Organizations aim to pepper Austin, Texas with urban farms

Paige Hill is a founder of Urban Patchwork, an Austin organization that offers to turn property owners’ yards into vegetable patches. Photo by Larry Kolvoord.

Urban Patchwork currently farms four plots

By Asher Price
American-Statesman
April 16, 2010

Except:

Within the buzz of traffic from Koenig Lane and a view of a Texas Gas Service office and warehouse across the street, Dale Oliverio’s backyard isn’t obviously situated as a pastoral paradise.

Until recently, his yard was overrun with “weeds and nut grass, and very little real grass,” he said. “It was such a waste of space. I would mow it every week, just wasting gasoline.”

But about four months ago, the 38-year-old systems analyst who lives near Highland Mall turned it over to an organization called Urban Patchwork, a 10-month-old operation that offers to turn homeowners’ yards into vegetable patches.

Now neat rows of vegetables — onions, garlic, tomatoes, ancho chile and jalapeno peppers, beets, kale, green beans, potatoes and romaine lettuce — are sprouting out. In return for granting access to the land, Oliverio and other property owners who participate get all the free vegetables they can eat. The biggest pests are Stitches and Angus, Oliverio’s two pugs.

Community-supported agriculture outfits — where buyers of the produce often pay, in labor and money, to a local farm — have long been part of the Central Texas “locavore,” or local food movement, scene. But Urban Patchwork and other similar projects in town are an effort to turn Austin back into a quilt-like urban farm, where front yards and backyards are not for grass but for vegetables patches.

“We want to foster a sense of community, to encourage people to meet at the front of the house,” said Paige Hill, a 34-year-old former graphic designer and landscaper who started Urban Patchwork and is Oliverio’s girlfriend. “You’re giving something to the land and getting something back.”

Urban Patchwork currently farms four plots and has 40 subscribers, each of whom pay about $20 a week for vegetables. Hill said they hope to have another 10 plots by the end of the year. The plots range from 1,000 to 3,500 square feet; property owners donate water used to irrigate the plants and commit to providing land to the organization for at least two years.

Right now, Hill finds herself getting more offers of land than she can handle and has to turn down some yards because they don’t get enough sunlight to nourish a vegetable garden. Urban Patchwork also prefers not to farm any plot smaller than 1,000 square feet.

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