Green Mind
Most community gardens around the city are planted on spare parcels of land by people who want to raise vegetables for their own tables or by schoolteachers who want to show their students how plants grow. That’s all well and good, but it’s not enough for Dunaetz.
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The 70th Street Farm–named after one of his previous gardens–got off to a modest start last season. Sitting beside a handmade cardboard sign, Dunaetz sold his produce at farmers’ markets in South Shore, Englewood, and Hyde Park. At a fall promotional event for the Celebrity Charity Chair Auction he set up a display of some of his tomatoes that caught the attention of Sarah Stegner, a noted chef at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. “His tomatoes were gorgeous,” she says. “I asked Neil if he sold to restaurants. He said he was just getting started. I gave# him a call in a couple months, and we struck a deal.” So far this year Dunaetz has sold her speckled baby romaine lettuce, Japanese turnips, and green scallions with red bulbs. “They’re so sweet,” she says, adding that she’s looking forward to the tomatoes, which will start coming in mid-July.
This year he’s growing 30 kinds of tomatoes, with names like pineapple, brandywine, and big beef. Their vines are already winding up 12-foot stakes, to his unabashed delight. He’s also growing, among other things, melons, eggplant, potatoes, peas, greens, carrots, beets, onions, lettuce, chives, and chard.
As it worked out, Hauswald kept her garden, an adult group home and some neighbors took other plots, and Dunaetz started his market garden on the remaining quarter acre. He planted winter rye that fall and turned it under in the spring to enrich the soil. He also started plants from seed on cafeteria trays in his sunny apartment. When he could work the soil, he started digging the beds, all with hand tools–a spade, shovel, mattock, and wheelbarrow–and all by himself. “It takes 12 to 14 backbreaking hours to dig a bed,” he says, “and I did 38 last year.”
Stegner is enthusiastic about the idea. “This is an idea that everyone at some point thinks of when walking by a empty lot. But who has the knowledge or the will to pull it off?”
