Rosie Willis stood amid 54 garden beds filled with tomatoes, collard greens, okra, and sweet potatoes that she needs volunteers to help her dig. This was once just another vacant, overgrown lot in the poverty-stricken JeffVanderLou neighborhood of North St. Louis. Now it’s Fresh Starts Community Garden, a thriving grower that has sold to vendors like Metro Market, a nonprofit grocery store housed in a bus that sells fresh fruits and vegetables in food deserts around the city.
“This garden has truly been blessed,” said Willis, the Fresh Starts founder. “It’s here—it will be 11 years old next year, and we are steadily looking for ways that we can expand it westward.” She added, “The thing that bothers me the most about this is we don’t get the community participation that I wish we would, that I am prayerful we eventually will.”
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