‘Don’t shoot. I’m gardening.’ Urban garden showcased in East Garfield Park

Wearing T-shirts that proclaimed, “Don’t shoot. I’m gardening,” kids from an East Garfield Park neighborhood plagued by gang violence on Thursday presented Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Congressman Danny Davis with baskets of vegetables they had grown in their own urban garden.

It was a showcase for the Urban Transformation Network, a group of South and West side churches that has forged a partnership with the city and USDA National Resources Conservation Services to turn vacant lots once strewn with garbage into productive vegetable gardens.

The nonprofit aims to shrink food deserts where fruits and vegetables are hard to come by. The goal is also to keep kids productively occupied, train ex-offenders for careers in landscaping and improve the overall health of an inner-city community.

“It helps young people growing up to know that, when it’s corn, as opposed to maybe corn chips or corn sticks, that it has more nutritional value,” Davis said.

Getting kids to eat vegetables is often like pulling teeth for parents. Not so with the vegetables kids grow in their own urban gardens.

“The mere fact that I grew this cucumber, I want to know how it tastes. The fact that I watched these tomatoes spring up, I want to see what they really are now. They taste better. And don’t give them to me in a can,” Davis said.

East Garfield Park is located in the Harrison police district, which led the city in homicides last year and ranked second in shootings. The 2014 homicide rate spiked by 50 percent over the previous year. Shootings rose by 28 percent.

That’s what the ominous, “Don’t shoot. I’m gardening” slogan on the sign and T-shirts was all about.

“Anything that can be done to try and curb violence and curb the notion, everything is being used. Any slogan. For example, we often say, `Pick up a book and not a gun,’ “ Davis said.

“It’s part of the effort to reduce violence . . . If young people are engaged in gardening . . . If they’ve got something to do,” they’re less inclined to become victims or perpetrators of crime.

Ald. Jason Ervin (28^th) said he was mighty proud to see a “piece of land we used to get phone calls on” because of overgrown weeds and fly-dumping turned into a productive vegetable garden he called a “place of life.”

But the beefy alderman pleaded guilty on the nutrition front.

“As you can see, I did not take any of the . . . advice on eating healthy. But I want you all to blame my wife for that. She continues to cook and make good food,” Ervin said.

Turning serious, he said, “East and West Garfield Park has some of the most daunting statistics for health outcomes in this city . . . We have the highest incidences of breast cancer, HIV and AIDS, diabetes. These are the types of programs that are needed to help turn this tide around for our community.”

Emanuel was proud of the fact that the garden showcased Thursday at the JLM Abundant Life Community Center, 2622 W. Jackson, used to be a city-owned lot.

“If we want to see the type of economic growth and the safety and the job creation, it is taking land like this and turning it into a place where a community comes together, rather than to complain about it, but to build it together,” he said.

Emanuel campaigned on a promise to eradicate food deserts and end a disparity that has left entire inner-city communities with precious few healthy shopping choices.

He claims to have delivered on that promise by: opening or expanding 26 stores offering fresh produce; doubling the number of farmers’ markets; re-launching a donated CTA bus delivering fruits and vegetables after a false-start and by dramatically expanding the number of acres across Chicago devoted to urban farming.

The new stores include a Whole Foods under construction in impoverished Englewood.

When Emanuel fell short of delivering on his own lofty promises, he revised his own definition of food deserts to make the progress look better.

City Hall defines food deserts as census tracts located more than one mile from a licensed retail food establishment with at least 10,000 square feet of space. Gas stations and fast-food restaurants don’t qualify.

By that measure, Emanuel claimed in 2013 that the population of Chicago food deserts had declined by 21 percent from 100,159 to 79,434.

But Jason Weller, chief of the USDA National Resources Conservation Services, used a dramatically different definition after announcing a $200,000 federal grant that will allow the Urban Transformation Network to expand its urban gardening program.

“Here in Chicago, it’s estimated around 400,000 Chicagoans live in a food desert—15 percent of the city’s population,” he said.