Matt Jones stands in a field of neatly clipped grass on Desire Street in the 9th Ward wearing a wide brimmed hat to protect his face from the sun, a loose-fitting shirt and khaki shorts — his go-to uniform for early spring gardening. He's working in one of two locations where the nonprofit Farming NOLA has cleaned overgrown vacant lots to grow fruit and vegetables.
Jones squints slightly, walks over to the kale bed and bends down.
“These darn caterpillars just love eating kale,” he said as he plucked a silky golden critter from the leaf of the plant and tossed it in the grass. “I just take them off the leaves and throw them in the grass because they like to eat grass, which means less work for me when it's time to mow.”
If anyone should know about the behavior of caterpillars, it would be Jones, an upper school biology teacher and chairman of the science department at Newman School. The school donates 100 pounds of cooked scraps per day from its kitchen for Jones to mix into the compost pile on the edge of the cultivated area.
“Sometimes there are pleasant surprises growing out of the compost — like the pineapple plants. I think that vine over there with the big leaves is a pumpkin vine,” he said.
The idea behind the nonprofit is to use some of 9th Ward blighted lots as mini-farms and to help end the "food desert" conditions there, he said.
“We are talking to Margie Green at NOCCA about collaborating on an organized food distribution system to residents, but so far, our crops haven’t been big enough. That will change this summer,” he said.
To date, crops have been given away to neighbors, and anyone can walk onto the grove of trees and help themselves — there are no fences. With 56 fruit trees at the Desire Street location and another 20 on North Miro Street, Jones expects a good harvest from the now mature trees that he planted four years ago.
“We tried to get a big variety — a few kinds of figs, mayhaw, pomegranate, citrus, papaya, pear, peach, persimmon,” Jones said. “Many of them were donated by friends, and many of the figs I propagated from cuttings.”
The vegetables (cucumbers, okra, tomatoes, peas), leafy greens (kale and Swiss chard) and herbs (cilantro) are planted in what stands in for raised beds — the cinder block foundation of a house that was never built.
Farming NOLA leases several lots from NORA through its Growing Green program, and a couple from Habitat for Humanity. It purchased one lot, and its seventh lot was a donation.
“You see this?” Jones asked, motioning to the thick tangle of vines, trees and debris at the edge of the compost pile. “This is what every lot looked like when we first started — a 15-foot-tall wall of weeds.”
A rented bush hog helped clear the lots so that Jones and student volunteers from Newman could level them with river sand and prepare them for planting.
One of the notable aspects of the garden is how found materials have been called into service. Curtain rods, paint stirrers and rebar make excellent plant stakes, and thin sheets of plywood — some of them dumped there — serve to suppress weeds. On North Miro, boards were culled from a pile of construction debris and fashioned into a planter. It’s a practical garden, created for function rather than beauty.
Nonetheless, beauty prevails.
“The sweet peas (flowers) for example. We didn't intend to have them in the garden, but that's what grew instead of the edible ones,” he said.
Jones lets a good number of plants go to seed rather than harvest them, with the hope that they will self-seed and return next season. He takes care of both the Desire and North Miro sites, mowing them with a push mower. He has improved the watering regimen by installing drip irrigation to the vegetables and herbs in the beds; he waters the trees by hand. All told, he devotes at least eight hours a week caring for the gardens.
In the years that Farming NOLA’s Desire and North Miro street gardens have been in existence, Jones says he has watched the surrounding 9th ward neighborhoods become more animated.
“The city has been fixing the streets in both areas, and there are a lot of new houses being built near North Miro that aren’t part of the Make It Right development,” Jones said. “Others have taken advantage of the availability of lots for their projects — one woman grows flowers to sell, someone else has a bamboo nursery, and someone else keeps bees and sells the honey. It’s an incredibly interesting community.”
