by Emma LaPlante
When Mary Ostafi moved to a high-rise loft in downtown St. Louis in 2011, she had never gardened before in her life. Within a year, she became the founding director of the first community garden in downtown St. Louis.
“It didn’t take me too long to figure out that there was absolutely no green space, and there was really no opportunity to grow any food,” she told me in an interview in early February. “So I just kind of started along this path of wanting to start up a community garden because I felt like the neighborhood needed it.”
Mary works in the Office of Sustainability at Washington University in St. Louis, but in her other life she leads a volunteer run organization called Urban Harvest STL as its Founding Director and Chair. Mary, a chic young urbanite from Chicago with no prior farming experience to speak of, may appear an unlikely candidate to lead the charge for community gardens in downtown St. Louis. (Although there are over 200 community gardens within St. Louis’s boundaries, before Mary arrived, the grand total of farms in the downtown area was zero.) In fact, when I asked her where she found her inspiration for this radical new undertaking, she laughed.
“That’s a great question,” she said. “The funny thing is…”
She went on to explain how she got from Point A—a St. Louis newcomer, struggling with an inexplicable desire to grow things—to Point B, a polished, experienced urban gardener who teaches other people how to farm their own food. A self-proclaimed “health nut,” she has always been passionate about health and well-being. Eventually she came to understand that the only way she could truly control the food she was putting into her body was if she grew it herself. But she wasn’t interested in doing things halfway—instead of simply growing tomatoes in a hydroponic tower on her windowsill, Mary decided to create a community garden. “It’s great going to Farmers’ Markets, and it’s great supporting other local food, but I want to create that opportunity for my neighborhood,” she told me.
After her stroke of clarity, she held a community meeting to gauge interest. Over fifty people showed up, all people in her neighborhood who had seen her Facebook page or the flyers she had hung in a grocery store. The word spread fast, and before long, she didn’t just have takers—she had a waiting list.
Around this time, Mary was taking part in a nine-month organic apprenticeship program through EarthDance Farms, which lasted for the entire growing season. For Mary, it was an invaluable crash course that taught her all the skills she would need to become a successful gardener, skills that she now teaches to first-time gardeners. “Very quickly I learned that most people who live in the urban environment don’t have those skills, and never had an opportunity to garden,” she told me. She mentors these people now, paying forward the lessons that EarthDance Farms taught her, everything from choosing what crops to plant to learning how to harvest them.
(When I asked what crops the gardeners at Urban Harvest typically plant, Mary’s face lit up. “There are probably over, like, thirty,” she said. “Everything from your typical, you know, green-leaf vegetables, various lettuces, spinach, kale, chards, probably ten different varieties of tomatoes, a lot of root vegetables, carrots, beets, turnips, radish, onions, eggplant, pumpkin squash, a ton of different herbs…yeah.”)
It was around this point in our conversation that I began to wonder about the gardeners themselves. In my limited experience observing gentrification, I have learned of the unfortunate tendency of community projects in St. Louis to cater exclusively to one group of people at the expense of others. I was relieved to hear that Mary shares my concerns. She admitted that, while the gardeners at Urban Harvest STL are a fair representation of the diversity in their neighborhood, “we don’t have a hugely diverse neighborhood.” But that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying.
“Different community gardens are governed differently,” she said. As for Urban Harvest, it tries to make leasing a plot as accessible as possible for all types of individuals and families. “The way that we’ve structured our community garden in the past is we kind of set a sliding scale—just kind of telling people to pay what you want. Like, here’s a suggested price, pay less, pay more, pay whatever you want, so that way anybody really had the opportunity to be a part of it.” She went on to point out, “It really [caters] to people mostly who had interest in healthy living and food, and I’m not sure if that really fits into one certain socioeconomic class.”
They also allocate certain plots to growing food exclusively for donations, which they deliver once a week to St. Patrick’s Center downtown, where homeless people and veterans are trained in skills for the restaurant business. In this way, they can give back to the community whose support enables them to exist.
But as Mary pointed out, it’s difficult to make generalized statements, because Urban Harvest STL has changed a lot throughout the years, perhaps most significantly in its location. “We’re nomadic gardeners,” she said, laughing. In the beginning of Urban Harvest’s existence, it was located on a rooftop with twenty 4x10 raised garden plots, two blocks off of Washington Avenue and 14th Street. After two years, the lease was up, so it moved to the top deck of a parking garage on Olive and 6th Street—“right in the middle of the high-rises.” (Part of Urban Harvest’s commitment to accessibility means locating its garden within walking distance of most of its downtown gardeners.) And then, one day before our interview, the folks at Urban Harvest had just signed a lease for a 10,000 square foot rooftop space a block off of Washington Avenue on 14th Street, a space that they hope will become a more permanent home. The nomadic nature of their community garden is something that Urban Harvest has come to embrace. In many ways, it echoes how Mary feels about the city at large.
“That’s the beautiful thing about downtown. It’s primarily a bunch of transients that live there. It’s transplants, like me,” she said. “And I think we bring a new perspective to the city.”
So how do you create a community, the most essential requirement for a community garden, out of a city of transients? Community gardens, it would appear, are a solution.
“I would not have met half of these, I mean, probably any of these people that I’m now either good friends with or make connections with if it wasn’t for this project,” Mary told me when I asked about a community garden’s ability to strengthen a neighborhood’s sense of collective identity. “I think it really brings a community together, because it’s something that you can grow together, and learn together, and evolve and just kind of enhance your neighborhood. It creates a place for people to convene.”
A community garden is, at its most fundamental level, the product of a group of people taking back their city. It’s people seizing ownership of space—abandoned, demolished, unused space—and turning it into something beautiful, something productive. Mary used the phrase, “taking abandoned lots or hardscapes and turning them into greenscapes.” The environmental benefits of implementing this type of action on a large scale are transformative: introducing new ecosystems, enhancing biodiversity, and reducing the heat island effective, just to name a few. But studies show that community gardens also reduce crime and enhance the longevity and health of their members.
Mary is also adamant that community gardens help foster a sense of local pride. “Definitely for the people involved, who have created it, there’s a tremendous sense of pride of the accomplishments,” she said. “But then also people that aren’t involved, just to see that happening, I think it makes them proud to see that people care enough to build something like this, to enhance their community in that way to provide another asset to St. Louis. So I think it’s just a win-win for everybody, no matter what level of engagement they have in the project.”
After witnessing such resoundingly positive effects, a top priority for community gardeners is to expand and get as much of a city involved as possible. That’s why, this time, Urban Harvest isn’t just relocating—it’s scaling up. While in the past Urban Harvest has been necessarily limited to being a community garden, now it’s embarking on the impossibly exciting task of tackling urban farming, or the Food Roof Farm, as it will be called.
The idea for the Food Roof Farm was born out of the realization that, not only were there many people sitting on the waiting list for the community garden, there were also many people who wanted access to fresh, local food without necessarily having to grow it themselves. The Food Roof Farm, which is 10,000 square feet and is set to open to the community this summer, will address these needs by incorporating a larger community garden into a working CSA farm that sells community-supported agriculture shares. It will also expand on its educational purpose, designating a built-in space for classes and workshops. Urban farms of this kind also have a more tangible economic influence than smaller community gardens, because they sell food to the public and create jobs. They can also help to combat the problems of food deserts, or areas that don’t have ready access to healthy, affordable foods. In a brilliantly understated pun, Mary said, “It’s just kind of taking the seed that we started with and growing it to the next level.” She added, “Making it more accessible to everybody in the community.”
The fact that Urban Harvest STL has grown from a small rooftop farm into a 10,000 square foot urban farm while staying true to its community values demonstrates a resilience and adaptability that St. Louis, a city in desperate need of a major overhaul, needs. Change, especially socioeconomic change, will only be successful if it starts at a grassroots level, just as Mary feels a community garden will only be successful if it is neighbor-based. Community gardens may not be able to fix all of St. Louis’s problems, but they certainly are a start.
“I think that this is just kind of the pilot project,” Mary mused during our interview.” “We’re going to get this one up and running, and we’re going to experiment with it, and, you know, learn from it over the next couple years, and then we hope to scale up to more areas downtown—rooftops, vacant lots, whatever the opportunity we can find, and grow more.”
Mary also believes in this project because she thinks everyone can be a gardener. As she said, “It’s to incorporate more people that want to grow their own food and then just show people that you can grow food, anywhere. If we can grow food first on a vacant lot downtown, second on the top deck of a parking garage, and third on a rooftop downtown, we’re trying to say, you know, if you have an interest, wherever your opportunity is, you can take back that space and do it.”
The community garden at the heart of Urban Harvest STL inspires people to do more with the city they live in. Every city is full of unproductive and forgotten spaces—demolished lots, eroding parking spaces, unused rooftops and empty parks. A community gardener looks at those spaces, squints a little, and sees potential. She digs her roots into the ground and blooms where she’s planted. If she’s lucky, a community of grounded people will follow her example, growing their roots around her.
For upcoming volunteer opportunities and how to get involved with Urban Harvest STL, please visit www.urbanharveststl.org.
Mary works in the Office of Sustainability at Washington University in St. Louis, but in her other life she leads a volunteer run organization called Urban Harvest STL as its Founding Director and Chair. Mary, a chic young urbanite from Chicago with no prior farming experience to speak of, may appear an unlikely candidate to lead the charge for community gardens in downtown St. Louis. (Although there are over 200 community gardens within St. Louis’s boundaries, before Mary arrived, the grand total of farms in the downtown area was zero.) In fact, when I asked her where she found her inspiration for this radical new undertaking, she laughed.
“That’s a great question,” she said. “The funny thing is…”
She went on to explain how she got from Point A—a St. Louis newcomer, struggling with an inexplicable desire to grow things—to Point B, a polished, experienced urban gardener who teaches other people how to farm their own food. A self-proclaimed “health nut,” she has always been passionate about health and well-being. Eventually she came to understand that the only way she could truly control the food she was putting into her body was if she grew it herself. But she wasn’t interested in doing things halfway—instead of simply growing tomatoes in a hydroponic tower on her windowsill, Mary decided to create a community garden. “It’s great going to Farmers’ Markets, and it’s great supporting other local food, but I want to create that opportunity for my neighborhood,” she told me.
After her stroke of clarity, she held a community meeting to gauge interest. Over fifty people showed up, all people in her neighborhood who had seen her Facebook page or the flyers she had hung in a grocery store. The word spread fast, and before long, she didn’t just have takers—she had a waiting list.
Around this time, Mary was taking part in a nine-month organic apprenticeship program through EarthDance Farms, which lasted for the entire growing season. For Mary, it was an invaluable crash course that taught her all the skills she would need to become a successful gardener, skills that she now teaches to first-time gardeners. “Very quickly I learned that most people who live in the urban environment don’t have those skills, and never had an opportunity to garden,” she told me. She mentors these people now, paying forward the lessons that EarthDance Farms taught her, everything from choosing what crops to plant to learning how to harvest them.
(When I asked what crops the gardeners at Urban Harvest typically plant, Mary’s face lit up. “There are probably over, like, thirty,” she said. “Everything from your typical, you know, green-leaf vegetables, various lettuces, spinach, kale, chards, probably ten different varieties of tomatoes, a lot of root vegetables, carrots, beets, turnips, radish, onions, eggplant, pumpkin squash, a ton of different herbs…yeah.”)
It was around this point in our conversation that I began to wonder about the gardeners themselves. In my limited experience observing gentrification, I have learned of the unfortunate tendency of community projects in St. Louis to cater exclusively to one group of people at the expense of others. I was relieved to hear that Mary shares my concerns. She admitted that, while the gardeners at Urban Harvest STL are a fair representation of the diversity in their neighborhood, “we don’t have a hugely diverse neighborhood.” But that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying.
“Different community gardens are governed differently,” she said. As for Urban Harvest, it tries to make leasing a plot as accessible as possible for all types of individuals and families. “The way that we’ve structured our community garden in the past is we kind of set a sliding scale—just kind of telling people to pay what you want. Like, here’s a suggested price, pay less, pay more, pay whatever you want, so that way anybody really had the opportunity to be a part of it.” She went on to point out, “It really [caters] to people mostly who had interest in healthy living and food, and I’m not sure if that really fits into one certain socioeconomic class.”
They also allocate certain plots to growing food exclusively for donations, which they deliver once a week to St. Patrick’s Center downtown, where homeless people and veterans are trained in skills for the restaurant business. In this way, they can give back to the community whose support enables them to exist.
But as Mary pointed out, it’s difficult to make generalized statements, because Urban Harvest STL has changed a lot throughout the years, perhaps most significantly in its location. “We’re nomadic gardeners,” she said, laughing. In the beginning of Urban Harvest’s existence, it was located on a rooftop with twenty 4x10 raised garden plots, two blocks off of Washington Avenue and 14th Street. After two years, the lease was up, so it moved to the top deck of a parking garage on Olive and 6th Street—“right in the middle of the high-rises.” (Part of Urban Harvest’s commitment to accessibility means locating its garden within walking distance of most of its downtown gardeners.) And then, one day before our interview, the folks at Urban Harvest had just signed a lease for a 10,000 square foot rooftop space a block off of Washington Avenue on 14th Street, a space that they hope will become a more permanent home. The nomadic nature of their community garden is something that Urban Harvest has come to embrace. In many ways, it echoes how Mary feels about the city at large.
“That’s the beautiful thing about downtown. It’s primarily a bunch of transients that live there. It’s transplants, like me,” she said. “And I think we bring a new perspective to the city.”
So how do you create a community, the most essential requirement for a community garden, out of a city of transients? Community gardens, it would appear, are a solution.
“I would not have met half of these, I mean, probably any of these people that I’m now either good friends with or make connections with if it wasn’t for this project,” Mary told me when I asked about a community garden’s ability to strengthen a neighborhood’s sense of collective identity. “I think it really brings a community together, because it’s something that you can grow together, and learn together, and evolve and just kind of enhance your neighborhood. It creates a place for people to convene.”
A community garden is, at its most fundamental level, the product of a group of people taking back their city. It’s people seizing ownership of space—abandoned, demolished, unused space—and turning it into something beautiful, something productive. Mary used the phrase, “taking abandoned lots or hardscapes and turning them into greenscapes.” The environmental benefits of implementing this type of action on a large scale are transformative: introducing new ecosystems, enhancing biodiversity, and reducing the heat island effective, just to name a few. But studies show that community gardens also reduce crime and enhance the longevity and health of their members.
Mary is also adamant that community gardens help foster a sense of local pride. “Definitely for the people involved, who have created it, there’s a tremendous sense of pride of the accomplishments,” she said. “But then also people that aren’t involved, just to see that happening, I think it makes them proud to see that people care enough to build something like this, to enhance their community in that way to provide another asset to St. Louis. So I think it’s just a win-win for everybody, no matter what level of engagement they have in the project.”
After witnessing such resoundingly positive effects, a top priority for community gardeners is to expand and get as much of a city involved as possible. That’s why, this time, Urban Harvest isn’t just relocating—it’s scaling up. While in the past Urban Harvest has been necessarily limited to being a community garden, now it’s embarking on the impossibly exciting task of tackling urban farming, or the Food Roof Farm, as it will be called.
The idea for the Food Roof Farm was born out of the realization that, not only were there many people sitting on the waiting list for the community garden, there were also many people who wanted access to fresh, local food without necessarily having to grow it themselves. The Food Roof Farm, which is 10,000 square feet and is set to open to the community this summer, will address these needs by incorporating a larger community garden into a working CSA farm that sells community-supported agriculture shares. It will also expand on its educational purpose, designating a built-in space for classes and workshops. Urban farms of this kind also have a more tangible economic influence than smaller community gardens, because they sell food to the public and create jobs. They can also help to combat the problems of food deserts, or areas that don’t have ready access to healthy, affordable foods. In a brilliantly understated pun, Mary said, “It’s just kind of taking the seed that we started with and growing it to the next level.” She added, “Making it more accessible to everybody in the community.”
The fact that Urban Harvest STL has grown from a small rooftop farm into a 10,000 square foot urban farm while staying true to its community values demonstrates a resilience and adaptability that St. Louis, a city in desperate need of a major overhaul, needs. Change, especially socioeconomic change, will only be successful if it starts at a grassroots level, just as Mary feels a community garden will only be successful if it is neighbor-based. Community gardens may not be able to fix all of St. Louis’s problems, but they certainly are a start.
“I think that this is just kind of the pilot project,” Mary mused during our interview.” “We’re going to get this one up and running, and we’re going to experiment with it, and, you know, learn from it over the next couple years, and then we hope to scale up to more areas downtown—rooftops, vacant lots, whatever the opportunity we can find, and grow more.”
Mary also believes in this project because she thinks everyone can be a gardener. As she said, “It’s to incorporate more people that want to grow their own food and then just show people that you can grow food, anywhere. If we can grow food first on a vacant lot downtown, second on the top deck of a parking garage, and third on a rooftop downtown, we’re trying to say, you know, if you have an interest, wherever your opportunity is, you can take back that space and do it.”
The community garden at the heart of Urban Harvest STL inspires people to do more with the city they live in. Every city is full of unproductive and forgotten spaces—demolished lots, eroding parking spaces, unused rooftops and empty parks. A community gardener looks at those spaces, squints a little, and sees potential. She digs her roots into the ground and blooms where she’s planted. If she’s lucky, a community of grounded people will follow her example, growing their roots around her.
For upcoming volunteer opportunities and how to get involved with Urban Harvest STL, please visit www.urbanharveststl.org.