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Editorial: Find Palm Beach urban farm a new home

We urge the city to work with Mr. Bosley and community volunteers who might join in, to plant a new, sustainable urban garden before uprooting the old one.

The Palm Beach Post
Editorial Board
Oct 6, 2021

Excerpt:

For seven years, West Palm Beach’s urban farm has brought a spot of green, purple and red to a weedy lot by the railroad tracks, in a humble, historic neighborhood where an overlay of street crime makes life tough but hasn’t suppressed a generational sense of community.

Sadly the city, by executive authority of Mayor Keith James, has given urban farmer Stewart Bosley has a couple of weeks to clear out.

“The city chose not to renew the lease to explore other opportunities and land purposes that will address other long-standing, critical needs in the city,” said a statement from the Mayor’s Office. The city sees the acre and a half as a potential site for housing for downtown workers, or for transitional apartments for the homeless. It’s considering other possible sites for a community garden.

The garden has been a worthy complement to the neighborhood, which would be poorer without it.

On the site of long-demolished apartments a mile north of downtown’s glitzier streetscapes, the garden took root as a way to provide fresh, low-cost vegetables for residents, many of whom don’t have cars and who strained in the South Florida heat to trek the two miles to the nearest Publix. The modest operation was conceived by Vietnam War Marine veteran Bosley, to whom the city initially leased the land for $10 a month, and more recently $25 a month.

Along the way the city also paid a few thousand dollars for a water hook-up. Soil contaminated by commercial uses of decades past was hauled away. A grant was about to help build a greenhouse to supplement the ground plantings. “Boz”, as the former TV ad salesman is known in the community, estimates he pitched in $50,000 of his own money to keep the garden going.

Read the complete article here.