By Sonia Rao

July 20, 2021

NEWPORT NEWS — Judge Graham knelt over a row of bare soil and the occasional yellow marigold, planting seeds. In a little over a month, he hopes, the bed near Zion Baptist Church will be bursting with ripe tomatoes. The tomatoes, and the rest of the food Graham and other volunteers are growing, will go to the surrounding community.

Graham was gardening on a recent Saturday morning in a farm run by Hampton Roads Urban Agriculture, which wants to create a healthy, sustainable food system in the neighborhood. The farm is a partnership between the church and the Newport News-based nonprofit, which is working to reduce food insecurity through farming and educational programming.

On Aug. 14, the farm will open its first farmers market, which will take EBT and SNAP payments.

“The ones that can afford to pay, fine, but I’m not gonna turn anybody away,” said Graham, who helped start the group. “Anybody that shows up is gonna go home with some groceries.”

The area around Zion Baptist is a food desert, said Renee Foster, founder of Hampton Roads Urban Agriculture. It has only one grocery store, a Piggly Wiggly, and many residents are low-income and don’t have transportation to drive elsewhere.

The garden has been around for four years and Hampton Roads Urban Agriculture has managed it for two. All of its workers are volunteers, including high school students, veterans and service members. This year, the farm is expected to grow about 3,500 pounds of produce. Graham and Foster also deliver food to older adults who can’t come out because of health concerns or a lack of transportation.

Graham said the farm is also a teaching garden, so he treats it as a place for visitors and volunteers to get hands-on experience.

On June 25, a group from the Coast Guard came to volunteer. This was the first time Petty Officer 2nd Class Stacey Maine gardened. But by the end of the hour, she was explaining how to weed and cut asparagus.

Some people drive from Norfolk, Chesapeake or Virginia Beach to volunteer.

On the left of the 34-by-100-foot garden is an orchard of peach, plum, apple, fig, pear, cherry and nectarine trees. Next to the orchard are rows of tomatoes, butternut squash, strawberries, asparagus and radishes, and a garden of herbs with basil, sage, lemongrass and stevia. At the back is a collection of chili, tabasco, habanero and ghost peppers. A sign says “Judge’s ’HOT Pepper Zone’ ” with an image of a skull and crossbones to warn children away. Children, Graham said, often mistake the peppers for strawberries.

Interspersed between the crops are bright pink, purple, red and yellow flowers. They bring in pollinators like bees and hummingbirds, Graham said.

The farm also has more than eight types of sweet potatoes, all donated by Clifton Slade, who owns Slade Farms in Surry. Slade donated 270 slips of sweet potatoes. Other donors include The Virginia Small Farm Resource Center, Tidewater Community College’s horticultural program and the Hampton Roads Agricultural Research and Extension Center. The farm gets the rest of its supplies from Norfolk Feed and Seed or Slade Farms. Everything the garden grows is organic, Graham said.

Foster said she’s excited to start hosting more events now that more people are vaccinated and pandemic restrictions have been lifted. The farm has been having movie nights when children can come to have fun and learn about the garden.

She hopes the market will turn enough of a profit so that she can put more food back into the ground. She’s also raising $10,000 to start a “Drones in Agriculture” program to introduce children to careers in agriculture, science, technology, engineering and math. Children will learn how to code and fly drones, which will be used for agriculture scanning — mapping out the layout of the garden and recording plant health.

Foster hopes eventually to raise enough money to hire a part-time farm manager and create more urban farms across Hampton Roads. She and the other board members of her group work full-time jobs, so managing even one is difficult.

“It takes many, many hands,” she said.

At the end of the day, the goal is to empower food-insecure communities to create and maintain access to healthy food.

“We don’t want to give them a handout,” Graham said. “We want to give them a hand up.”

Lead Photo: Volunteers weed a vegetable bed in a garden on Friday, June 25, 2021, near the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and 21st Street in Newport News, Va. The garden is a partnership between Hampton Roads Urban Agriculture and Zion Baptist Church. (Kaitlin McKeown/Virginia Media)