Thursday, August 14, 2003

By Virginia Phillips

Organic farmer Barb Kline lifts a clod of earth from the furrow she has just tilled. She presses the dirt in her palm, where it squishes like over-moistened pie dough. "Too wet to plow. We are really behind with the rain."

	Three kinds of peas are among the crops grown at Mildred's Daughters' Urban Farm, a five-acre organic plot, run by Barb Kline and Randa Shannon, that is tucked into Stanton Heights. (John Beale, Post-Gazette) Women of the fields: Second of three parts: Greens machine: Carnegie woman was ahead of the organic trend(07/31/03) The changing face of farming A different approach to production

It was a sopping spring, and little relief would come for many weeks.

Mother Nature can be unmotherly. But Kline, 49, and her partner, Randa Shannon, 54, have no regrets over the exhilarating move they made five years ago, which transformed them from contented backyard gardeners to real, if almost accidental, organic farmers in less than a week's time.

Their story places them in the midst of one of the rare growth sectors in agriculture -- women who own or manage small farms.

Making them rarer still, their farm nestles in city ZIP code 15201 in the heart of the residential neighborhood of Stanton Heights. Theirs may be the last remaining farm in the city of Pittsburgh. It has been farmed continuously for 80 years.

Ask directions, even a few blocks from the five-acre plot, and see how few Pittsburghers are aware that the farm exists.

Despite their low profile, Kline and Shannon are recognized organic market gardeners -- familiar faces at the East Liberty Farmers' Market and, until this season, at the Highland Park market. They've pulled up stakes at Highland Park to launch an organic market on Thursdays at the Union Baptist Church at Stanton and Negley avenues, a few blocks from the farm.

The women's vest-pocket operation, hemmed in on three sides by neat city houses, circa 1940s and '50s, features a back-porch view that swoops down to Lawrenceville's busy Butler Street and to the hills beyond.

In their own short tenure, Kline and Shannon have learned a lot about engaging nature in a serious way.

They battle flea beetles, fend animals off tender growth and wrestle with what Shannon calls "sequencing," the timing of crop succession.

Each season they have been able to bring to market more heirloom produce, cut flowers and ornamental plants for drying. Despite this year's slow start, they will harvest five kinds of lettuce, three of peas, and radishes, potatoes, chard, carrots and beets in usual and unusual colors.

For future harvests, they planted blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, cranberries and lingonberries. They hope to coax existing peach and black walnut trees, peonies and wild foxglove to bear market crops, too.

Over a lunch of fresh herb pasta and an egg salad made nearly orange with the bright yolks of the farm's pasture-based eggs, Kline shows off her "market book." This is a loose-leaf "wish book" of crop candidates. Many will appeal to organic shoppers' adventurous streak. There are purple scallions, red okra, apple-green round eggplants that Kline recommends for stuffing and freezing, the Gold Ball turnip for a zesty slaw, and Kline's sentimental favorite, the Catawissa walking onion, a ramp-like plant named after the central Pennsylvania town near Danville where she grew up.

How it happened

Kline and Shannon had been armchair farmers long before they owned a field. Both had families with farms.

Friends for years but with separate lives, the two University of Pittsburgh Medical Center nurse anesthetists shared an interest in organic gardening and alternative health care.

When coincidence ordained that each must seek new living arrangements -- the youngest of Randa's grown children had moved from her four-story house in Highland Park, and Barb's roommate and landlord was transferred out of town -- the two decided to find a place to live together. They wanted space to garden.

"Wait a minute, look at this new listing," their real estate agent said: "Country living in the city, $130,000."

"On a Wednesday," Kline says, "we were standing behind a gate of an 800-foot driveway looking at a farmhouse some three football fields away. On a Thursday, we stepped onto the property. We saw the land. We didn't care about the house as long as it didn't fall down on us. We made a bid. Randa got us an inspection on Friday. We didn't know that a developer bid would also be submitted on Friday. In spite of that, on Friday night our offer was accepted.

"Our jaws dropped. I think the owner, Ray DiCaprio, whose family had farmed the land for 71 years -- his father, Dominic, was profiled at age 89 in a 1983 Post-Gazette story, 'City Farmer, One of the Last' -- was excited that we wanted to keep it a farm.

"Omigod -- I am not an 'immediate' person," says the deliberate Kline, whose heritage is Pennsylvania Dutch.

Drawls the Alabama-born Shannon: "The overgrown property had four dead cars, an old refrigerator and a truck cab on cinder blocks. An asphalt drive sloped from the street to the door, funneling a torrent of water into the basement. It didn't bother me. It just looked like where I came from."

Mildred's Daughters' Urban Farm

Interns Susanna Meyer, left, and Sacha Ottoson-Deal learn about growing eco-friendly food while working at Mildred's Daughters' Urban Farm in Stanton Heights. (John Beale, Post-Gazette)

The partners took title on April Fool's Day, 1999. Shannon wanted to call the place April Fool Farm. When they realized that they each had a mother named Mildred, they opted instead for Mildred's Daughters' Urban Farm.

"We weren't ready that first year," Kline admits. "We didn't know what we'd do."

They got a call from the Mennonite Urban Corps, a voluntary service program of the American Mennonite Church that matches recent college graduates with one-year internships in Pittsburgh's art and social services community.

They said, "Can you use some interns?"

"We were like, yeah," says Kline.

Susanna Meyer, 23, who was graduated from Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Goshen, Ind., with a major in art, English and environmental studies, and Chatham College biology grad Sacha Ottoson-Deal, 24, of Pittsburgh are the latest in that continuing link. Both envision careers related to growing eco-friendly food.

"When we need something, it happens," Kline says.

Kline and Shannon, who divide their time between farming and a nursing job-share, have big plans. They will apply for organic certification this year and are looking into a conservation easement that would ensure the property be farmed forever.

They credit mentors, including organic grower Stephanie Meyers, who leased part of the farm before they bought it. They tap into wellsprings of enthusiasm for organic food and stewardship of the land:

The Urban Farm received a $12,000 USDA National Resources Conservation Service grant to clear overgrowth enabling "forest" gardening, a multi-level approach in which tall trees, mid-size berry bushes and ground-hugging, sun-loving herbs co-exist.

The farm's community advisory board -- professors, lawyers, a city magistrate, specialists in environmental law and education -- weigh in on projects such as a planned solar-heated straw-bale structure. Windows and beams will be scrounged from friends and second-hand suppliers. The building will house interns and environmentally based continuing education classes for teachers.

Volunteers are part of the fabric. "A Mennonite church group drove in from Lancaster," Kline says, "worked, stayed for a cookout and had a little sing." Susanna's dad, Ron Meyer, came from Coshocton County, Ohio, and repaired a roof. Customers call to offer a hand. When help was needed pronto to clear invasive Canadian thistle, a doctor, a fund-raiser, a college professor and a chiropractor donned heavy gloves to tackle the prickly bane of the farmer.

Urban connections. A summer farm party benefits the Union Project, an effort launched by the MennoCorps and taken up by community leaders, to transform the century-old Union Baptist Church into a space to house artists, community projects and the urban farm's market. Student photographers from the Manchester Craftsman's Guild created a calendar of photographs of the farm.

'Crazy women' are going to stay

"As soon as we grew the corn and got the chickens, people said, 'Those two crazy women are staying there, and it really is a farm,' " Kline says.

"This place had been the neighborhood kids' paintball playground for years. We talked to some moms, and the kids made a good adjustment. The day we moved, our neighbor Rose Jevnicar, who has lived here since her father persuaded the city fathers to run the first streetcar up to Stanton Heights, brought over an organic seed catalog and a mum."

Neighbor Jodi Miller, 40, a farm board member, grew up on a street bordering one side of the farm. Miller and her husband are raising their toddlers in a house they bought on the other side. The Char Valley math teacher cites several schoolmates in this close-knit community who did the same. She and her mom, Adrianne Sapir, a retired Pittsburgh Public Schools teacher, help "the girls" ready produce on market days.

No fairy tale

	Sacha Ottoson-Deal, left and Barbara Kline harvest peas to be taken to the market. (John Beale, Post-Gazette)

The partners tend to divide up labor. Kline focuses more on vegetables and farm improvements; Shannon is inclined toward the flowers and herbs, grants and community involvement.

Shannon has two grown sons, one a Cirque du Soleil choreographer in New York, the other the father of her two grandchildren. Her mother, who suffers from dementia, will join the farm household.

Farm work by any definition is unrelenting.

Dark moments came when Randa wrecked her knee after a do-it-yourself move from her big old house to the farm. Also in that first year, too much rain and then drought had Kline sobbing one week when she didn't have enough produce.

Long term, despite support from intern muscle power, the women knew they risked working their own middle-aged bodies into the ground.

This past February, they spent a month in a wellness program that taught them personal resource management, from diet to yoga. They've each lost 30 pounds on a largely vegetarian diet, which has eased the pain in Randa's knee and enabled Barb to get her adult onset diabetes under control with minimal medication.

"We wanted to look as pretty and healthy as our vegetables, to reflect well on them," Shannon says. "We didn't think we were up to their standards."

Kline gives a pat to Chester, one the farm's four pups whom she teaches to have good manners but to be good security dogs.

"People want farms to survive," she says. "We don't really own the land. We are the next generation of stewards of this land.

"To grow really good food in a way that nourishes the earth is our priority."

Virginia Phillips is a Mt. Lebanon-based freelance writer and translator.

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