Urban Farmers Upset About How a Garden Will No Longer Grow

Toby Sanchez, who founded the community garden at Brooklyn College with her husband. She said: “There weren’t many rules. ‘Take care of your garden, and don’t grow marijuana.’ ”

Take care of your garden, and don’t grow marijuana

By Kareem Fahim
New York Times
May 21, 2010

Excerpt:

In one garden plot, a little girl and her younger brother spent their childhoods among the strawberries, poppies and sweet peas tended by their mother, a Russian immigrant who learned to farm in Siberia. In another plot, a Turkish woman grew eggplants that she took home and stuffed with meat and mint that she added to yogurt and cucumbers for her family.

On Thursday, those urban farmers and others like them went back to their plots at a community garden on the Brooklyn College campus, not to tend their plants but to uproot them. College administrators have ordered part of the garden, on a strip of land near a college entrance that they lent to the gardeners, paved over to accommodate the long-planned expansion of an athletic field.

Though the administrators said they would build a smaller community garden on the site, they will first have to get rid of a sprawling garden that has grown since 1997, putting the college in the strange position of reducing green space at a time when schools and colleges across the country seem to be clamoring for it.

But it is another detail about the plans that has particularly enraged the farmers and garnered a fair amount of resentment toward the college: Part of the garden will be claimed to — yes — put up a parking lot.

College administrators say their hands are tied. Nicole Hosten-Haas, the college president’s chief of staff, said an athletic field near the community garden did not meet N.C.A.A. standards, forcing both the men’s soccer and the women’s softball teams to play elsewhere. Parking spots lost because of the field expansion would have to move to the garden space, she said.

Ms. Hosten-Haas said the gardeners had long benefited from the space given to them by the college, which had to balance competing claims for the property. But she acknowledged that the decision had been unpopular. “We can’t compete with a 1960s folk song,” she said.

The fight left bitterness and unanswered questions hanging over a last gathering in the garden on Thursday night as the farmers, under the watchful eyes of campus security guards, dug up lilies, sang folk songs and carted bushels of mint and echinacea away in plastic bags.

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