Urban farming alive and well at site of former Robert Taylor Homes.
It’s one of many lessons Rosenthal has learned in the two years she’s been growing produce at Legends Farm, a training site for urban farmers through the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest program.
Today, where chain-link fences once stood and concrete covered the ground, Legends Farm is alive and green.
Legends Farm supplies produce to restaurants and wholesalers in the Chicago area and provides hands-on training for graduates of Windy City Harvest’s nine-month apprenticeship in sustainable urban farming.
It’s going so well that next year, the farm is scheduled to begin moving just south of where it now stands to a permanent home within the development, says Angela Mason, associate vice president of urban agriculture at Chicago Botanic Garden and head of Windy City Harvest.
Shortly after Windy City Harvest’s apprenticeship program began in 2008, Mason says, students started asking the same question again and again: “We want to start a small farm-could you help us find land?” In 2011, Mason and Kelly Larsen, director of operations at Windy City Harvest, started investigating urban incubator farm programs, visiting locations in Massachusetts, Washington and California.
“Urban farming like this is still in its infancy, and the support that Windy City Harvest gives is unmatched.”
This is an autogenerated summary from a published source: Chicago: When farm to table is just a few blocks away
