Danielle Marvit, who could fairly be called the tomato maven of Pittsburgh, didn’t hesitate when asked to list her favorites among the dozens of tomato varieties sold as seedlings by the Garden Dreams urban farm in Wilkinsburg, Pa., which shares a border with the state’s second-largest city. The quarter-acre farm, set between vacant Victorian-era houses, specializes in organic seedlings, including heirloom varieties.
“Pink Princess,” said Marvit, the farm’s manager for the past two years, when asked to name her favorite tomatoes. She quickly added another cherry tomato, Sunrise Bumblebee, which is yellow with pink stripes and has a tangy taste. Among slicing tomatoes, Cosmonaut Volkov, a productive heirloom variety from Ukraine, topped her list. Garden Dreams offered 75 to 100 varieties of tomato seedlings and three dozen varieties of peppers this year. Its catalog lists dozens of herbs, vegetables, fruits, and flowers. The farm was started by Mindy Schwartz a decade ago.
“I’m really hopeful” about the future of urban gardening, Marvit, a Pittsburgh native, told reporters who visited the farm while attending the Society of Environmental Journalists convention in Pittsburgh. “Seedlings are our primary business.” The farm holds workshops for home gardeners and does free soil testing. In a region famous for steel production, lead contamination of the soil is a worry.
Raqueeb Bey of the three-year-old Black Urban Gardeners and Farmers of Pittsburgh Co-op (BUGS) described food deserts in Pittsburgh as systemic food apartheid. The Homewood neighborhood in eastern Pittsburgh has 9,000 residents but no supermarket, she told convention attendees. “There are corner stores, but the food isn’t healthy.” Bey began as an urban farmer with a small garden and gradually became an advocate for gardening as a local source of fresh fruit and vegetables and for a farmers’ market to sell the produce. BUGS has a dozen farmer-members.
“I always say growing your own food is the most revolutionary thing you can do,” said Bey.