Growing a Greener World

- [Narrator] "Growing a Greener World" is made possible in part by.

- [Woman] The Subaru Crosstrek.

Designed with adventure in mind.

Built in a zero-landfill plant, so you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru, proud sponsor of "Growing a Greener World" (upbeat music) - [Narrator] And the following.

Rainbird, Corona Tools, and Milorganite.

(soft music) - [Joe] I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created a "Growing a Greener World," I had one goal, to tell stories of everyday people, innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real.

They're passionate.

They're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

(soft music) "Growing a Greener World," it's more than a movement.

It's our mission.

(soft music) 10 acres of farmland set against a backdrop of residential streets and established neighborhoods.

This place has a history, though much of it is far from storybook.

But these vegetables and herbs represent far more than a simple meal, they are a spark.

A glimmer of hope for a community that's largely gone dark.

The seeds that just might grow into a brighter future.

- My name is Josh Plymale and I'm an urban farmer.

- My name is Jessica Legendre, and the organic produce that I grow supplies two of the most popular farmer's markets in a city of 5 million people.

- My name is Kevin Frazier and I grow mushrooms for some of the top restaurants in one of the food capitals of the country.

- My farm is someone's backyard.

- My organic farm is behind a convenience store.

- My mushroom farm is inside an old cotton warehouse.

- Welcome to Sparta.

- Welcome to Sparta.

- Welcome to Sparta.

(soft music) - Urban farming, taking abandoned or underutilized land in the city and growing food has become quite the national trend.

And for good reason, because it can alleviate food shortages in areas that may not have access to local produce, it can stimulate the local economy by creating farmer's markets and gardening jobs, and they can also help grow community, oftentimes in areas where that's in short supply.

On "Growing a Greener World," we've taken you to some of the premier urban farming operations in the country in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and New York.

But those issues that urban farming can help address, they aren't exclusive to big cities, they're everywhere.

And that's why, just maybe, urban farming should be to.

Welcome to Sparta and welcome to Elm Street Gardens.

(soft music) About an hour and a half Southeast of Atlanta, you'll find the tiny town of Sparta.

It's located in Hancock County, which was the most populous county in Georgia in 1800, a time when cotton was king.

A century later, the boll weevil decimated the industry.

Towns like Sparta were hit hard and never recovered.

Today, Hancock County's population is a third of what it once was, and it's the poorest county in the state.

In Sparta alone, over a third of the town's residents live below the poverty line.

(soft music) - Everybody talks about food deserts like, like it was some isolated activity that goes on in metropolitan areas, but look, there are food deserts sitting right under our noses in all these little towns.

There are many little towns right around Sparta that don't even have a grocery store.

Things like Elm Street Gardens, if we can open our community up to the idea and get 'em to shop here is one way of alleviating those problems.

Here we are with an urban farm in this little town.

It's kind of interesting.

The reaction for the most part is positive, but there are people who say, "What are you doing that in the town for?"

Not everybody thinks it's a great idea, but why isn't it a great idea?

We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the state and we're employing people.

It just so happens that we're employing people farming, and we are upgrading lots up and down Elm street.

We now own 10, we own 10 acres on Elm Street in Sparta, Georgia, all within a block of each other.

And if that ain't an urban garden in a country town, I don't know what it is.

- [Joe] But Robert Currey and his wife Suzy didn't exactly set out to start an urban farming revolution in this tiny Georgia town.

- There was no real plan.

It just happened.

But then again, an awful lot of my life has been, it just happened.

- [Joe] Robert Currey was one of the founders of the Storehouse furniture chain in 1969.

Later, he started Currey and Company, manufacturers of lighting, interior furniture, and garden products.

- I've been dreaming.

I don't know how, how you know this stuff, but I wanted to be in the retail business.

I've always wanted to be in the retail business.

I wanna be in the retail business right now, and just don't have the energy level, but.

- [Joe] But, but Robert knew he would do something new once he stepped away from retail.

He just didn't know what, and he had no idea that getting there would require taking the scenic route.

- A friend came down with this notebook with pictures of this gorgeous 1840s Greek revival house.

Wonderful, wonderful plaster molding.

I mean, it just couldn't have been more beautiful in its untaken care of state.

I mean, this house, it remained vacant for 40 or 50 years, and so there was gray mildew on the wall.

It was just beautiful in it.

And I said, "Where in the world is that?"

And he said, "Sparta, Georgia."

And I said, "Where in the world is that?"

Then they said, "Come on, let's ride around Hancock County and look at historic properties."

And so we did.

By March of that year, we bought this house on Elm Street.

When you look at properties like this, you talk about it.

And in case you can't tell I'm a good talker.

And so we talked a lot about Sparta and Hancock County, and we frequently encountered people from Atlanta and from this area out here and not one of 'em said anything, but "Oh, don't buy a piece of property in Hancock County."

I can't remember anybody saying anything positive except, "Aren't there a beautiful bunch of houses there."

Well, I'm a contrarian, and when somebody says something like that to me, I'm thinking, you know, somebody's missing something.

We didn't know a thing.

I didn't know repair from restoration, but I had built a lot of stuff.

So, built a lot of stores, built a lot of showrooms, done all that kind of work, so I had an idea, but I had no concept of the magnitude of what turned out to be a restoration.

This was the summer, June, I think, of of 2002, and sometime in 2007 or eight, or I'm not sure when we sort of finished, but here we are in 2016 and we ain't finished yet.

- [Joe] And as the grand old house on Elm Street was transformed into a home, something else started to change for Robert.

- Two great things have happened in the last decade for me.

And one is I fell in house love, which I knew nothing about.

I mean, I lived in my parents' house and it was my parents' house.

And then we lived in a house in Atlanta for 40 years.

And I used to wonder when I pulled up in the driveway who want, who lives here?

(Robert giggles) And then we came here and over a period of years, I found myself absolutely in love.

And I wake up in the morning loving where I am and I go to bed thinking, how lucky am I?

(soft music) - The second great thing that happened to Robert Currey late in life, he decided to try his hand at vegetable gardening in his new backyard.

And Robert turned to this book as his guide.

It's "Weedless Gardening by Dr. Lee Reich.

You may recall we met Dr. Lee Reich and toured his own yard to get tips from the master on smarter ways of gardening that cuts down dramatically on weeds and produces phenomenal yields to boot.

You can go back and watch that episode in its entirety online by going to growingagreenerworld.com and searching weedless gardening.

For his own garden here in Sparta, Robert followed the four main principles that Dr. Reich laid out in his book.

Number one, no tilling of the soil, ever.

It sounds crazy, but Lee maintains that it just destroys the soil's natural structure and kicks dormant weed seeds up to the surface where they'll now get sun and air and water and turn into weeds.

Pick out weeds by hand when you see them, but put that tiller in your next garage sale.

Number two, make strict designations between planting beds and walking areas.

Don't walk in the planting beds and you'll never compact the soil you want to plant in with foot traffic.

Number three, cover your planting beds with compost.

Organic matter feeds the soil, which feeds the plants.

And a top dress layer of it keeps those nutrients right at the level where most roots are anyway.

And number four, use drip irrigation in your beds.

It conserves water by putting it directly into the soil at the base of your plants, instead of spraying it around the entire landscape where it will just feed weed seeds that are deposited by wind or birds.

That's an overly simplified look at the weedless gardening philosophy, but it's the core of what Robert set out to do.

And by now you can probably guess the Currey's home garden took off.

- What this place has told me is that with a 20 mile 40 lot, you can grow enough food for four people, and it doesn't kill you.

In fact, it's invigorating from a, from a psychological point of view, as well as from a physical point of view.

I had a friend that came down from Atlanta and he was gonna garden half of my plot and I was gardening the other half, and by August, he was spent, and mine was going like crazy, because I was using this no till all over mulch, organic practices.

And he was doing all the bad stuff.

His part looked terrible.

So I thought, well, maybe that will that'll help him understand a little better another way of gardening.

Well, all it did was aggravate him and he quit coming down here, but the end of that story is I took over that section.

So then I had twice the size garden.

Well, what do you do with all this produce that you're growing in this very fertile environment?

Over the years what has happened here is we started gardening behind this house, and then we bought the lot behind the house.

Then we built the hoop house.

Then we built another hoop house.

Then we built a seed house.

And all of a sudden what started out as a garden has become an urban farm in a country town.

The farm hires community members.

The whole idea was to hire people and to bring people into Hancock County who otherwise might not come here.

So we're bringing fresh young folks into the community and we're hiring community members to work on the farm.

And that's been the concept from the get-go.

- So this has been a really unique experience in how small the farm is, I think.

So the, I guess I didn't completely expect to be farming in someone's backyard and kind of surrounding areas.

- That's the neatest part about it.

We're in someone's backyard, we're in a front yard, we're in a few plots along the road, we're behind the Golden Pantry, and the flower shop.

Like, it's a really neat thing.

It's unique.

We're just spread out amongst Elm Street and we're able to supply two farmer's markets in Atlanta.

We have one market here on property on Fridays, and then we also sell to restaurants.

And so we're able to produce enough food for us to make a living in and to, for the business to be viable, which is, which is a great thing.

- [Joe] You've had a lot of opportunity to interact with people kind of on a daily basis here.

A lot of farmers, they're working the soil, they're working their crops, but they're not really engaging with the community, or their customers directly, but you are.

Any ahas in this time that you've had a chance to do that?

- I'll meet somebody on the street, somebody I've never seen before in my life.

And they'll look at me and they'll say, "You're the hardest working woman I know."

(Jessica laughs) I'm like you don't even know me, but they do.

And that's the most interesting thing is these folks see me daily running around, maybe like a chicken with my head cut off, but nonetheless doing what I love to do, rarely without a smile and just always doing it.

And so I think hearing that, and running into people that I see daily, and folks that know my name and say, "Hey," on the side of the road that I've just met just a few weeks ago, that I guess the aha moment is that, that the, that everyone's watching.

Not only are they watching, but they want to know what's going on.

They want to also be a part of it.

And that's really cool to me.

- So you think that maybe just in an oh so subtle way, you're sort of planting seeds and leaving an impression with some of these people?

- Well, that's the whole purpose of this place.

Not to tell people, "Hey, you should be a farmer."

But "Hey, look what we've done with this backyard, and look how many people we're feeding by growing the food here."

We see attitude changes and idea changes all the time, just from the folks that we work with, just by saying like "You haven't tried a cucumber before, just try it."

And just seeing that, seeing that whole world open for them.

- Cool.

- And that's a good part too.

- [Joe] If it sounds like maybe there's a lot more going on at Elm Street Gardens than just growing vegetables, there absolutely is.

He may not believe in tilling his beds, but Robert saw a lot of other long standing things that could use a good turning over too.

- Middle Georgia, across this belt that runs across middle of Georgia into Alabama and all the way through Mississippi was known as the Black Belt.

There was a alluvial soil here and it was wonderful farming soil.

And so this has been an agricultural community from the time this place was founded.

So in the late 1700s, people started farming here.

Well, we all know the history of our plantations and our slavery and all of that stuff, so what this place is doing is reintroducing agriculture into an agricultural community, but at the same time, there's a large part of the community that is resisting that, because of the negativity that surrounded the early life of African-Americans in America.

Well, we can't do anything about that.

I mean, we're here and now from my perspective, but that's easy for a Caucasian to say, not so easy for African-Americans, because of their heritage.

And so what Suzy and I have done is think about what we can do every day that's right for the community.

And so our actions here are not just a bunch of white people from Atlanta amusing ourselves, but a bunch of old white people from Atlanta trying to do stuff that's positive in the community.

And that includes race relations.

(soft music) - [Joe] And so the Currey's, fueled by their love of the town they now call home, and blessed by the considerable resources of a lifetime of success are making good on their desire to do something impactful that lifts up an entire community, and they keep stumbling onto new ways to do it.

- Sparta mushrooms, what an interesting business.

And this is a business founded on the basis of our need in the community to employ people.

That was the start.

And what we did was with Jonathan Tescher, who was then at Georgia Organics.

Jonathan started looking at the agricultural statistics and found that the metropolitan Atlanta area was a big user of mushrooms, and there weren't very many local growers.

That was how Sparta Mushrooms was born.

Jonathan and I put together Sparta Mushrooms on a pure business basis, neither one of us having ever grown a mushroom in our lives.

- [Joe] That's because growing mushrooms is hard.

It requires a precise set of growing conditions, an exact scientific balance of darkness and humidity that's difficult to find in nature in any real size.

So Robert thought outside the box and inside a historic building in Sparta.

In the 1890s, it was a cotton warehouse sited near the all-important rail line.

After the cotton crash, it became a furniture factory of all things.

Leave it to the lifetime furniture man turned farmer to restore the building, install movable climate controlled greenhouses, and convert the whole place into an indoor mushroom farm.

- So our Shiitake production begins on Tuesday through Thursday.

Pretty much every week we'll come through, grab the blocks, clip the mushrooms that are ready to pick, put the blocks back down, and let the ones that are immature form over the next couple of days.

And by Thursday, every block is stripped down and we go ahead and compost that, and turn it into soil fertility for Elm Street Gardens across the street.

So it kind of closes our loop and begins their loop.

So every Friday morning, we'll empty our Shataki harvest spoons into boxes, and weigh them out to five pounds each, and they'll hit the road for Atlanta for delivery.

There are a few smaller producers of locally grown, certified organic mushrooms, but not year round and not in the consistency that we offer here.

There's not much of anything like us in the Southeast.

We're kind of a unique thing.

There's a lot of moving parts involved with growing mushrooms and not a lot of people have the ability to build the infrastructure to do what we do.

(soft music) - Don't get any of this confused with long-term planning.

Long-term planning here is about 90 days.

We weren't planning anything.

We were just moving through life and things happen.

And what happened was we started this garden and we started growing a lot of stuff.

We started selling it.

We were looking at the community.

We were trying to figure out what we could do in the community that would make a difference.

And so the vehicle to do all of this stuff, ultimately became Elm Street Gardens and Sparta Mushrooms.

(soft music) This agricultural umbrella, it's awfully meaningful here.

We are doing good work in our community and growing great food, so what's not to like?

We ain't talking about planning, we're talking about doing.

And what's happening here, both with Sparta Mushrooms and Elm Street Gardens is we're doing stuff.

It may be good for the community, but boy it's been really meaningful to us, and whether everybody agrees with that and they don't, I don't think.

I don't know, but I know that for Suzy and I, the experience of working in Sparta has been maybe, I think, one of the most meaningful parts of our lives.

(soft music) - The urban farming movement is blossoming and not just in big cities.

What started out as a part-time hobby for a recently retired couple in their new home has become something much more.

It's feeding an entire community, maybe just a few neighbors at a time for now, but it's growing every day.

And it's changing lives in a very real way by providing not just fresh food, but hope for a town that was at risk of being suffocated by the past.

Thanks for watching everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l and we'll see you back here next time for more "Growing a Greener World."

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Growing a Greener World" is made possible in part by.

(upbeat music) - [Woman] The Subaru Crosstrek.

Designed with adventure in mind.

Built in a zero-landfill plant, so you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru, proud sponsor of "Growing a Greener World."

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] And the following, Rainbird, Corona Tools, and Milorganite.

- [Joe] Can you start again?

Let's just let that sound go away.

- It's a farm.

(Robert laughing) - Well that's, that's a truck stop.

- In the city, in the city.

- Yeah this is.

Listen, this is an urban farm in a country town, and we have these noises and these people are trying to edit out the reality of life.

And I'm working with 'em folks as best I can, but I don't know what I can do with this one boy.

Okay now.

- That's me.

(both laughing) - Sorry.

- No, that's great.

That's beautiful.

- [Narrator] Continue the garden learning from "Growing a Greener World," Joe Lamp'l's Online Gardening Academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels from the fundamentals to master skills.

You can take each class on your own schedule from anywhere, plus opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

To enroll go to growingagreenerworld.com/learn.