Needham Farmer Digging up Dedham Gardens - With Permission

When most people think about local farmers markets, they think of giant fields in rural areas of Massachusetts growing everything from corn to cucumbers to tomatoes.

But for two years, Kate Canney garners the help and land of neighborhood homeowners in Dedham to bring locally grown food to market.

Sitting on a white igloo cooler underneath the only refuge from the sun on a hot August market day in Dedham Square, Canney said the idea hit her as she drove around the area and noticed backyard gardens of residential houses.

"People had really nice yards. A lot of them were organic, they clearly weren't using lawn chemicals, good sun, I thought, 'I could dig up all those yards. I could grow a lot of food on those lawns,'" she said.

Long before Canney began Neighborhood Farms in 2008, she had wanted to become an organic vegetable farmer.

"But living in Needham, I wasn't able to find land anywhere around here that was millions of dollars and destined for subdivisions," she said.

So Canney turned to those neighborhoods, and the houses with "really nice yards" – 10 in all, two in Dedham – and began growing organic vegetables in what she calls market gardens.

Canney pins the smallest garden at 500 square feet – the size of a small studio apartment – and the largest at one-third of an acre.

Neighborhood Farms, comprised of Canney, her wife and business partner Jude Zmolek and friends that make up the volunteer crew manage the gardens for the homeowners.

They spend their long days digging up yards, planting seeds, nurturing the plants, picking them when they're ripe and bringing them to the Dedham Farmers Market, and a farmers market in Roslindale on Saturdays, Canney said.

The days are long, and the travel is more than a typical farmer with the market gardens spread throughout a couple of towns, but that has crop rotation benefits, the farmer said.

"I have so much less insect issues because I'm able to move stuff," Canney said. "Where in a traditional field, you may be rotating 100 yards. Well, insects they can go 100 yards too."

Canney said she is the only farmer in the area that she knows of that runs market gardens with this type of model. Since market gardens don't require large farm space that just doesn't exist in the surrounding area, most weeks Neighborhood Farms is the closest vendor at Dedham's farmers market.

Homeowners that allow Canney to dig up their lawns earn credit toward free vegetables – even from other gardens.

Market gardens aren't without limitations, however. Corn requires a mass amount of space in one location to make it worth a farmer's time to grow it – a stalk will only have one or two ears of corn. So you won't see much corn at the Neighborhood stand anytime soon.

It also takes massive amounts of paperwork and diagramming. Canney said her home is filled with plans scrawled on Post-It notes for each farm that she and Zmolek draw up each winter for the coming season.

Zmolek, 43, comes from a different background. She didn't always want to be an organic farmer like Canney. But since she started, Zmolek has become the researcher of how to perfectly grow different kinds of vegetables.

This year, she focused on garlic, and spends her Wednesday afternoons explaining to customers the difference between "grocery garlic" and garlic Neighborhood Farms brings to the table.

She's spent two years learning garlic, how to keep it for longer, unique varieties that bring different tastes to people's tongues, and recipes for garlic – including garlic cheesecake and garlic ice cream. (Ask her before you knock it.)

"Now I'm working on beans, and things that take more attention like radishes and carrots," Zmolek said.

An advantage of market gardens and hyperlocal growing lies beneath the plant in the soil, Zmolek said.

"We can put a little more attention into the soil, because the gardens are smaller," she said. "The flavor comes from soil."

While Zmolek focuses on garlic, Canney's "thing" is tomatoes – particularly the ugly heirloom ones that both women spend time convincing customers that the multicolored, multi-shaped tomatoes are delicious and fresh.

Canney, 34, said the market gardens are not certified organic, although they are organic. The paperwork to become certified would be too much as the process means talking to all abutters of the gardens, she said.

"Since we come to market, we feel comfortable just talking to our customers, and they know how we grow," she said.

But with their days already filled with farming, Canney and Zmolek don't plan to expand in the near future, but that doesn't mean the demand isn't there to add more gardens to the rotation.

"I've had hundreds of offers to dig up yards because people really want their lawns to be productive," Canney said. "The community response has been great."