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Farming Bartram’s Garden

The Pennsylvanian Gazette

Sunday, August 24, 2014

On the last Tuesday in July, two days before market day, 14-year-old Ryshawn Dobey mixed compost into a row of freshly tilled clover in Bartram’s Garden in Southwest Philadelphia. For a moment he leaned on his hoe and surveyed the zucchini vines, collards, eggplants, peppers, black-eyed peas, okra, tomatillos, rattlesnake pole beans, and Sungold tomatoes whose profuse growth blocked the view of still other crops beyond them.

“I’m going to say my favorite thing I’ve eaten here was the squash,” the stocky rising ninth-grader reflected. “Wait. No! It was the raspberries!”

He gazed up past a hill dotted with peach, pear, plum, cherry, apple, and nut saplings toward a bramble of raspberries that by this stage of the summer had been picked nearly clean. The view may have struck Dobey as particularly lovely, considering that he lives practically next-door in Bartram Village, a scruffy complex managed by the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

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