Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli

urban farmer dovetailed as if scripted with the budding locavore movement, and the narrative of an underserviced minority population in the poorest big city in the United States seizing control of their nutritional destiny by embracing a preindustrial, communitarian way of feeding themselves proved irresistible.
    With the amount of press devoted to Detroit gardeners like Mark Covington, the personal beneficiary of coverage by Time , MSNBC, the Guardian , the Associated Press, and the official White House blog, you’d think he’d invented celery. But Covington also happened to be an incredibly engaging character. A thirty-seven-year-old heavy-equipment operator, he’d begun cleaning up and then tilling the garbage-strewn fields in his blighted east side neighborhood out of boredom, after losing his job in 2008. He’d started out with four beds, eventually “adopting” the lots through a city program that gave citizens permits to beautify unused city-owned properties, as long as no permanent structures were erected.
    When I stopped by for a tour, Covington was wearing a blue T-shirt that read “I’m an East Sider” and a Denby High School football cap. He had close-cropped hair and one of those thin mustaches that circle around the bottom of your mouth to become a chinstrap-looking beard. Covington said he’d lost fifty-five pounds over the course of the barely two years he’d been gardening, solely due to healthier eating. I pictured him fifty-five pounds heavier—he remained a massive presence—and nodded, impressed. The neighborhood was a battered quilt of houses and vacant fields, except for Covington’s community garden, which stretched across a park-sized patch of land comprised of a half-dozen former home lots, including, at the time, twenty-three beds of tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, bell peppers, okra, turnips, bok choy, Napa cabbage, carrots, bush beans (“my family alone picked fifteen pounds this year,” Covington told me), Swiss chard, collard greens, vivid orange clusters of marigolds (which “bring beneficial bugs, red and black aphids, that eat cabbage beetles”), and jalapeño peppers. The different vegetables were labeled with hand-painted signs. Raspberries grew out of an old tire. Pallets corralled a compost heap of grass clippings.
    Covington seemed at once bemused by and grateful for the amount of attention his efforts had received; along with the media coverage, he’d been invited to speak at a number of conferences. His last day job had been working for an environmental services company, cleaning oil, bodily fluids, and other waste products from refinery tanks, machinery, and Amtrak trains. Vomit, he said, “was the nicer stuff.” He said he hoped to expand the garden to include goats and chickens and maybe one day opening a little farmers market in the abandoned party store on the corner. The last owner of the party store had been selling drugs out of the back. “You couldn’t buy Pepsi or bread, though,” Covington said. Now prostitutes used the space to turn tricks. 2 On a telephone post outside the shop, a little yellow sign read “Top Cash Paid Gold Diamonds.” A dead possum, about the size of a large cat, lay in the middle of the street.
    Continuing the tour, Covington pointed out a couple of hoop houses (homemade greenhouses constructed out of PVC piping and plastic sheets) and some raised “lasagna beds” (organic gardening plots layered with sheets of compost), which resembled fresh graves. One of his friends, a barber, had been setting aside bags of hair, good for keeping away rabbits, and in an ambiguous spirit of city-suburb cooperation, a riding club in Grosse Pointe had been donating horse manure. I asked if people in the neighborhood had been excited by the garden. He smiled faintly and said, “Noooooo. Workdays are Monday and Thursday, and we can’t get anybody out here. We had three people say they wanted to plant things, but it ended up just being me, my