When I first met Stefan Meyer it was late Spring and he was a few weeks away from kicking off the inaugural season of Growing Lots, a pretty unique urban farm located in my South Minneapolis neighborhood. Back then, Stefan told me the general premise of the farm – take an abandoned and unwanted parking lot in an industrial part of town and turn it in to a farm selling produce to local markets and restaurants, and CSA shares to neighborhood residents – and I knew I needed to photograph his progress. As often happens to start up businesses, Growing Lots has worked through some tweaks to their original idea in order to get the process rolling, but the result is a place that’s even more interesting that I had expected it to be, which is a testament to Stefan’s creativity and dedication to the concepts of urban farming.

I’d definitely recommend checking out the Growing Lots Blog for all the details about what Stefan is up to. It’s inspiring. The general gist goes like this: you hear ‘farm’ and ‘abandoned parking lot’ and you assume that the black top has been ripped out, right? Nope. Stefan is creating beds right over the top. The original concept of covering the whole plot with soil in one swoop didn’t work out, so he’s been going little by little, adding on to the main bed as he’s ready to plant more seedlings. He’s also experimenting with these ingenious planters (made of tomato cages, straw, and soil clocking in at about $1.75 each to construct) that hold an incredible number of plants for such a small footprint.

Mostly by chance, I stopped by on the morning of the farm’s first CSA share pick up day. Here’s Stefan harvesting some kale for one of the CSA boxes.

Hopefully I’ll have a chance to stop by in a month to check the farm’s progress. As the early season greens are harvested, late season things like brassicas and melons are just sprouting up, and I’m excited to see what the farm will look like as Stefan finds more ways to innovate and pull food from the urban landscape.

Portrait of a true urban farmer:

Yesterday I got my copy of the lastest Seward Coop Sprout! magazine in the mail, which means I can show you some photos that I took not too long ago. Pretty fun stuff – over the fall and winter most of the work I did for the coop was in the store, but they got me out in the neighborhood for some really fun stories. Namely,

The cover story was shot at the Seward Child Care Center. They’ve received a neighborhood grant from the coop to teach their kids about food. One of the teaching tools is a compost bucket, which they keep underneath the fish tank. They feed it their lunch scraps, and leaves, and keep it watered, checking in with the worms and keeping ‘em happy. If there’s one thing you want it’s happy worms. Ask any of these kids, they’ll tell you the same thing.

Next up was a house remodeled to Gold LEED certification a couple years ago – amazing and very personal in the way they used materials that in most remodel projects would’ve been chucked in the dumpster, to make a super livable and beautiful new home. Definitely check out the magazine for the whole story on this staircase and all the other sustainable touches. Pretty inspiring.

Lastly, we’re entering the inaugural year of Growing Lots, a new farm being created right on top of an old parking lot. It will operate on the community supported agriculture (CSA) model, which is a fairly cutting-edge idea for an urban core area not on one of the coasts. I got to photograph the team at Seward Redesign, an incredibly innovative real estate development firm who is sponsoring the project (among the many projects they’ve got going, all enhancing sustainability and livability in the Seward neighborhood).

How great a client is the Seward Coop, sending me to meet all these amazing folks?

Is there anything better (I’m talking food-wise here) than a neighborhood deli? Sure you’ve got your schmancy once-a-year places that stretch your palette and show you something amazing. You’ve got your exotic street foods, your bakeries and pubs. But in terms of an experience that grounds and comforts you, I’ll take a neighborhood deli any day.

Now I’ve definitely got a certain amount of loyalty to the Birchwood Cafe – it’s the neighborhood deli in my neighborhood, after all – but I’ve got to shout out to the Cheeky Monkey Deli in St. Paul too. Beautiful fresh bread. These amazingly airy homemade potato chips. Organic meats. It’s the good stuff.

Cheeky Monkey is my friend Sarah’s neighborhood neighborhood deli, so I called her up to see if she’d be interested in letting me take pictures of her with a meatloaf sandwich – one of the signature dishes at the deli. As it turns out, Sarah orders the meatloaf sammie every time she goes to Cheeky Monkey. Her husband Craig has traveled the menu, but not Sarah. And, as she told me, every time a meatloaf sandwich lands in front of her she makes this face:

and that’s one of the reasons she’s my friend. : )

Here are a few more photos from our lunchtime shoot. Thanks loads to the fine folks at Cheeky Monkey for their hospitality and for plating up such photogenic and delicious food. Hopefully we can collaborate again.

What’s your favorite neighborhood joint? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The magnificent Pot Roast Sandwich. Oh, the pickled onions. Ah, the horseradish sauce. . .

This month is on track to be the wettest October in Minnesota history. From most perspectives it’s been miserable: cold and damp, constantly overcast. A tough time for people like me who think of fall as the best, most beautiful time of the year, as all the rain has kept me indoors and caused the premature dropping of all those beautiful leaves. Not to mention how hard the weather has made things like fall harvest and yardwork.

But a couple days ago we had a one-day respite from the clouds, so I sped down to the vineyard before the clouds swallowed the sun again to check in on Nan and V in the fields.

These days the task is pruning back the vines of the one variety of grape that gets buried for the winter. Most of the varieties grown by Alexis Bailly stay on the trellises year-round and get pruned in the Spring. But one gets snipped in the fall, then buried as protection against the cold. As Nan explained to me, pruning is one of the main tools she has to impact the character of the grapes: the shape of the canopy, and the direction that the vine takes along the trellis directly shape a grape’s flavor profile. Pruning is an art built on years of trial and error, and it takes constant evaluation.

It’s interesting to watch an expert make her way down the a line of plants and quickly and efficiently sculpt vines in to shape. Pruning takes many quick decisions and movements; grape vines are such prolific growers that each one takes tens of snips. And there’s the medical exam part of the process, looking for small injuries in the vine that are all that soil-borne plant viruses need to take the entire vine down. And at the end of a growing season that started with a harsh winter, the medical exams can end up coming back. . . not as good as you’d hope.

But as Nan told me, many times she’s predicted the vineyard’s demise, and it keeps hanging in. All you can do is keep nurturing.

Grape vines, after the leaves fall

Pruned

A small but terminal injury

More of the Alexis Bailly story available here, and on the Alexis Bailly site.

A few weeks ago my wife Johanna and I took a trip down to the tasting room at Alexis Bailly Vineyard, just south of Hastings, Minnesota – about an hour’s drive from Minneapolis. It was a beautiful late-summer Saturday, and unbeknownst to us, the last day of the grape harvest at the vineyard.

The vineyard grounds are beautiful: the driveway takes you through rows of vines stretching out to the left and right, and behind the main building (made of knotty pine and Minnesota limestone) is a restored prairie and broad picnic grounds with big outdoor sculptures scattered around. Off to the side are two beautiful bocce courts with an outdoor dining area under vine-covered trellis.

As Johanna and I ate our picnic lunch and sampled from A. Bailly’s wines, I had a growing awareness of the harvesters having a great time at the end of a day of picking. Somehow we learned that the entire harvest workforce is made up of volunteers, and that there are actually more people that want to help every year than they can even use (and feed lunch and wine. . .).

Producing wine has got to be one of the pinnacles in the world of local food – not only are you dealing with the economics and all the physical realities of agriculture; you’re growing a crop that is extremely temperamental, with an attachment to a microclimate that takes years to completely work out. A couple of the big varieties that A. Bailly grows were actually developed at the University of Minnesota to harmonize with our climate; others have been brought in and tweaked over the 35 years the vineyard has been in existence. Add all this together, and what I see is a pretty amazing little community brought together by local food artistry of the best (ahem. . . alcohohic) kind.

Before we left I had decided that I wanted to know more about A. Bailly – I wanted to know more about the process, not just the harvest but throughout the year; about the community; about the balance that Nan Bailly has to achieve between being a farmer, a vintner, and a small business owner. Lucky for me, Nan is super open to people interested in what’s going on at her place. So after a few emails I went down last week for my first wander around. My plan is to keep going back as I’m able for the next year to get a sense of one cycle of grapes, starting with a little bit of the fermenting and bottling of this year’s crop, all the way through next year’s harvest. Hopefully by the end of it I’ll have a big pile of images that tell a story.

And with that introduction, here’s my first installment: some visual first impressions and wanderings around a working day at the vineyard. More personalities, perspectives, and stories to come over the next year.

Thanks to Nan, V, Kevin, and Joan for humoring me and letting me distract you from your work. And thanks for reading!