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Sharon rolls up her sleeves to get the dirt on urban farming.

Monday Aug 13, 2007.     By Sharon Hoyer

Lifestyle Feed

It's a temperate Saturday morning, a welcome relief to the week of unrelenting high temperatures and humidity. I kneel in a bed of wood chips, yanking a tangle of morning glories from the stout base of a massive sunflower. My friend Khurram crouches over the loamy earth 20 feet away, chatting with another volunteer about her trip to the Boundary Waters to forage for wild edible plants. They're separating inedible weeds from the purslane they cleared to take home for salads and stews. Their conversation is relaxed and sparse; for the most part, everyone remains quietly absorbed in their work. With the rare tranquility of the morning, I forget I'm spitting distance from the Loop.

I am volunteering at City Farm, the two-acre vegetable garden that sits, somewhat incongruously, on the corner of Division and Clybourn, between the bleak monoliths of Cabrini-Green and a strip mall. It's an easy spot to pass over; the hurricane fence encircling the farm could just as easily house a construction site or abandoned land. You might notice the occasional hand-painted sign announcing "Fresh Veggies" or "Real Food Sold Here" (or the title of this article) strung to the fence before the orderly rows of tomatoes behind it.

City Farm has occupied this empty lot since 2002, providing organic produce to the public and several upscale restaurants, as well as jobs and horticultural education to local residents. A handful of paid staff operates the farm, but they welcome volunteers to help with the small-scale, labor-intensive work. About six volunteers turned out this morning; they're scattered across the grounds planting carrots, weeding beets and tucking unruly tomato plants into supports constructed from wooden stakes and twine. I landed the particularly gratifying job of helping Ben, the director of the volunteers, breakdown a sunshade sheltering ready-to-harvest carrots and rebuilding it over a newly seeded bed. Pedestrians on Division pause to watch our progress. A trio of neighborhood girls, no more than eight or nine years old, stops in to ask each volunteer what they're doing and if they can use any help. The girls visit the farm regularly, and Ben keeps them occupied tacking down sprinkler hoses with large metal clips.

Urban agriculture has reached a tipping point in the past few years. Newspaper and magazine articles have cropped up nationwide, marveling at the transformation of empty lots in low-income neighborhoods to sustainable sources of organic food and community activism. City Farm Founder Ken Dunn has actively promoted sustainable living in Chicago for the past 38 years. The farm is but one arm of Dunn's Resource Center, a non-profit dedicated to the use and reuse of resources "both human and material" squandered in big cities. The Resource Center creates the soil used by City Farm at its South Side composting facility, which collects everything from food scraps discarded by grocery stores and commercial kitchens to grass clippings from landscaping companies and horse manure donated by the Chicago Mounted Police. It also supplies the soil to independent gardeners.

City Farm exemplifies the arrow-triangle recycling logo we grew up with: A chef purchases organic produce from a farm located a mile or two from her restaurant, then sends kitchen wastes to a local site for composting to eventually be used for fertilizing new vegetables from the same farm. The Ritz-Carlton Chicago, Frontera Grill and University of Chicago cafeterias participate in the program at either the giving or receiving end.

Want to lend a hand, but not exactly a master gardener? Volunteers of any experience level are welcome. The grade school girls were assigned chores alongside adult volunteers, and I got some advice on the mysterious rot plaguing the bottom of my tomatoes at home. If contributing to a working model of local, organic, community-oriented food production doesn't motivate you to get on your knees and uproot some crabgrass, consider this: A recent study suggests that exposure to dirt may boost the human immune system and trigger serotonin production in the brain, enhancing mood and overall quality of life.

There you have it: cold, hard scientific evidence that playing in the dirt makes you happy.

Volunteers are welcome at the following urban farms in Chicago:

City Farm: E-mail cityfarmchicago@gmail.com, or stop by the farm at 1204 N. Clybourn and ask for one of the farmers.

Openlands Project: Contact Julie Samuels at (312) 863-6256 or jsamuels@openlands.org.

Growing Power: Contact Laurell Sims at (773) 486-6005 laurell@growingpower.org.

It took a move from the regimented lawnscapes of the suburbs to the congestion of a major metropolis for Sharon to look twice at what she puts in the trash, down the sink and into her own body. She reports fortnightly on her endeavors to change "greening" from calculated deviation to a practicable way of life. You can contact her here.