Jan Marie Belle, being a Woman Who Gets Things Done, had plans for the land east of her office. The lots formed a runway of grass and weeds, half a block from the Westwood Community Center and the SouthWest Improvement Council.
Belle helped start SWIC 23 years ago and has been heading it ever since. In that time, a lot of people have come and gone in Westwood. They move on to better situations or fall into worse ones. They get tired of the neighborhood’s population churn, a form of impermanence that makes Westwood easy to overlook and hard to improve. Belle stays. She has never understood quitting a job not yet done.
SWIC wanted to build affordable housing on the land. Six houses. It was a matter of assembling adjoining parcels. Such things take time. In this case, too much time. The economy curdled. Foreclosures pockmarked the neighborhood. Unemployment in southwest Denver neighborhoods outstrips surrounding areas.
“We had this land sitting there, ready to go,” Belle says, “but the neighborhood changed. The climate changed. People’s needs changed. They don’t need new houses. They need jobs to hold on to the houses they’re renting. They need help hanging on to the houses they do have. They need food. . . . We’re giving out 150 to 200 food boxes every Friday. Two years ago, we were giving 25 boxes every other week.”
One day, several months ago, SWIC deputy director Ron Cardenas was at the grocery store. He overheard someone in line behind him talking about finding a community group interested in fighting hunger by planting gardens on unused land.
This, my friends, is what is called serendipity.
There’s a woman, another who gets things done, named Taja Sevelle. She lives in Detroit, and she saw foreclosures creeping across her city, leaving behind boarded-up homes and vacant lots. In that abandonment, Sevelle saw opportunity. She would turn the neglected land into community farms, give the food away and end hunger.
Don’t you think that’s a little lofty? Sevelle remembers her father asking her. “Bless you, Dad,” she replied. “But I’m not going to tone it down.”
Sevelle founded the nonprofit Urban Farming, and what started in 2005 with three plots has grown to more than 1,000, most of them in Detroit. This year, Urban Farming partnered with Triscuit to build 50 more gardens in 20 cities. Urban Farming and Triscuit provide the prepared plots and the starter veggies and herbs. SWIC and neighborhood volunteers provide the care.
At Wednesday’s groundbreaking, Sevelle tells volunteers that during World War II, Americans planted about 20 million Victory Garden plots. That bounty made up 40 percent of the county’s produce supply, she says, and “if they could do it, we can do it.”
Urban Farming plots are a standard 20×20 feet, so that from the air, the SWIC garden might look like postage stamps on a business envelope. But, Sevelle says, this small plot can produce 500 pounds of mixed vegetables in three months. On Wednesday, volunteers planted tomato, basil, sweet peppers, bush beans, lettuce, collard greens, broccoli, beets, carrots, cabbage and summer squash. For the time being, the irrigation system will consist of volunteers pushing grocery carts filled with water buckets from SWIC.
The garden will be accessible to all and its produce free for the taking. What’s left, Belle says, will go into SWIC’s weekly food boxes. Already, she is envisioning other gardens on the land. A co-op maybe, a house and a farm, with chickens and goats.
“I look at this as a patchwork quilt,” she said. “We want it to grow.”
Sustenance comes in many forms. It feeds the flesh and the spirit. And so a little garden is created in the hope that its tomatoes and sweet peppers will feed the hungry, but also that a neighborhood will be still long enough for its residents to meet over these furrows in the earth and share the fragrance of damp soil and basil and ripe tomatoes, ready to be diced along with some green chiles and garlic. Gardens inhabit the senses, and the last tug when the ground gives up its carrots is as sweet a moment as any.
Beth Ryan, SWIC’s program director, says this public garden is, in a fashion, a return to the neighborhood’s earliest days, before it could probably be called a neighborhood. Before it was consumed by Denver and was grassland and truck farms and Depression refugees who, as I once read in a old newspaper account, sought “home and independence and hope.”
There is something pleasing about this connection to a neighborhood’s past life and the ethic that governed it then and still does today. “It’s like a circle completed,” Ryan says.
So, SWIC has decided to name the farm in recognition of that past. They’re going back to the old name for Westwood, an ideal name for what’s just begun on a long, empty lot in the city: Garden Home.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
