“I never dreamed I would be doing this,” Liz Boxley tells me. Boxley, a retired bus driver, is swiping through photos of the 3,000-pound harvest grown at Food for the Soul Community Garden in 2023. The garden, where Boxley has volunteered since 2021, is on Fulton St. just a few blocks from Ohio River Blvd. Despite being close to a major roadway, Boxley rightly describes the garden as “so serene.”
Ebony Evans started Food for the Soul, with the help of volunteers like Boxley, because she saw a need in her community for both healthy food and a collaborative, outdoor social space. Boxley says neighbors living on Fulton stop by the garden to help mow the grass or to ask for vegetables when bank accounts and cupboards are bare.
Food for the Soul was one of 15 sites featured in this year’s Pittsburgh Urban Farm Tour, organized by the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council and co-hosted by Grow Pittsburgh, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, and the Chatham University Food Studies Program. Established in 2017, the tour supports the Urban Growers Scholarship Fund, which helps urban farmers “access professional development opportunities.” This year’s tour, on Sept. 14, “showcased some of the many people who have put Pittsburgh on the map nationally for their work in urban agriculture and helped bring attention to the value of urban agriculture,” says Chris Murakami of Chatham University’s Food Studies Program.
Read more on Pittsburgh City Paper.
