The parcel had sat derelict for nineteen years. The city had cited it eleven times. A church three doors down held the deed and no idea what to do with it.
A MEDVETS crew cleared it in two weekends, tested and remediated the soil over a winter, and put in twenty-four raised beds and a high tunnel by the following spring.
Nineteen years everybody walked past it. Two weekends and it fed the whole street. Pastor E. Whitfield, site partner
The site now runs a weekly harvest distribution with no eligibility test and no paperwork — you turn up, you take food. In its second full season it served an average of nine hundred families a week.
Three of the crew who built it have since gone on to run sites of their own.
