Pa. agriculture secretary tours urban gardens in Reading

Tanya Melendez told the story with a bright and proud smile on her face.

It was three years ago, the director of community outreach and programs for the 18th Wonder Improvement Association said, the first summer the association operated its community garden in the 1000 block of Liggett Avenue.

Melendez was working in the garden, thinning the rows of carrots she had planted, when a group of neighborhood kids approached her.

“They asked what I was doing,” she said, “I showed them what I was doing, why it was important and explained how to grow carrots.”

The kids were intrigued and ended up coming back several times over the next few weeks to check on the progress of the carrots.

“They would watch how big they were getting,” Melendez said. “So by the time I was ready to harvest them, I let them help. We took them over to the hose, washed them off and they ate them.”

The kids were thrilled.

“You should have heard the kids as they were leaving,” she said. “They were saying ‘I can’t wait to tell my mom that I ate carrots right out of the dirt.’ I yelled back, ‘please tell her you washed them first!’

The story got a big laugh from the crowd gathered at the garden late Wednesday morning. That included state Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding, who stopped by the garden and three other urban farms in Reading as part of the Shapiro Administration’s 2024 Urban Agriculture Tour.

Stops during the weeklong tour highlighted Pennsylvanians who are working to increase access to fresh food in areas where it is scarce; break down racial, ethnic and socioeconomic barriers; and overcome historical inequities to grow opportunities for their urban neighborhoods to thrive.

And that’s what the 18th Wonder’s community garden is all about.

During the COVID pandemic, Melendez said, she came up with the idea to establish a community garden for the residents of the Oakbrook Homes, a public housing development that is owned and managed by Reading Housing Authority.

The housing authority allowed the association to build the garden on a plot of land they owned across from the development on Liggett Avenue. They started with $1,000 and a wishlist of supplies and equipment.

Melendez said she reached out to everyone she knew about lending a helping hand any way possible — whether that meant recruiting volunteers to transform the plot of land into a garden, reaching out to community organizations who could provide some support or appealing to local businesses who could donate supplies to the effort.

“The help started to trickle in,” she said. “We just started ticking items off of our list and slowly it became the community garden that you see here today.”

Tanya Melendez, director of community outreach and programs for the 18th Wonder Improvement Association, takes Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding on a tour of the community garden on Liggett Avenue. The tour was one of four stops the secretary made in Reading on Wednesday to promore urban agriculture. (KAREN SHUEY – READING EAGLE)

The United Way of Berks County gave $5,000 to build raised garden beds, the composting boxes were made by local Boy Scouts and nearby businesses.

The garden started with just 12 raised beds and has grown to 32 over the past three years of its existence.

Each spring, plots are opened to people who want to apply for a space to grow fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs. Those who live in the Oakbrook development are given first priority and make up about 80% of the people working the land — including Martin and Margarita Garcia.

The Oakbrook couple had one of the first plots in the garden when it opened in spring of 2021, and have enjoyed the time they’ve spent tending it.

“It keeps us busy and entertained because we love watching our plants grow,” Martin Garcia said through a translator. “We would have never had the space to have a garden of our own, but this community space has allowed us to do something that we really love.”

His wife, also speaking through a translator, agreed.

“We also like that we can share the fruits of our labor with our friends and neighbors,” Margarita Garcia said.

The Garcias have been joined in the garden by many of their neighbors, each planting, raising and harvesting fresh produce. Growing in the garden Wednesday were tomatoes, eggplants, strawberries, cucumbers, beans, squash, peppers, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, sage, cilantro and parsley.

“This garden has been a wonderful success,” Melendez said. “Everything you see here has been built and created entirely by the community. Making those connections and working together is how we have been able to do this.”

Melendez said one of the most exciting things to come out of the community garden is spontaneous learning with the children in the neighborhood.

“A lot of the kids will see us working here and they come over,” she said. “They learn, they weed and they get something to take home.”

Redding said he was impressed by what he saw at the community garden.

“On behalf of the Department of Agriculture, thank you,” he told Melendez. “These kinds of success stories are so good to hear and the common denominator in all of the gardens that I have seen this week is that there is a person who figures out how to put everything together.”