It all started with a single homegrown radish.
"There were six kids in this apartment next door to us, and they always hung out in the backyard all the time," said Catherine Mardosa '03, who founded Red Planet Vegetables, an urban farm operation dedicated to bringing fresh, local and chemical-free produce to Providence residents.
"They saw me pull a radish and rinse it off and eat it, and they were disgusted," she said.
"They were so revolted that I had taken something out of the ground and put it in my mouth."
Mardosa's desire to engage the curiosity of the children in her neighborhood and educate them about where food comes from inspired her to grow beyond her backyard garden.
Along with her partner Matt Tracy, Mardosa began gardening in a neighbor's backyard in Providence's West End. Currently in its sixth year of operation, the local organization has expanded from its humble roots to harvesting year-round from urban plots and an acre of farmland in Johnston. It sells the vegetables it grows to local restaurants, the Armory Park Farmers' Market in the West End of Providence and local residents in shares.
Sowing seeds
Besides the kids next door, Mardosa said the West End's urban environment also inspired her and Tracy to begin farming in Providence. Tracy and Mardosa had bought a house in the West End surrounded by litter-strewn vacant lots. Both had kept gardens before their move and wanted to use gardening to transform the urban landscape.
"We saw so much possibility," Mardosa said.
The operation's name came to Mardosa and Tracy as a result of a very different sort of experiment — the Mars Rover landings in 2004. Mardosa said they used to sit in their backyard at night and look at Mars while they talked about starting the farm. They remembered that the Roman deity had once been a god of agriculture before he was changed into a god of war.
"It was the beginning of the war (in Iraq), and we were just thinking that we could make people think … about agriculture instead of war," Mardosa said.
Red Planet Vegetables officially began that year in a neighbor's backyard and in a hay field in North Rehoboth, Mass. Mardosa has avoided tractor farming because of the vehicles' dependence on fossil fuels, she said, so she and Tracy purchased hand tools and a roto-tiller to turn the earth and set to work.
Starting a farm from scratch created a unique set of challenges and opportunities, Mardosa said, citing their ongoing attempts to try new methods of growing their vegetables.
"We don't have a sense of how it's supposed to work, so we just try to use what we've got and borrow things and build things," she said.
Since 2004, the organization has changed locations frequently. It maintains two urban plots, growing perennials such as berries, asparagus and herbs, but the vast majority of its produce is now grown on a 1.5-acre plot in Johnston. Located on a farm owned by the Mathewson family since 1780, the suburban plot has offered Mardosa and Tracy more space to grow but has also set them outside the urban community they intended to serve.
"I loved it when I could spend more of my days in the neighborhood talking to the people that walked by," Mardosa said, "but it makes a lot more sense to have a piece of land big enough to grow for enough people."
A growing movement
Over the past few months, Laura Brown-Lavoie '10.5 has learned just how much "enough" is. Twice a week, she bikes to Mardosa's house in Providence, rides out to the Mathewson farm and spends about five hours harvesting parsley, radishes, lettuce, greens, beets and carrots.
"I don't know if you can imagine how much 17 pounds of salad is," she said about a recent harvest.
Brown-Lavoie's interest in farming began last fall, when she took a semester off and traveled in France through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms network.
Although her decision to "WWOOF" began as a way to see the country, Brown-Lavoie said that when she returned for the spring semester, she realized how much she missed working on a farm.
She began working with City Farm, a project run by the Southside Community Land Trust. Over the summer, she spent Tuesdays and Thursdays working with Mardosa for Red Planet Vegetables. Brown-Lavoie said she found growing food in the city fulfilling, so she created an independent study project that allowed her to continue working twice a week this semester.
While Brown-Lavoie has volunteered her time, most of the people who work in the fields with Mardosa and Tracy participate in Red Planet Vegetables' Community Supported Agriculture, a business model in which members pay for a share of vegetables in advance and then receive a portion of each week's produce. Red Planet Vegetables' CSA members also contribute a given number of hours to working on the plots.
After being impressed by Mardosa's and Tracy's produce at the Armory market, Sarah Bernstein '04.5 participated in the farm's winter CSA and joined its inaugural summer CSA this year.
"They're being innovative in how they structure it and trying to be in conversation with the members of the CSA as much as possible," she said.
Over the course of the summer season, Bernstein said she helped harvest three or four times. Like Brown-Lavoie, on each harvest Bernstein dedicated the better part of the day to picking and preparing vegetables — including arugula, parsley, herbs, greens and squash.
In addition to receiving her share of the produce, Bernstein said she also benefited from Mardosa's knowledge about growing plants.
"That was an added incentive to me as a gardener and a curious person who wants to know more about the food that I eat," Bernstein said.
Farming for the future
Sunday afternoon found the Mathewson plot drenched in November sunlight. Rows of lettuce and greens peeked out from the soil, their leafy heads covered in dew droplets. Nearby, Tracy worked on building the metal hoop house that will allow Red Planet Vegetables to continue to grow its produce through the winter. The bulk of these vegetables will end up being served in local restaurants. In turn, scraps from some of those restaurants will become compost, like the heaps Brown-Lavoie has helped build at City Farm.
Brown-Lavoie said she appreciates being able to participate in this cycle of growth and re-use.
"Citizens of cities have to stop assuming that what we need will be brought to us," she said. "We have to grow our own food."
