UrbiCulture Community Farms: Mile-High Life-Changing Urban Farming

“I started learn­ing about where food came from and about grow­ing food,” Candice con­tin­ued. “I rented a house up in Idaho and there was this huge back­yard that was full of weeds, and I decided to just start grow­ing food and see what hap­pened. I trans­formed that whole back­yard and put in a gar­den, and it basi­cally changed my life. Eating fresh food from your gar­den is much bet­ter than buy­ing any­thing from the store.”

Candice’s dis­cov­er­ies moti­vated her to share this new­found knowl­edge with oth­ers. “At that point I knew I really needed to know how to grow food, and to edu­cate peo­ple about where food comes from. So I stud­ied hor­ti­cul­ture and envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice in school, and my the­sis project was start­ing a multi-plot urban farm in Denver, Colorado. I was going to school in Boulder and I moved up to Denver. I trans­formed four people’s front yards and back­yards into gar­dens, and they had six com­mu­nity sup­ported agri­cul­ture (CSA) mem­bers. It was the start of this amaz­ing activity.”

That the­sis project was the launch of Candice’s career. Five years later, she’s still doing it, but on a con­sid­er­ably larger scale. UrbiCulture now con­sists of 15 lots being uti­lized through­out Denver for grow­ing, with very sat­is­fied CSA subscribers—so sat­is­fied, in fact, they can’t accom­mo­date them all. The wait­ing list is upward of 80 people.

For the Community

But Candice’s work only begins with the CSAs. Within the main city area of Denver, UrbiCulture took over a piece of land on which they grow pro­duce for low-income residents.

“In down­town Denver we have a 6,500 square-foot dirt lot that we took over and beau­ti­fied and then put in this extra­or­di­nary gar­den,” Candice said. “We farm it; we gar­den it. We have the com­mu­nity come out and they’re a part of plan­ning, plant­ing and weed­ing. We har­vest it so that peo­ple who maybe work and don’t have the time to gar­den, or maybe they don’t want to gar­den or they don’t have access to land to gar­den, can still come and access fresh vegetables.”

Produce from the gar­den, as well as from other plots, is also sold at UrbiCulture’s rather unique farm­stand. “We have what we call a pay-what-you-can farm­stand,” Candice explained. “People come there and they either pay the sug­gested dona­tion price, or they pay more, or they pay what they can, which is usu­ally not very much.

“Something that’s always been close to my heart as a per­son who grew up in a low-income house­hold is, how do we get this good, fresh local food into the hands of the peo­ple that need it and can’t nec­es­sar­ily afford it? This con­flict of food jus­tice and food access is some­thing I really wanted to focus on.”

For the Children

Part of the oper­a­tion of UrbiCulture’s down­town plot involves edu­ca­tion. “We do a lot of children’s pro­grams there,” Candice added. “We hired two high school stu­dents last year who really helped a lot with the farm. We’re going to expand that pro­gram this year.”

Candice has seen to another gar­den in a place that really needs it. “We also have a school gar­den that we grow food on,” she said. “It’s a school in which 95 per­cent of the stu­dents are on reduced-rate lunch, so it’s a very low-income school. We put the gar­den there and they’ve taken it as their own—they grow the food and sell it at the mar­ket. The food goes into the cafe­te­ria as well dur­ing the spring and the fall.”

Click any image to enlarge.

From the Dirt

It hasn’t been easy. There are numer­ous chal­lenges to grow­ing in UrbiCulture’s par­tic­u­lar area.

“We’re in high desert, and it’s def­i­nitely rough soil up here,” Candice said. “It’s just kind of clay and sand. We can’t sim­ply throw a seed down and watch it grow, so we are con­stantly fix­ing the soil. You have to have good soil and good micronutrients—otherwise you’re not going to be able to grow the food in a sus­tain­able method.

“Another thing that’s kind of push­ing against us is we have a short grow­ing sea­son. We start plant­ing in April and begin har­vest­ing in June. Usually our first frost day is the mid­dle of October. It’s kind of like go-go-go-go-go!”

Candice is mostly self-taught in learn­ing to care for this soil—but learn she has. “We grow all of our food sus­tain­ably,” she said. “We don’t use pes­ti­cides, her­bi­cides or any­thing toxic. We’re grow­ing a lot of food in small spaces, so we try to rotate at least three crops through a plot per sea­son. We start with our spring crops, and as soon as those are done we pull them and throw in our sum­mer crops. Then as sum­mer crops are dwin­dling, we pull those and put in our fall crops.”

The Passion

It is obvi­ous Candice is ful­fill­ing a pas­sion­ate pur­pose for her­self, which is made most man­i­fest in watch­ing oth­ers learn. “I love it when peo­ple see where their food comes from,” she con­cluded. “I think that’s still my main key: the fact that when kids are walk­ing through their school gar­den they’re say­ing, ‘Oh my gosh! That’s a car­rot that I eat in my lunch—I can just pull it up and here it is.’ Then find­ing out that they can grow all kinds of dif­fer­ent tomatoes—not just the toma­toes that are in the store that are red and per­fect; there are pur­ple ones and green ones that you can eat that are just so extraordinary.

“I also love the edu­ca­tion of how we need to start chang­ing the way our food is grown, stop using genet­i­cally mod­i­fied seeds and stop using her­bi­cides and pes­ti­cides. They start think­ing about organic, about local and sus­tain­able grow­ing. When I see that light go on in that lit­tle brain and they start con­nect­ing the dots, as a farmer that gives me a lot of pride and it makes me very excited.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.urbiculturecommunityfarms.org.