Birth of a Food Forest

"A successful community welcomes and rewards

more than one kind of person. Diverse residents support themselves

and enrich one another's lives with different talents."

-Jeremy Smith in Growing a Garden City

On My Birthday, No Less!

I'm crazy excited, super stoked. Today was my birthday, and I gave myself a present; I went to visit the library for the very first installment of ...drumroll... a series on Sustainable Living! It wouldn't have mattered how they advertised, but the picture of a chicken coop with a cat perched on top sold me. Immediately.

Here was the blurb on FB:
Have you ever raised chickens or rabbits in your backyard? Have a bee hive in your yard? If you want to learn more be at the New Haven Branch at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 18. This is the first in a series on Sustainable Living.

Local Spotlight: Young Urban Homesteaders

I really admire how young these two food-growers are!  People in my city are becoming more and more interested in learning how to grow produce in their yards, or are seeking out food that has been grown organically within the city. It is so wonderful watching this growth and enthusiasm as it takes off!

Young Urban Homesteaders create ecosystem in their backyard in the Wells Street Corridor near downtown Fort Wayne

More…

Urban gardeners sell goods at Fort Wayne area markets

By Jaclyn Goldsborough of The News-Sentinel

Friday, August 16, 2013 - 8:18 am

For 24-year-old Philippe Carroll and 23-year-old Samantha Arney, growing a large urban garden next to their home on their double lot in the Wells Street Corridor near downtown Fort Wayne is more than just a way to make extra money, it's a way of life. It's a way of feeling connected to the Earth and to their community.

Carroll and Arney are the owners of Young Urban Homesteaders and part of a growing trend of the farm-to-fork food movement and the grow-food-not-lawns agricultural movement. Status, titles and trends are not important to this young couple, however.

What is important is building a sustainable ecosystem and selling the best product to Fort Wayne market shoppers.

The Homesteaders offer everything from chard and kale to okra and kahlrabi. They also sell handmade herbal teas with herbs from the garden.

While prices vary for each different market item, the Homesteaders also offer a unique pricing system: prices are a suggested donation.

“We want to make it available to anyone,” Carroll said. “If you are used to paying for more your food at certian places then you are more than welcome to pay more and pay what you are used to. If you are used to paying less you are welcome to pay less to have access to food. But we also need to stay afloat,” he said.

When they first moved to their home in November, they noticed two apple trees and a peach tree. Carroll said they began to build their farm around the existing fruit trees.

In their garden, everything is connected and strategically placed. The sunflowers are planted above the lettuce to maximize space and protect each other from the elements to provide the ideal growing condition. The young two farmers have a wealth of knowledge. From planting to ways to reuse waste, most everything is considered.

The Homesteaders also develop their own black gold fertilizer, creating their own compost and even cultivating their own worms.

Everything that comes out of the soil or the beds goes back into it one way or another.

Arney said while they have only been selling for a few months, so far they are getting a lot of support from the community.

“Just for people to be able to see that we can grow food in a small place and actually get it to people - it's inspiring to people. It's a way to do what we love and make a living off of it. It's also a way to show other people that this is possible. We have neighborhood kids that started coming around and they have taken to it and they love it,” Arney said.

Georgina Balestra, Carroll's grandmother, grew up on a farm in Cuba. She said she is proud of what he is doing.

She said she was wondering about how much he could really grow in such a small area, but she said she is extremely impressed.

"He has always been interested in nature. I'm learning a lot from him," she said. "It's the satisfaction of not only doing something for yourself, but doing something for others."

Carroll said he is on a mission to live with less impact in a high density environment.

“When it came down to it I was thinking, 'What do I want to do with my day? What do I want to do with my daily energy?' There's something I really enjoy about putting my daily energy - I get my exercise - into growing food which then sustains me and it sustains my community,” Carroll said.

The Young Urban Homesteaders set up a stand at the Fort Wayne Farmers Market from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesdays at One Summit Square. They also appear at the West Main Street Farmers Market from 3 to 8 p.m. on Friday's at 1938 West Main St. They accept credit and debit card.

For more information on the Young Urban Homesteaders, the Fort Wayne Farmer's Market and the Historic West Main Street Farmers Market visit their Facebook page.

Students Grow and Donate Over 100 Pounds of Food

Students in the Study Garden Club sort and weigh some of their harvest to donate to the local food bank

Winter is firmly here; the sweet memories of warm weather, green grass, and a thriving garden are becoming more distant. Though new excitement comes along with snow (snow angels and subsequent snow ball fights, followed by hot cocoa indoors), the nostalgia of running out to the garden, sans shoes and socks, can hit hard. Especially for kids; a month might as well be a year--a whole winter seems a lifetime!

Will summer ever come back? To keep the memory alive, it's fun to look back at the previous growing season. Not just our own fun pictures (of which we have hundreds), but also pictures of what other people have grown.

I found this series of pictures on Facebook, and was utterly thrilled. The school, Study Elementary, is in our school system. I've driven past Study hundreds of times, but have never visited--though now I'm so fascinated by the work of the Garden Club that I'm pondering: how odd would it be for a stranger to request a visit during the growing-garden months? 

The coolest thing about the Study Garden Club is this: The club set a goal to grow and donate 100 pounds of food to our local food bank. When they tallied up their totals, they had surpassed the goal; 114 pounds of fresh produce had made its way to Community Harvest food bank. What an amazing success! I looked and found that a local newspaper noted the donation here, at this link.

Every school should have a garden, and a Garden Club with active membership.  Enjoy these pictures of Study Garden Club. My little crew of gardeners and I loved seeing what Study's students grew, and can't wait until it's time to get back out and try some new ideas for ourselves. Perhaps we will even try our hand at growing a cotton plant (as you'll see in the following pics, Study did just that) this upcoming season! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the fresh tomatoes donated to Community Harvest

Sprouting an Urban Farm

Hey, Fort Wayne folks! Right here in our neck of the woods, Matt and Ann Merritt are attempting to accomplish exactly what I feel like the future needs for our food production. Kudos to their hard work. I plan to visit their booth at our new year-round farmer's market that gathers every first Saturday of the month (see details here), and begin to get to know them. I especially like that as they searched for land, they were dedicated to finding a space that would be accessible to urban and suburban areas, even though they could have found a more rural property. When I picture the future of locally grown food, I see this! I'm so very excited to see real people putting into action all of my ideals!

Photos by Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette

Matt Merritt tours his greenhouse at ATOM Acres. The Merritt family grows vegetables and herbs to sell locally.

Published: November 11, 2012 3:00 a.m.

Sprouting an urban farm

Couple hopes to expand operation with CSA, classes

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

Merritt checks his kale for bugs in the greenhouse.

Merritt carves away the comb to harvest his honey.

Matt Merritt, wife, Ann, and sons Trace and Oliver plant kale in the greenhouse at ATOM Acres.

Matt Merritt is standing inside his kitchen on a recent sunny, if chilly, October morning. A beehive, honey dripping from honeycombs, lies in partial disassembly on and under his family’s round oak table.
Merritt pulls out a shelf and starts scraping the caps off one of the combs. Then he’ll place the rack in a hand-cranked centrifuge to extract the honey – a job, he says, that his blonde-haired 3-year-old son, Oliver, likes to “help” with.
“This is our sugar. Well, we sometimes use regular sugar, but we also use this,” the 30-year-old says. “It’s great stuff, because it smells so great.”
His wife, Ann, 26, smiles, while crocheting on a step nearby while the couple’s second son, Trace, 1, naps in another room. “Matt comments all the time about the smell. He says he likes the job because he smells like honey afterward.”
Yes, to Matt and Ann, this is the sweet life – life on what they hope will become a sustainable urban farm.

They call their nearly 6-acre patch of ground at the corner of Bass and Thomas roads ATOM Acres, an acronym made from the initials of family members’ first names.
From their land – across from a housing development and around the corner and down the street from a major local shopping strip – the Merritts plan to provide year-round vegetables, herbs, flowers and other products to area residents – while educating them about food production and preservation.
“This is everything that I thought that I’d need,” says Matt, who came to farming after a stint as a helper to a personal chef in Chicago made him curious about where the high-quality ingredients he was using came from. “Everything,” he says, “just felt right.”
Nonetheless, the two acknowledge theirs is a long row to hoe.
For now, after being able to purchase the land with the help of Matt’s mom and stepfather, Bobbi and Jerry Suetterlin of Fort Wayne, they’ve started with what growers call a hoop house – a plastic sheeted greenhouse – that Matt found at a public sale.
Inside, rows of beds are sprouting spinach, kale, Swiss chard and several kinds of leaf lettuce ready for harvest. The produce will be sold at the year-round farmers market at Parkview Field that is open the first Saturday of each month.
There are also several kinds of herbs and tiny pea vines that will be planted outdoors in the spring – and a germ chamber for sprouting seeds.
On the grounds, about 2 1/2 acres of which are tillable, Matt has eight beds for other vegetables, including broccoli and cabbage now, and tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other produce next year.
His goal, he says, is not just to sell at farmers markets, but to start a community-sponsored agriculture program, or CSA. He’s not quite sure what form it will take – “Winter is a good time for mapping that out,” he says.
But it likely will involve recruiting shareholders who will pay an entry fee and would determine at least in part what foods they’d like to receive.
Still in its earliest stages is converting an existing equipment garage into a facility where produce could be sold – with a kitchen where food could be preserved and classes given.
If all that sounds idealistically lofty, Matt says, well, it is. But he and Ann, who met in a health foods shop when both were living in Hawaii – “I overcharged him for peanut butter one day, so he remembered me,” she says with a smile – also come to the task with a well-suited background.
After working with the chef, Matt went on to study organic farming in a nine-month program at Michigan State University, commuting weekly to East Lansing, Mich., while Ann lived with his parents. There, he learned to manage a hoop house and flower fields, as well the business of structuring and marketing a CSA.

He says with the amount of land he has, and only a slightly larger growing space, the university program supported a 160-member CSA, farmers markets and wholesale sales. “That’s a lot of food,” he says.
Ann grew up on a 400-acre ranch cooperative in Washington, where dairy cows, pigs, goats, chickens, sheep and horses were raised. She says she started gardening, growing “strawberries, potatoes and petunias” at the age of 9.
Later, she lived in Florida and worked for a tree farm and plant nursery while taking botany and related courses at a community college. She says she knew when she met Matt that their goals and experiences meshed.
After leaving Michigan State, Matt tried helping friends raise chickens on a farm for a time. But when his parents said they wanted to help him farm on his own, he started looking for a suitable property.

“We looked everywhere – Waterloo, Syracuse, Bluffton, Avilla. We looked at a place in Leo. We wanted to be within close driving range of markets,” he says. “That’s the problem with famers – they’re not where the people are.”
The land they found was a fluke. It seems as if the land should be within city limits. But it’s actually in Wayne Township and zoned residential/rural agriculture. Other conventional crop lands lie nearby.
By going to farmers’ markets this summer, he’s been building an online newsletter subscription list that he hopes will become a customer base.

“One of our biggest goals,” he adds, “is to have heirloom varieties of vegetables that are beautiful and different,” he says, adding he’d someday like to start another Michigan State idea – “an edible forest” of fruit and nut trees.

“The whole idea is to get back to local food – food that hasn’t sat in a truck for a week and in the store for a week. We need to get out of the industrial revolution mindset when it comes to food that bigger is better. It can be useful in some ways, but maybe it’s not the safest way or the most economical way,” he says.
“Maybe we all need to eat more like farmers eat.”

rsalter@jg.net

Growing the Garden Season--Practical Model of a Suburban Garden

I read this article over a week ago when it was published in my local Sunday paper, and I keep thinking about it, for a few reasons:

1). This guy has come up with some really nice raised garden beds. I love his idea of lining the inside with insulation to keep the beds at a nice temperature--not too hot in summer, not too cold in winter. I would like to try building a couple of beds like his.

2). He has tips for extending the growing season all winter long.

3). Though it's not stated specifically in the article, the photo of the spacing of his plants demonstrates the biointensive method of planting, which I am very interested in.

4). This is a little more abstract, but I really love the pictures in the article because it shows the gardener's property pretty well, and it's obvious he lives in a typical suburban neighborhood. Not a sprawling country acre, but a standard-sized suburban lot. I find this very encouraging. As we face food shortages and the probability that people will have to start growing food, it's nice to have good models of how it can be done, in every situation and property size. 

Photos by Swikar Patel | The Journal Gazette

Seed templates made from old truck tire flaps help Arthur Stahlhut make the most of the planting space at his Fort Wayne home.

Published: October 14, 2012 3:00 a.m.

Growing the garden season

Raised beds, covers help enthusiasts harvest all year

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

Raised beds outfitted with hoop frames can be covered with agricultural cloth and function as mini-greenhouses in Stahlhut’s backyard.

Holes drilled in a diagonal pattern allow the master gardener to space plants four inches or six inches apart.

When most area gardeners are readying their vegetable beds for a long winter’s nap, long-time master gardener Art Stahlhut was out in his garden pointing out his newly sprouting lettuce.
If things go according to plan, say Stahlhut and his gardening partner, Karen Fecher, both of Fort Wayne, the garden will have the same outcome as last year.
“I had the most beautiful fresh lettuce mix for my Thanksgiving table,” Fecher says.
Stahlhut believes in extending the season for vegetable growing – which usually means he harvests something in virtually every month of the year except January.
This year he’ll have tomatoes on the vine well into October and lettuce, spinach, onions and carrots well into November. Last year, with the mild temperatures, he pulled plump red radishes and harvested romaine lettuce the first week in December.
Stahlhut says he doesn’t fight Mother Nature – he just plays to her gentler side so plants get what they need, whatever the calendar says.
His secret, he says, is growing veggies in eight raised beds, which he designed and built himself, and covering them when appropriate with hoop frames to create mini-greenhouses.
He’s refined his techniques over the years, with his most recent beds consisting of a frame made with sturdy two-by-fours to stand about 20 inches tall. There’s no real reason for the exact height, he says, “except I have bad knees.” Twenty inches gives enough room for root development while alleviating the need to have to kneel to cultivate, weed or harvest, he says.
The bottom of each bed is lined with wire mesh with landscape fabric on top of it, “to keep critters out,” Stahlhut says. The sides are filled in with 16-inch-square patio tiles two inches thick.
The sides are then lined with thin foam insulation sheets and then even thinner sheets of metal flashing to keep in warmth. The metal also makes tilling with a small roto-tiller possible without tearing up the insulation, he says.
Beginning in early fall, he adds to some of the beds what gardeners call “hoops” – curved arches made of metal wire or conduit pipe that are covered with translucent agricultural cloth.
Stahlhut, who helped create raised beds for vegetables at the demonstration garden outside the office of the Purdue Extension Service at IPFW, says the raised beds allow him to control the soil composition and temperature.
He uses layers of grass clippings and shredded paper and horse manure for the bottom half, and swears by a mixture of one-third peat, one-third compost and one-third sphagnum for the top. He calls it the “lasagna method” because of the layers.
“Art makes the most wonderful soil mix,” Fecher says. “It’s fluffy and light, and you don’t have to deal with the (northeast Indiana) clay.”
He makes his own compost in one of the raised beds. “We don’t use synthetic fertilizer,” he says, adding that he doesn’t pull out tomato plants at the end of the season, only cuts them down to encourage worm action in the soil.
Another of Stahlhut’s secrets is intensive planting. To get more out of his small spaces, he has made seed templates from, believe it or not, old truck tire flaps into which he’s drilled two sizes of holes for even seed placement. He also occasionally intercrops.
“The rule of thumb is you can feed a family of four from a garden the size of a two-car garage. Well, we only use half that size, but we use every square inch of it,” he says.
As for tools, Stahlhut says a thermometer that reads both high and low temperatures is essential, especially at each end of the growing season.
So is keeping a close eye on the coverings, because the soil can quickly get too warm even in cool weather and “fry the plants,” he says. They’re held to the hoops with giant clothespins, so they’re easily removable.
Fecher says covering crops keep them warmer in the spring and fall and shades them in the summer. She says they saved a lot of lettuce from bolting when the weather turned quickly hot this year. Last week, after temperatures dipped to freezing, the cover raised the ambient temperature to 65 degrees with a couple of hours of sunlight.
Stahlhut doesn’t use plastic to cover his plants but does use a conventional cold frame with plastic sides and top.
The pair has been selling lettuce and other veggies at the Historic Main Street and South Side Farmers Market.
“We want to get more into production. Right now we can’t grow it fast enough. We’d sell out every time,” Fecher says.
Stahlhut says he travels to regional gardening meetings and festivals, reads a lot and watches gardening videos to get ideas and learn new approaches. Two favorites videos are “Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan” by Homeplace Earth and “Growing Greens for Love and Money” by Susan Moser.
But mostly he likes to experiment – whether it’s growing different varieties of garlic or planting peanuts in a bed under the lamp post in his front yard.
“It’s always a work in progress,” he says.

rsalter@jg.net

 © Copyright 2012 The Journal Gazette. All rights reserved. Neither this material nor its presentation may be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Local Project: Helping Others Grow Food

I think this is just awesome! What a creative way to raise needed funds for Fort Wayne's refugee initiatives. I was surprised and excited to learn that 5 1/2 acres have been set aside for raised garden beds by Autumn Woods, an apartment complex housing many Burmese families. I'm glad Fort Wayne is recognizing the importance of growing food, and hope the projects keep coming.

Abigail Kopen and Tony Henry of Deer Park Irish Pub put together an Irish-themed wheelbarrow of cabbage and Brussels sprouts as a fundraiser for the World on Wheels Garden Project.

Wheelbarrows for good cause

Money raised to help gardens of local refugees

Published: May 20, 2012 3:00 a.m.

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

When it comes to public art contests, Fort Wayne has had giant decorated sneakers and smaller-than-life-size decorated mastodons.

“Now it’s time for wheelbarrows,” says Hollie Chaille.

This summer, Chaille is spearheading the World on Wheels (W.O.W.) Garden Project. The project is enlisting artists, gardeners, businesses, churches and community groups to raise money to continue gardening and urban farming initiatives for local refugees.

The idea, she says, is for groups or individuals to plant an appropriately decorated 6-cubic-foot wheelbarrow with plants used in the cuisine of one of the countries or ethnic groups represented in Fort Wayne.

Decorated wheelbarrows will go on display for viewers’ votes at Fort Wayne’s Taste of the Arts festival on Aug. 25. Plant-filled wheelbarrows will be displayed during events and at various locations around downtown beginning Sept. 7.

The wheelbarrows will then be auctioned to the highest bidder at the International Blast Festival Sept. 29. Winners of the design competition also will be announced that day.

Chaille, director of Catherine Kasper Place, which coordinates refugee integration activities, says nine sponsors have been recruited so far. Cuisines include Burmese, Filipino, Irish, Scottish, Greek, she says; Middle Eastern and Bosnian groups have indicated interest.

The project has room for 30 participants, and organizers would like to see nations such as Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, China, Japan and India represented.

“You should be able to go on a tour of world cuisines just by touring these W.O.W. gardens,” Chaille says.

Chaille says the need to raise money for refugee efforts comes because two federal grants amounting to about $150,000 may soon end.

One provides money for job readiness and training while another, through the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program, has been supporting gardening and small-scale farming by refugees.

This year, about 26 people are participating, mostly refugees from Myanmar, formerly Burma. About a dozen of them are growing specialty vegetables to be sold at existing city farmers markets.

Last year, refugee growers sold at specialty produce markets at the Women, Infants and Children office parking lot on Calhoun Street, but they were discontinued this year because of construction of a garage, Chaille said.

The initative this year is also consolidating plots for raised bed gardens on 5 1/2 acres on city property adjacent to Autumn Woods named Victoria Acres. Many Burmese families live in Autumn Woods.

Chaille says the deadline for those interested in sponsoring or planting a wheelbarrow is Friday to give plants time to grow or germinate from seed.

Sponsorships are available at two levels – $500, which includes signage and recognition, and $1,500, which includes enhanced opportunities for advertising, an invitation to a Farm-to-Table celebration Sept. 30 and the option to keep the wheelbarrow. The Farm-to-Table event will feature ethnic dishes made from crops grown by Victoria Acres refugee farmers.

She says she hopes groups interested in putting together a wheelbarrow will team up with restaurants or other businesses or non-profits for sponsorships, and those interested in sponsoring can be teamed up with a group by organizers.

Wheelbarrows can be designed by a participating individual group or by a participating artist, Chaille says.

Groups, with their artist, will receive a free table at International Blast, she says, and selected designers will be eligible for a $50 stipend for materials. A limited amount of free plant material also may be available, Chaille adds.

The project is also recruiting master gardeners or other gardeners to assist groups in picking plants and teach planting and growing techniques, she says.

The deadline for participating designers to submit a proposal is June 22. A kickoff event at which sponsors, participating groups and artists can meet will take place July 28.

Chaille says the events spotlight Fort Wayne’s diversity and refugees’ continuing needs.

“These grants only support services within a certain limited time frame, and we focus on integration, and that takes longer than a specific small window of time that a grant would allow us. All the services we provide – mental health, establishing employment, child development – are ongoing so we need to keep funding them,” Chaille says.

“After all, we’re all refugees from somewhere.”

rsalter@jg.net

© Copyright 2012 The Journal Gazette. All rights reserved. Neither this material nor its presentation may be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

For original link click here

20 Weeks of CSA

I cannot believe how quickly my first CSA (Coummunity Supported Agriculture) share passed me by! Back in April, when I paid for a twenty-week share of produce, the weeks seems to stretch out in front of me like a lovely dream. I looked forward to almost half a YEAR of weekly pickups of fresh, local, organically grown food.

Just like all things in life, the time slipped through my fingers, and my 'summer share' came to an end. All through the summer months and early fall we had some amazing food! I have long prided myself in being a true veggie lover, but there were things I tasted that I had never even heard of before my CSA experience. Daikon radish, sorrel, and lemon balm, for example. I scoured the internet and the CSA cookbook the farmer gave me for tips and recipes. As a family we learned to love some new flavors, and as a daycare teacher I was able to share some new foods. (The biggest success by far was the kohlrabi...no one around here can resist the unique crunch!)

Each Thursday night when I got home with my goodies, I set them up on the kitchen table and snapped a photo. Which, to anyone in my family, doesn't seem the slightest bit odd. I do love my photos. "Oh, mom is standing on a chair taking photos of strategically placed vegetables? Yeah, what else is new?"

So, here are the photos of our 20 weeks of colorful, tasty produce. I can't wait to buy a share next spring!

Permanent Local Farmer's Market? I hope so!

Along with my weekly CSA bundles, which I look forward to every Thursday, I have started checking out Fort Wayne's various farmer's markets. Just a few years ago, we only had one of them, and I never went--I simply was not interested. Things have changed A LOT in a few years, for the city and for me. The city has gained at least 10 markets (click here)., and I have gained a new found interest in local food and farmers! I love that the city is growing in this area just as I'm becoming passionate about it.

It's been so fun to meet local growers and crafters, and to fill my bags with fresh produce each time I visit a market. I've found that the prices are comparable to the produce at the grocery store (actually, sometimes cheaper). The more locations Fort Wayne has, the more accessible the food is to everyone--and once people realize how affordable it is, the potential for our local food movement to grow is huge. I have thought about how nice it would be to have a year-round market, like those in the cities of warmer states, but I realize that our local climate has a limited growing season. It seemed like just a wistful daydream.

Well, apparently I'm not the only dreamer. I am beyond thrilled to know that a permanent farmer's market is definitely being talked about by the city. Here is the article, fresh from this morning's paper. I have to say, I was discouraged to read that our city consumes 1.78 times the national average of fast food, and even more discouraged to admit to my readers that I still occasionally contribute to that statistic. Yes, we still eat fast food. And plenty of processed junk still lines our shelves. However, we have seriously cut back on fast food, and we've felt our desire for it lessen even more. We have worked hard to find ways to avoid the processed junk, as well. It's happened in increments as we've learned more about what we eat. I fully believe that many other people are starting to feel the same way. I believe a permanent market will draw in a lot of business, and start generating interest in more people who are not yet aware how affordable and delicious it is to support local growers. I see the potential for a lot of other changes in our city's eating habits once we establish such a market.

The Salomon Farm farmers market on Wednesdays during the summer is a draw for residents looking for locally grown produce.

Published: July 22, 2011 3:00 a.m.

Cathie Rowand | The Journal Gazette

Editorials

Worthwhile study

Investigating the economic potential and the appeal of a permanent farmers market downtown is a shrewd move by city leaders, given the overwhelming popularity and increasing number of seasonal markets in Fort Wayne.

Interest in eating locally grown fresh produce is only part of the obvious lure of the markets, which can be found on every day of the week at various locations throughout the city.

Just a few years ago, the only farmers market in town was the South Side Farmers Market, open Saturdays on Warsaw Street. Merely strolling through the markets, viewing the local wares, is a pleasant activity, even if you don't buy anything.

The $30,000 feasibility study from Market Ventures Inc. suggested a year-round farmers market would likely become a downtown attraction.

City development experts deserve credit for taking an analytical and reasoned approach to researching the possibility of such an endeavor.

The Public Market Working Group, led by local residents interested in downtown development, helped ensure the study asked the right questions.

Would having a permanent market downtown detract from the many seasonal markets around the city?

Market Ventures' research confirms that downtown can't support two markets and suggests rolling the Barr Street Market, open only 12 days each year, into the permanent market.

The study recommends a permanent structure that provides vendors with utilities, but suggests starting modestly with potential for growth with market demand.

It also suggested Lawton Park as a promising location. The city park houses several important park department functions, including greenhouses and equipment maintenance and storage. Parks leaders will need to play a significant role in assessing the suitability of using Lawton Park for a permanent farmers market.

The venture would not be without risk. Residents' dietary habits remain appallingly slanted toward cheap and not ideally healthy food.

(A recent Bundle.com survey found that Fort Wayne residents spend 1.78 times the national average on fast food.)

And Indiana has a limited growing season. Would a farmers market be able to offer enough variety of offerings to attract customers throughout the winter?

City leaders also need to determine how the market proposal fits with existing downtown plans and take a closer look at details such as who will own and run the market and, most important, how to pay for it.

Proponents of the farmers market think it could be a good use for a portion of the I&M settlement money and submitted a proposal to the Legacy Fort Wayne task force.

A permanent farmers market is an idea with merit and the feasibility study was an important first. Next comes working out the trickier details.

Link to original article