Dan Bravin Will Destroy Your Lawn*

[May 6th, 2009]

Two years ago, Dan Bravin was a database administrator for a local prepaid-cell-phone company. Now he’s a lawn killer. Last Friday he gunned his trusty BCS rototiller and tore up 700 square feet of City Hall’s east lawn create a downtown vegetable garden—at the behest of Portland’s City Council, Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and Food Policy Council. The 38-year-old lifelong gardener ditched his desk job and joined Portland’s growing network of urban farmers in 2008 when he founded City Garden Farms, a CSA program that sold veggies from Bravin and partner Martin Barret’s collection of urban vegetable plots in backyards and vacant lots around town. Then, in January, the former social worker launched the Portland Organoponico Project (POP Farming), which aims to teach people one-on-one how to grow food in unlikely places—including the city’s political headquarters.

WW: Organopon-WHAT?

Dan Bravin: Organoponico. That’s the Cuban word for urban farms. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba was cut off from their resources—people started to starve. They didn’t even have the fuel to ship vegetables across the island. One of the ways they rebounded was to learn how to grow food intensively in the cities where people were living. It makes a lot of sense in hard economic times. I want to see that happen here.

What’s a foolproof crop for newbie gardeners?

Any kind of leaf lettuce. I grow a small, fast-maturing butterhead lettuce called Tom Thumb. Deeeelish! And peas. They start growing even when you think nothing can grow in the cold dark of early spring. Right now is a great time to seed radish, lettuce and peas.

What if I live in a freakin’ apartment?

Borrow land. There’s an awful lot of people with yards that don’t use them. [PDX site] yardsharing.org connects people who want to garden with people with [unused] space. And you can grow almost anything in a pot—carrots, tomatoes, peppers….

What veggies did you plant at City Hall?

POP is just working on the vegetable piece [of the garden]. The sun isn’t great on the east lawn, so I’m focusing on root crops like radishes, turnips, beets, rutabagas, carrots, lettuce, arugula, endive, Swiss chard and kale. [And] broccoli raab, cauliflower. [And] herbs…. Oh, yeah...and some potatoes.

What should backyard farmers understand?

That you don’t need to get too fancy to grow food. You can waste a lot of money on gardening. I mean, you don’t need raised cedar beds. They look nice, but you don’t need them—just start digging up your yard. The key is adding lots of organic matter to your soil—homemade compost, coffee grounds, free compost [like] manure from local horse stables/farms. Llama manure is some of the best stuff. And oddly, there are an awful lot of people with llamas around. It’s kind of weird.

Now that even the White House has a Victory Garden, it kinda feels like a fad.

Everybody [used to] garden. It was part of their food intake. When World War II rolled around, Victory Gardens were encouraged by the government; [home gardeners] grew 60 percent of the produce eaten in the U.S. Losing that connection has caused a lot of problems—it’s turned us into floppy, processed-food-eating non-gardeners. If you’re growing your own food, you know what’s in it. You can take control. And you can save money, if you do it right. I want people to know that there’s help out there. It’s never too late to start a garden in Portland (except for the middle of winter).

What’s your own garden like?

I live in the Woodstock neighborhood. My whole front yard is full of peas right now. I’ve got chickens in my backyard...baby greens, rhubarb. I’ve got radishes growing around the deck. And apple trees. I try to fill the yard with as much food as possible. My wife is not a gardener; it’s all me.

What do you wish you could grow here?

I don’t think its legal yet to have cows in your yard, so I can’t grow steak.