C'ville Foodscapes teaches customers how to grow own food

Every new business is bound to experience growing pains.

But a blister here or a few dirty fingernails there don’t compare to the smiles from satisfied customers plucking fresh vegetables from their own back yards.

“I knew I wanted to start growing my own food, but I didn’t know what the best way was to get started,” said Kim Wells, associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church.

She found C’Ville Foodscapes last spring, and the new business partners found the perfect spot right outside Wells’s front door.

“That was such a fun job,” said Patrick Costello, one of the founders and co-owners of C’ville Foodscapes. “She is wonderful.”

Wells’s garden was one of nearly 40 jobs the new business worked on during its first season.

“The jobs really vary,” Costello said. “Sometimes it’s designing and installing and even maintaining a garden for someone, and other times we will just be tilling a plot of land or a space on their property and they take it from there.

“Sometimes we are just doing watering for someone while they are on summer vacation.”

A significant portion of the work, however, was putting in new gardens — the main key to C’Ville Foodscapes’ goal of helping people grow healthy food using organic, sustainable methods.

A good-sized bed for a two-person home is about 32-square feet, Costello said. But size and shape don’t matter. It’s all about the sun.

“We really have worked with a wide variety of sizes and spaces,” he said. “We have done container gardens, we have worked around people’s decks and we have done things on their porches.

“Basically, what you need is some container or space that can have soil and that has about six hours a day of sunlight. So really, it is quite feasible for most people.”

Costello and his colleagues test the soil and bring in compost to amend it, if necessary, or they can build raised beds. For Wells, the front yard provided the best space for sunlight.

“Sam [Pierceall], Sky [Blue], and Kassia [Arbabi] went through some different options with me,” Wells said, “where I could plant, whether or not to use raised beds, how to connect an irrigation system to a rain barrel and how to lay out the garden design.

“They were able to help me make educated decisions about these things, and within just a few weeks, I was already harvesting my first cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squash. They were also really great at trouble shooting with me throughout the summer as I encountered the various challenges of pests, heat and drought.”

Costello said they try to leave people with a good amount of well-organized information because they want people to be able to grow their own food.

“We are not primarily interested in making a multi-billion-dollar corporation,” he said with a laugh. “We are in it because we want to see more people growing food in the city of Charlottesville. We are going to do whatever that takes to make sure people feel comfortable in that.”

The partners also are hoping to expand their Garden Grants Program. Last year they were able to give one family the gift of food. This year they hope to help more low-income individuals and families have their own gardens.

“As a business, we provide a variety of services to support people in growing food,” Costello said. “And then we team up with the local nonprofit the Quality Community Council.”

Through the council, people can make donations to help those less fortunate. Then others may apply to get a garden for free. Anybody who is on any kind of financial assistance is eligible to apply.

Costello and his new business partners all share that spirit of community.

“All of us didn’t really know each other before we started talking about this project,” he said. “We all sort of found each other through various channels and knew that we wanted to do some sort of urban agriculture project.”

They met each other in January 2009 and incorporated as a business in January 2010.

“We started with six people,” Costello said. “It was collectively conceived and collectively operated. The six of us all had various experience growing food and doing some permaculture design. A lot of us had experience doing some organizing work and doing some community-based projects.”

Blue and Arbabi lived and worked at Twin Oaks in Louisa County. Pierceall traveled Central America for three years before apprenticing with Radical Roots Farm in Keezletown.

“I had done quite a bit of growing,” said Costello, who also sidelines as an artist. “My mom has had a garden for most of my life and I have been gardening, personally, for a couple of years.”

He also worked with community gardeners in New York City.

“I had the opportunity to head up a program called Harvest for Neighborhoods, where I was planting beds that were used, then distributed the produce to local food pantries,” Costello said.

But he quickly pointed out that he “actually came into this business with the least amount of growing experience out of everyone that we started with.

“We each kind of came to this business with this really diverse set of ideas and skills, and so far it has worked incredibly well.”

At 25. Costello also is the youngest of the foursome that has continued into the second season.

“I definitely like living in Charlottesville,” said Costello, who moved here to go the University of Virginia. “It is almost impossible to escape being interested in local food.

“As I went to school here and went to the Farmer’s Market every Saturday, I became more and more interested in ways that we might build community around growing food and ways in which we could get more food grown inside a city.”

And in the houses. He grows the seedlings for C’Ville Foodscapes in his laundry room.

“We meet at each others houses,” he said. “We store all our materials at a place that we rent, but we don’t have a storefront, because most of the work that we do happens on site.”

They are working on spring gardens right now, preparing for brassicas like broccoli and kale plus onions, chard, beans arugula, carrots, beets. Then comes the summer staples. Tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber — all that gets planted in late April or early May, after the risk of frost.

“There are a number of things that we can work with people to do in their yards, whether they have gardens already — or if they want to start one but don’t know exactly where to start,” he said. “We can provide services to people at all levels of interest and experience and time and budget.”

The growing business seems to be fairing well for many.

“It’s been really great,” Costello said. “There are a couple of businesses like us that started at the same time and we have all done really well and have been able to thrive. “Charlottesville is a really awesome place to do work like this. People are really receptive.

“It feels great that we have all managed to carve out a niche and be successful. We are just happy now that business is still continuing to come in.”

Wells is one of those returning customers.

“Now we are planting this year’s spring bed,” Wells said. “I’m grateful to be in community with them.”