Raised-beds hoist sustainability in Dudley

By Megan Donovan

ROXBURY – Behind a blue house off Dudley Street, green leaves and yellow flowers have sprouted in the soil of a three-by-eight foot garden. The raised-bed garden is an enclosed frame made out of 2x6 wood filled with compost. By mid-June, the plants, which now look like weeds, will produce strawberries.

These raised-bed gardens are part of The Food Project’s Build-a-Garden plan which encourages residents of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and Jamaica Plain to grow their own food. Nearly every other house in the Dudley neighborhood has some sort of garden bed, and requests for more raised-beds continue. This year, The Food Project plans to construct some 200 garden beds in these neighborhoods.

“Our focus is on food access and helping people grow their own food in Boston,” said Michael Iceland, the outreach coordinator for The Food Project.

The Build-a-Garden initiative began as a response to large amounts of lead in the soil of the Dudley neighborhood. Over time, lead from paint on houses had ran off into the soil, making it dangerous to grow crops.

The solution was a raise-bed garden, made out of four pieces of wood from local sources with a weed mat as a base. The base is then filled with 4 to 6 inches of compost on top of the lead-ridden soil.

Since it began in 2008, the Build-a-Garden project has built more than 400 beds, providing enough food to feed over 700 people.

The Food Project constructs and delivers the beds, along with soil and seedlings at a cost of about $250. The average applicant only pays about $40 for the bed because of the programs “pay what you can” philosophy.

“I think only a couple people have paid in full,” said Danielle Andrews, the community food organizer of The Food Project’s Boston office.

The Food Project began with a few acres of farm land in Lincoln and has since taken up projects in Boston. With the acquisition of 1.6 acres of land off West Cottage Street, granted by the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, the program began to educate locals about agriculture and sustainability. Since then, The Food Project has acquired two more plots of land in Roxbury and has launched a new farm in Lynn, which employs youth in the summer.

The Food Project’s latest community plan is to use another space acquired by the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative as a greenhouse that would cultivate crops to be locally sold year round.

For the time being, the 10,000 square foot greenhouse is being used as a space to build and store more raised-bed gardens.