the DIY, punk movement, and beyond just making art, I wanted to make a difference, and so I became interested in the ecology, sustainability and environmental justice.”
“People are making food choices and logical choices about pollution,” says Bierce. “That’s made us into activists in that we think it’s just logical to leave as little of a carbon imprint as we can on the planet.”
“It’s political,” Parisi agrees. “Not Democrat or Republican, but by growing your own food, you’re making a statement about your values.”
So what does it cost for one of these companies to install a food-producing garden in your backyard?
First off, all three companies offer free consultations. Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest’s charges depend on whatever agreement you come to with them, while C’Ville Foodscapes’ services start at $100 for a 4’X 8′ lawn transformation that includes grass and weed removal, soil tilling and mulching.
On the night I meet up with them—following the launch party for C’Ville Foodscapes—the Backyard Harvest crew has gathered to discuss several consultations from earlier in the day. They go over Google Earth photos, sundial diagrams and digital snapshots in an effort to give their clients the most effective and best-priced garden.
“An investment in a garden is like money in the bank,” says Parisi. “The initial investment will pay for itself in savings on eating out and buying organic produce in the grocery store or at the farmer’s market.”
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Cabell Cox, left, and Hunter McPadden find a wide range of customers coming to The Grow Co., from people who want to ensure they’re headed in the right direction to those who want “a full-on edible garden with chickens, complemented by a comprehensive landscape design.” |
“With busy schedules and heavy priorities,” says Bierce, “a thriving vegetable garden in your own backyard can seem like an uphill battle. The most important thing to keep in mind is that it’s O.K. to go through that trial and error process. We’re discovering a lot of apple varieties, for instance, and seeing what works best with the soil here and whatnot. We can get a little nerdy about it, but it’s also practical.”
Elsewhere, Cox and McPadden of Grow Co. are preparing for several landscaping jobs coming up a few days hence. “We are finding that there is a range in the types of clients we are getting,” says Cox. “Some simply want an affirmation about ideas they want to implement themselves, others want a full-on edible garden with chickens, complemented by a comprehensive landscape design.”
Meanwhile at Random Row Books, the bluegrass quartet is down to a trio and the crowd is beginning to thin out. But before everyone leaves, the C’Ville Foodscapers pull out the winner of the raffle for a free backyard landscape job, with all the bells and whistles. They say that gardening requires a lot of water… most of it in the form of perspiration. Well, it’s spring time now—and it’s been a long, hard winter in more ways than one. Don’t we all deserve a new beginning?