Welcome to Food City, a city garden dedicated to producing produce, finding friends, and cultivating culture.
Reserve a garden bed for the entire growing season - first come, first serve.
Beds are $30 for the year. All proceeds go to improvements and tools for Food City operation.
For questions, please email: foodcitypgh@gmail.com
Views from Food City
About Food City
Our Community Garden
Food City is a permaculture forest garden created in Summer 2012 by the Food City Fellows program of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. It is a quarter of an acre (10,821 square feet) located on four vacant lots- two owned by Community Association of Spring Garden- Deutschown (CASGED) and two in the process of being purchased by them, and two privately owned lots in the East Deutschtown neighborhood. The cross streets are Tripoli Street, Retail Way and Lovitt Way. TRALI- Three Rivers Agricultural Land Initiative, which is a partnership between Grow Pittsburgh and the Allegheny Land Trust, is in the process of purchasing all the lots to preserve Food City as a garden indefinitely.
Food City is run by neighborhood volunteers and currently hosts twenty gardeners. In 2022, four new garden beds were formed and two new gardeners joined. Future goals include repairing parts of the now 11 year old fence, restoring the Children’s Garden, and planting flowering perennials in each garden bed and on the exterior perimeter around the fence. There is space for at least 3-5 more garden beds upon weeding certain overgrown areas. The site currently hosts a 10 year-old hazelnut tree, a beautiful redbud tree, a healthy fruiting cherry tree and a soapberry tree, the berries of which we hope to harvest next fall and provide free laundry soap for all! There is a large blackberry patch, raspberries and strawberries, with room for more. Each gardener grows a variety of vegetables, herbs and fruits. We have free mulch delivered each season for the garden beds, and we mulch the paths as well. We plan to increase the number of fruiting trees and bushes while still ensuring ample sunlight for gardeners to grow full-sun plants.
We hope to reach out to the waiting lists of other community gardens to recruit additional gardeners. Having support in creating a comprehensive landscape design that incorporates a biodiverse array of native and low-maintenance flowering plants would be incredibly helpful to the project!