Last week I visited The Vineyard – an pie-shaped, 2.7-acre parcel of farm land, tucked away in a northeast neighborhood, not far from the public market
The Vineyard is a project of the Northeast Block Club Alliance and the NorthEast Neighborhood Alliance, a group of neighborhood organizations who are intent on making their neighborhood vibrant again. The farm started as a “vacant” parcel of land, littered with garbage, a few dilapidated buildings, and trees downed by the 1991 ice storm. Now it is a wonderful site: tidy rows of vegetables, poking through black landscaping cloth, are all set up, ready for lots of water and cultivation. Shirley Edwards, who is leading the project, showed me the tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, shallots & onions that have already been planted. Carefully trained along wires, grape vines separate some of the vegetable rows. There are also several fruit trees on the property that provide pears & apples.
Shirley & her crew are in the process of developing an urban agriculture education & training center where the volunteers & neighbors who tend and harvest the crops can prepare food products & sell their wares. I was there because UW gave them a neighborhood mini-grant to purchase some of the equipment for the commercial kitchen. They are also selling their produce at the Public Market & to local restaurants – you’ll see their vegetables being sold under the name of GRUB – Greater Rochester Urban Bounty. Because they’re a not-for-profit, all of the funds that are raised go back into the farm & the neighborhood programs they run. In a neighborhood with fairly few grocery options, their hope is to reconnect the neighbors with healthy food choices that they themselves produce.
As you head towards the back of the property, there is a screened-in gazebo and a series of small flower gardens that have been developed by the neighbors. This may sound like a cliché, but its true: while you’re enjoying those gardens, you completely lose sight of the fact that you standing in the middle of a busy urban neighborhood because the only sounds you hear are the birds singing.
The Vineyard is a project of the Northeast Block Club Alliance and the NorthEast Neighborhood Alliance, a group of neighborhood organizations who are intent on making their neighborhood vibrant again. The farm started as a “vacant” parcel of land, littered with garbage, a few dilapidated buildings, and trees downed by the 1991 ice storm. Now it is a wonderful site: tidy rows of vegetables, poking through black landscaping cloth, are all set up, ready for lots of water and cultivation. Shirley Edwards, who is leading the project, showed me the tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, shallots & onions that have already been planted. Carefully trained along wires, grape vines separate some of the vegetable rows. There are also several fruit trees on the property that provide pears & apples.
Shirley & her crew are in the process of developing an urban agriculture education & training center where the volunteers & neighbors who tend and harvest the crops can prepare food products & sell their wares. I was there because UW gave them a neighborhood mini-grant to purchase some of the equipment for the commercial kitchen. They are also selling their produce at the Public Market & to local restaurants – you’ll see their vegetables being sold under the name of GRUB – Greater Rochester Urban Bounty. Because they’re a not-for-profit, all of the funds that are raised go back into the farm & the neighborhood programs they run. In a neighborhood with fairly few grocery options, their hope is to reconnect the neighbors with healthy food choices that they themselves produce.
As you head towards the back of the property, there is a screened-in gazebo and a series of small flower gardens that have been developed by the neighbors. This may sound like a cliché, but its true: while you’re enjoying those gardens, you completely lose sight of the fact that you standing in the middle of a busy urban neighborhood because the only sounds you hear are the birds singing.
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