The Trenton Times published the following article on May 4, 2013. To read the full article, click here.
Urban gardens bring Trenton residents together
By Erin Duffy/The Times of Trenton
on May 04, 2013 at 7:15 AMTRENTON — As a young man, Clarence Henley swore he’d never work a patch of dirt again.
Henley, now 78, grew up on a farm in Georgia. He knows firsthand the back-breaking labor that goes into spring plantings and fall harvests.
“We raised cotton, corn, sweet peppers,” he said. “It’s hard work. We worked sun up to sun down.”
But something changed six years ago when a friend’s daughter, then working with Isles Inc., a city nonprofit focused on sustainability, urban development and green jobs training, suggested he and a few other retirees start growing vegetables in a lot off Prospect Street Isles was developing.
Henley found he could tolerate — maybe even enjoy — a little recreational gardening.
“It’s nice,” he said. “I’m getting to like it.”
Since then, he’s moved his plot across town, to another Isles garden on Chestnut Avenue. There, just a few blocks from the Trenton Train Station, individual gardens will flourish from a three-quarter-acre sprawling dirt lot divided into neat sections by string and garden stakes.
The garden was started more than 30 years ago by local resident and gardening maven Betty Fleming, who turned a trash-filled dumping ground into a thriving garden in the 1970s, said Jim Simon, Isles’ program manager for urban agriculture.
The Garden of Three Points on Chestnut Avenue is just one of Isles’ 50 community gardens in Trenton, where residents and school kids turn empty lots into pockets of green that break up busy streets and clusters of homes.
Neighbors, everyone from African-American seniors to Bangladeshi families, pitch in on Chestnut Avenue, one of Isles’ largest and longest-running gardens, Simon said.
Isles maintains community gardens beautify neighborhoods while providing city residents with direct access to fresh produce, which can be scarce in a low-income city such as Trenton with more corner bodegas than supermarkets.
“There’s really a resurgent interest in local food, growing your own food, especially with rising fuel costs pushing the price of food up,” Simon said. “People want to know, to connect with how their food is grown. And it’s not just about food — a good amount of it is sociability. For some people, the food is secondary. They want to garden to be with friends or connect with neighbors or garden with their church.”
Henley lives in the West Ward, but now that the early spring cold snap is over and the weather is warming up, he drives across the city on an almost daily basis to till the dirt and prepare his patch for planting.
On Wednesday, in the mid-morning sun, he was already hard at work, even though most of his fellow gardeners don’t start planting until June. Stooping over a bit, he spread top soil on his assigned plot and used a shovel and rake to smooth soil and yank out stubborn dandelions and other weeds.
“It’s a little early but the ground’s just beginning to get warm,” he said. “Today is a nice day to start.”
Leafy green lettuce plants a friend gave his wife are already growing. Soon they’ll be joined by the rest of his annual haul: collard greens, cabbages, string beans, turnips and sweet potato vines.
“And onions,” he said. “I have to have my onions, every year.”
Yesterday, he took another trip in the late afternoon to water his seedlings after a full day of sun. As always, it’s Henley and Henley alone who carefully tends to his plot — it’s off-limits to his wife, Rebecca.
“My grandpa didn’t let my grandma in the garden,” he said. “That’s just the way it was.”
Henley admits he’s not a big talker, but it’s clear he takes pride in growing his own food, of the fresh summer bounty that travels just a few miles from an East Trenton garden to his dinner table.
“The love I gained for it in recent years…” he shrugs. “Well, it’s something to do.”
Contact Erin Duffy at (609) 989-5723 or eduffy@njtimes.com