They're meeting, they're talking, but they're also planting. Although the state of the nation's economy undoubtedly plays a part and has everyone thinking about frugality, this is more. What is happening in and around Racine County now is an extension of what has been known as the Slow Food movement, which began a decade ago in northern Italy and emphasizes the pleasures of high-quality food, and of the recent publication of books calling into question the quality of products produced by the country's food industry. Regardless of origins, it comes down to people putting seeds into soil.

Patti Nagai, horticulture educator with the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Sturtevant, said she has talked to many people about starting community gardens since she started her job in 1998. Interest has waxed and waned over the years.

"But this year has been incredible with the number of requests for assistance, the number of just inquiries about, 'How do we do this?' I think almost every church in the county has called at some point."

The volunteer master gardeners whom she advises have had their own food gardens on and off, too. The newest is in the Stephen Olsen Industrial Park on the city's south side, and it replaces another which had been in operation from 1999 to 2007. That's when officials discovered that a plume of contamination had leached under the garden from a nearby defunct dry cleaners.

"We were harvesting upwards of 13,000 pounds of organic produce each year," Nagai said. Food banks and food pantries around the county were the beneficiaries.

"It was just in full production when they shut us down," she said. "The vegetables proved to be clean. They did an extraordinary amount of testing."

They found a new site and began rebuilding the beds, trellises, and planting perennial crops such as raspberries. And they replaced all the soil which was full of concrete and gravel, she said. While not organic in the new, governmentally approved sense of the word, the master gardeners use organic techniques, she said.

One route down that road is what fanned interest in a group which started meeting at DP Wigley Co. in Racine this spring. It began with the simple goal of growing food for people, as Chris Flynn put it. With her husband, Mark, she owns the Racine business which sells feed, seeds, plants, and other agricultural and horticultural supplies.

The initial meeting attracted about 70 people, but as subcommittees split off to determine precisely what shape the organization should take, they found both practical and territorial obstacles.

It's truly too late in the season to begin a large-scale greenhouse or food gardening project this year, said Sarah Wright of the Johnson Foundation at a committee's meeting on May 22. There was no land for it, no volunteers, and planting season was already at hand.

As the group talked, members realized that donating food to food pantries meant testing for contaminants, and they were reluctant to duplicate other efforts such as those of the master gardeners. In the end, they opted to form a network so that people interested in techniques, information, or locations would have a central reference to turn to. Perhaps next year, they said, people could begin a more extensive project.

Gateway to food

A project like that is already taking shape. It's on the south side of the greenhouses at the Kenosha Campus of Gateway Technical College, and on a damp, chilly day at the beginning of June, Kate Keener and Kate Jerome were busy planting. They already had spinach and kale in the ground, crops which flourish in the cold of early spring.

The soil wasn't quite soil. It was hills of partially decomposed wood chips on top of 6 inches of real wood chips laid on top of the grass. The partially decomposed chips were a special compost from Growing Power Inc. (more about that shortly). Keener, who is from Kenosha, has trained at the Milwaukee urban agriculture center, and she and Jerome, lead instructor in Gateway's Horticulture Department, are trying to put the same techniques into practice.

On the side of one Gateway building are the compost bins, built of rough lumber and piled full of old vegetables and other plant matter. That's the first stage. Once this pile of waste has partially rotted, it's dumped into smaller bins about 3 feet square where the red worms live. Their job is to digest the compost, and their waste, called worm castings, is prized as fertilizer. It will find its way back onto the planting beds as well as into densely planted pots of salad greens.

By the time fall comes, Jerome said, the plan is to cover the 20-by-40-foot garden bed with a hoop house - a frame covered with plastic sheets or panels to allow solar heating and protect the plants from low temperatures. Then the Gateway group hopes to grow greens such as spinach through the winter, or as far through it as possible.

This first year will be an experiment to see which plant varieties thrive and what techniques must be employed. There is more, of course, because Gateway is an educational institution.

"We want to bring the community in and teach them about sustainable practices," Jerome said.

Even this is a hurdle because, she said, the message about growing your own food may be all over the media, but there is a gap between hearing the message and having the knowledge to do that. The knowledge skipped generations. People from the era of World War 2 and the Great Depression were raised this way, but many of today's young people never had the necessary apprenticeship in gardening and don't know what to do, she said.

Keener, who regularly sells greens at the Kenosha Harbor Market on Saturdays, is optimistic. "Instinctively I think it comes back to people because we're all farmers."

There's also an economic potential, she said, for someone to grow produce through the winter and sell it to local restaurants.

Milwaukee model

"I don't believe you can train farmers in a classroom," Will Allen said on June 16 to a packed room at Wingspread Conference Center.

That could as easily be the mantra for Growing Power Inc. which Allen founded in 1995 after a career as a professional basketball player. From that beginning Growing Power has become an organization that expended $1.58 million on its operations in 2007, has 35 employees, four farms (two in Wisconsin and two in Illinois), and about eight regional training centers where partner organizations pass on the techniques which Allen advocates.

Allen is all about engaging people in urban agriculture, especially young people, about promoting community, about making new soil to restore productivity to often contaminated city lots, about reviving the culture of the early 1900s when people grew food in their backyards and side yards, and he's about changing the food system. He says it's broken.

In the early 1960s, Allen said, farmers were encouraged to plant soybeans from edge to edge of their fields with the promise that prosperity would follow. "And now we have a million less farmers. We have more disease related to the food that we eat. Our young people are obese."

"Kids know what good food is. It's a matter of access." It is, Allen said, an issue of urban areas with no grocery stores or convenience stores that don't stock fresh fruits and vegetables. His organization has begun making deliveries of those to some stores, and he said that Growing Power, through an alliance with the giant food supplier Sysco, is providing plant sprouts to Milwaukee public schools.

He illustrated his talk with pictures: of the $5,000 hoop house he built; of the integrated tanks which grow fish, recycling their waste through beds of watercress which also become a money-making crop; of the vegetable gardens installed in Chicago's Grant Park; and of the project, at the site of the notorious Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago where vegetable beds were established on top of old asphalt just as the Gateway beds were put directly on top of grass.

Allen also talked about some of the partnerships he's formed with university scientists interested in one question or another and who help improve the quality of what Growing Power does.

There is a line which has been crossed, he said after his presentation. People aren't just talking as they did a decade ago. They're still talking, but they're actually doing projects.

Questions

The partnerships with scientists are good, Nagai said, because although there are questions about urban agriculture techniques, little research has been done, and one of the dangers is that all urban farming could fall into disrepute if one or two techniques are later found to produce health hazards.

For example, she said, it's uncertain what chemicals plant roots may be absorbing from asphalt below a vegetable bed. "And asphalt, especially the older asphalt, is full of carcinogens."

There have been questions about nitrate concentrations in fish raised in closed or almost-closed tank systems. (In the human body, nitrate is converted into nitrite which interferes with hemoglobin, the molecule which carries oxygen in the body. This is a risk especially to infants younger than 6 months but also to adults with some chronic health problems and to women who are pregnant or nursing.) These closed or semi-closed systems are hard to work with, she said, and added that NASA has been trying to perfect them for years for use during long space voyages.

And that's why we need solid research to answer these questions about urban farming, she said.

"I think these initiatives are great. This is how things often get accomplished. It often comes from ordinary people dong amazing things."

What will come of this in Racine and Kenosha counties no one can know, just as people plant in hope in the spring and then reap what the season and circumstance provide.

Yet there was the beef on the Wingspread buffet after Allen's talk, a buffet of food from Growing Power and other local suppliers. It wasn't ordinary beef but came from an animal raised fed on grass instead of the typical feedlot diet of grain. It was mind-bending beef. After he tasted a morsel, one member of the audience said, "Why would anyone feed corn to a cow?"