by Leigh Belanger

“We’re thinking big,” says Gabriel Erde-Cohen, co-founder of Green
City Growers, a six-month-old Jamaica Plain-based business whose
primary service is building and maintaining organic produce gardens
in people’s backyards.

With ten clients to date around Greater Boston, Erde-Cohen and his
business partner Jessie Banhazl are starting small as they work toward
their vision of growing food “everywhere”—in yards, on rooftops, in
schoolyards and in abandoned city lots. For Erde-Cohen and Banhazl,
the promise of their brand of urban agriculture is a citizenry more engaged
with food production and consumption.

“We’re in a time in history when more people than ever have access to
small pieces of land,” he says. Using that land to grow food makes
sense, says Banhazl, in a time when food safety scares like the recent salmonella
outbreak in peanut butter force us to consider how our food
is being produced; when concern over carbon emissions and climate
change makes us think about how far food travels; and when a global
economic meltdown offers an opportunity to think about building
more durable local economies.

Growing up eating food grown in his backyard, Erde-Cohen’s ideas
for urban agriculture have been shaped by his upbringing as well as
his work on both rural and urban farms. He has worked in Scotland,
Wyoming, California and Massachusetts and has toured California
planting fruit trees in urban settings there. “For me, the core of sustainability
is in local food systems,” Erde-Cohen says.

Banhazl and Erde-Cohen, both 25, met while attending Hampshire
College. Erde-Cohen studied agriculture there but left school after a
year and a half, figuring he could learn more about farming by doing
it. Banhazl eventually transferred to Smith, moving to New York after
graduation to work as a producer for realityTV shows like “The Hills”
and “Wife Swap.” She returned to Boston last year to work as the managing
director for Green City Growers.

The pair intends to expand their ten gardens, which they planted last
summer in towns and neighborhoods such as Quincy, Brookline, Jamaica
Plain, Roslindale andWaban, to 40 in 2009. Last summer, Erde-
Cohen helped the Boston Day and Evening Academy in Roxbury with
a garden project and hopes to build Green City Schoolyards, the company’s
gardening and education program for students, to include three
school systems this year.

Green City Growers’s primary services are akin to having a personal
farmer. Potential clients can count on consultation, up-front planning
and working with Erde-Cohen to determine the type of garden and varieties
of produce best suited to their needs. The raised bed gardens
start at $450 for a four-by-four-foot plot of salad veggies (lettuces,
radishes, peas, cucumbers, etc.) and range up to $1,000-plus for larger
plots with more labor-intensive crops such as corn and garlic. A weekly
fee covers maintenance.

It sounds spendy, but Banhazl points out that for people already buying
organic produce at the grocery store or shopping seasonally at farmers
markets, the cost is roughly equivalent. Part of the challenge of
expanding their business, say the pair, is moving people past the idea
that gardens are primarily for visual enjoyment, as well as selling the

idea of a backyard produce gardening service to a broad segment of
the population. “It’s not fringe, it’s not niche, it’s not elite,” says Erde-
Cohen. For the Green City Growers, theirs is a service with potential
to shift the way a significant number of people in the Boston area eat.

For busy non-gardeners who appreciate the taste and quality of fresh,
local produce, the service is welcome. Arnold Clayton and Tamar
Yehoshua of Brookline contacted Green City Growers last summer
after landscaping their yard. Erde-Cohen built them a 15-by-5-foot
plot. “It’s been great,” says Clayton. “We were able to eat greens and
herbs late into the fall, and we’re looking forward to sitting down and
planning what we’ll plant this spring.” And since Clayton professes to
not know much about growing and caring for vegetables, “I like that
you can depend on [Erde-Cohen’s] expertise.”

With continued interest in local and organic foods, says Banhazl, the
pair are excited about where their concept could go. From serving
families and students to maybe restaurants and entire neighborhoods,
“We think it’s the future of local produce,” says Erde-Cohen.

Green City Growers
508-395-1987
growmycitygreen.com

Leigh Belanger is a Boston-based freelance writer whose work has appeared
in the Boston Globe and Cook’s Illustrated. She is the Program
Manager for Chefs Collaborative, a nonprofit working with chefs on
sustainable food issues, and a candidate for her master’s degree in gastronomy
from Boston University.