As it happens, the city appears closer to realizing the former. Backing for new community food gardens comes from the one person who can seemingly create green space out of thin air. That would be Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose sustainability initiative, PlaNYC, calls for city agencies to identify vacant parcels that may be reclaimed for urban agriculture. Perhaps 100 potential sites should be evaluated by spring, said Edie Stone, who heads the vetting process as the director of GreenThumb, the community garden program at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
Food-garden proposals have also sprouted from the offices of City Council speaker Christine C. Quinn (FoodWorks) and Manhattan borough president Scott M. Stringer (FoodNYC). Closer to the grass roots (which is not a pun), the Brooklyn garden-advocacy group 596 Acres has created a Web database and a signposting program to bring empty city lots into tillage. With all the new stake-claimers, “We get probably three or four requests a week,” Ms. Stone said. “That’s probably the most it’s ever been.”
Ms. Stone, 46, expresses great gratitude for all the official backing. After all, she buried years of her life in the fight against the last mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and his late-’90s scheme to sell off the city’s gardens.
Yet it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Bloomberg and his colleagues will have the time this fall to drive an old Ford F-150 to Mott Haven with a load of mulch, and then stick around to prune the peach trees.
Who will actually do these jobs is an interesting question, and one that hasn’t necessarily been asked amid the blossoming of enthusiasm. “Everybody’s assuming there’s an infinite list of people waiting for a spot to garden,” Ms. Stone said. “I’m not convinced.”
Of course, she added, “Everything we find in Williamsburg is going to have 100 people on a list.” Yet new grangers aren’t likely to stumble upon free lots between the canteens on Bedford Avenue. “Are those people going to get on a train and go to East New York?”
Perhaps someday, Ms. Stone said, but “I haven’t found them yet.”
There is some evidence, in fact, that the bulk of New Yorkers do not have an unlimited appetite for growing their own kale. Official counts of New York gardens are fragmentary. But John Ameroso, the Johnny Appleseed of the New York community garden movement, suspects that the number of present-day gardens — around 800 — may be half what it was in the mid-1980s.
In his long career as an urban extension agent for Cornell University, Mr. Ameroso, 67, kept a log with ratings of all the plots he visited. “I remember that there were a lot of gardens that were not in use or minimally used,” he said. “Into the later ’80s, a lot of these disappeared or were abandoned. Or maybe there was one person working them. If nothing was developed on them, they just got overgrown.”
The truth, Ms. Stone said, is that at any given time, perhaps 10 percent of the city’s current stock of almost 600 registered GreenThumb gardens is growing mostly weeds. “In East New York, I can tell you that there are basically many gardens that are barely functioning now.”
This fact is no slight on the neighborhood, she emphasized. GreenThumb has a will and a way to revitalize these public spaces. As for actual financing — well, there’s a lot of compost to go around. GreenThumb runs on a budget of $600,000 to $800,000 a year, Ms. Stone said, mostly with federal Community Development Block Grants designated for poorer neighborhoods. From this pool, a typical garden receives about $600 in support and materials. The entire GreenThumb staff, including seasonal employees, numbers 15 to 20 people.
Presumably, after the gardens’ excessive watering this week, GreenThumb staff members will be especially busy for the next month or two (or six). GreenThumb’s deputy director, Roland Chouloute, reported that organizers will field calls from gardeners, with “requests and photos describing the situations they need help with.” Land Restoration Program crews will then “assist with tree pruning and cleaning, and fence repair.”
Yet by necessity and by design, the gardens are largely on their own. And so are the gardeners. It is volunteers who shoulder the responsibility to maintain the lots and open the gates to the public for 20 hours a week (between Apr. 1 and Oct. 31). A 2009 survey, commissioned by GreenThumb, found that the average community garden listed 29 members on its official rolls. But many gardens — nearly 10 percent, in fact — struggle to meet the 10-person minimum that the agency requires to renew each group’s registration.
In other words, before acres of pavement can turn into urban farmland, someone will have figure out how to grow a healthy crop of urban farmers.

"Dikutip dari sebuah tulisan sangat menginspirasi" 
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO