Tending the concept of urban agriculture
March 9, 2014 Roots of ChangeIt’s not easy being green. Ron Rutherford has been toiling for a year now, trying to sustain a community garden in a vacant lot. Heaped with junk, strewn with hypodermic needles, the dusty plot in Sacramento’s Oak Park was a mess in the autumn of 2012 when he bumped into a couple of neighbors clearing trash there. The neighbors saw blight; Rutherford, a resident of public housing, saw a shot at cheap produce. So they got the lot owner’s permission and on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, they did a communal planting. After a week or two, though, it became clear why so many still view urban agriculture as an oxymoron.