The Hollygrove Market

Across from a baseball park and the Carrollton Boosters' home turf, a bare arc of slatted wood panels will soon be covered with foliage from pots of squash, mirlitons and fresh greens.

  But the edible welcome mat isn't ready yet. The vegetables haven't been planted. The panels aren't all screwed into the frame. The model vision for the Hollygrove Market & Farm's front door — and everything else on the property — won't be completed until late spring.

  The future farm, a collaborative effort with the New Orleans Food & Farm Network (NOFFN) and the Carrollton-Hollygrove Community Development Corporation (CHCDC), occupies the former Guillot's Nursery on Olive Street and will operate as a training ground for backyard gardeners in the Hollygrove neighborhood. The urban agriculture training program will provide 35 gardeners with four workshops for two growing seasons. For now, the farm operates as a weekly market hub for backyard growers, community gardeners, urban microfarmers and rural farmers to sell healthy and affordable food, previously a rare commodity in the neighborhood.

  "Hollygrove was an extreme food desert," says Alicia Vance, a community organizer with the NOFFN. Until the opening of Robert Fresh Market on the corner of South Claiborne and South Carrollton avenues, Hollygrove's closest food source came from as far as Orleans Avenue or Airline Highway. But the supermarket's opening didn't necessarily solve the problem of finding affordable food.

  "From a resident's point of view, it's unaffordable to most people, so it hasn't changed shopping behaviors," Vance says. "People don't feel like it's in their income level."

  In early 2007, the NOFFN saw Hollygrove as an ideal location for a Good Food Neighborhood program, a three-year model in which the neighborhood is saturated with programs, educational forums and conversation about food.

  "To have significantly increased access and desire for fresh foods, unless you know how to cook and can appreciate fresh foods — they don't have a place," Vance says. "So we started a conversation with residents, talked about mapping food access in the neighborhood: Where can you buy food? What sort of foods? What fresh foods are available? Part of the conversation is really about the food going from seed to table — what it takes to grow food, to process, get it to market, to purchase, cook and eat it."

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