Where many see asphalt, others see vegetables

Asphalt gardening has many benefits, including taking back idle paved-over land and putting it back into use.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Where most people see asphalt, Maurice Small sees vegetables. Rows of them, ripening under a hot city sun.

His idea of a garden spot is a vacant parking lot.

Forget about tearing up the blacktop to reach the soil below. The earth could be contaminated. His theory is to leave the asphalt alone and build raised beds. The asphalt then becomes a barrier against whatever nastiness might be lurking below.

The way Small sees it, most available green space in the city is being gobbled up for new houses, so why not take back that which has already been paved over?

Asphalt gardening

Small is like the Pied Piper of asphalt gardening, promoting its benefits around the city. He recently took Andrew Watterson, sustainability programs manager for Cleveland, on a tour of urban gardens, both asphalt and the more traditional.

The potential benefits of asphalt gardens, Watterson said, include limiting the amount of storm water going into sewer systems.

Proponents also assert that asphalt gardens are a way to reduce the “heat island effect” created by the sun pounding on the pavement, and a means to bring fresh produce to parts of the community that might be underserved by grocery stores.

For a business or an apartment complex not using all of their parking lot, it’s something they might want to consider, Watterson said.

The extent of interest in asphalt gardening is new to real estate developer Michael Chesler, “but anything you can do to soften the hardness of an urban landscape is a good thing,” he said.

Great cities are known for their green space, said Chesler, who believes the benefit of the gardens will be purely aesthetic. But that’s OK.

“I think it probably does relax us all,” he said.

And if anybody’s interested, he has a parking lot — maybe one-third of an acre — beside the former Packard Auto Depot that might provide someone with a nice site for an asphalt garden.

Made their beds

Kate Thomas, nutritionist at Neighborhood Family Practice, oversees six raised beds in a corner of the Ridgeway Plaza parking lot. They occupy a fenced area beside the Brightside Academy, a day-care center.

Each bed is surrounded by cinder blocks and has a growing area of about 3 feet by 8 feet. Cabbage, collard greens, squash, tomatoes and more grow there. Even the cinder block cavities serve as miniature beds. Many contain marigolds to keep bugs away, although aphids have already done a number on the cabbage.

A grant from the Cleveland Foundation helped get it built. Water for the garden comes from four barrels that collect storm runoff from the adjacent building. Thomas plans to use the garden to promote better nutrition, even giving some of the produce to her patients.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, sisters Jessica and Emmy Levine have a more commercial proposition on their hands.

They already have two traditional gardens, one on the West Side of Cleveland and the other in Avon, and sell their produce at the Tremont Farmers Market on Saturdays. But this year they have added an asphalt garden.

A couple of feet of wood chips blanket a portion of the lot. A layer of cardboard and newspaper separates the chips from straw, organic matter and topsoil. Eventually the sisters hope to have more than a half-acre in vegetables.

The Levines were inspired to look in the city by another asphalt gardener, Meagen Kresge, who along with two partners has started a plot on the West Side. Kresge said she even hopes to raise chickens at her site, using their droppings as fertilizer.

The Levines pay a small fee to the Goodrich-Gannett Neighborhood Center to use the Stanard Avenue lot and will soon have their own metered water connection. At the moment, they have to extend a hose about 300 feet through a neighbor’s back yard to get water from Goodrich-Gannett.

Ultimately, they hope their passion for growing things will allow them to do it full time.

Idle lands

“It’s a different way to kind of think about vacant, idle land,” said Brad Masi, executive director of the New Agrarian Center in Oberlin.

Among its programs is the federally funded City Fresh community food project, which helps bring locally grown produce into the inner city. Small, who likes to wear his 10-year-old dreadlocks in a heap on top of his head, is a coordinator for City Fresh.

On a recent hot, steamy afternoon, Small took several teenagers working for the City Fresh youth program to help Thomas at her garden on Ridge Road. They painted a picnic table and hauled water in 5-gallon buckets from rain barrels nearby. Others were assigned to aphid patrol, smushing the tiny gray-brown dots on the leaves where they were feasting.

At one point Thomas showed Shammiah Reed, 7, who was there with her mother, Victoria, how to pluck collard greens.

“Your mom needs a lot to make a pot,” she said, “so snap off a bunch.”

Holly Harlan, president of Entrepreneurs for Sustainability, believes the asphalt gardens could be the precursor to even more sophisticated agriculture in the city, such as energy-efficient greenhouses, but that means figuring out how they can be supported.

“I don’t have the answer,” she said. “That’s why we have to attract more people with a business mindset to these challenges.”