This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 14, 2012 - Carlos Villarreal is a photo lab manager, and his wife, Jeri, is an IT worker. Each morning before heading to their day jobs, and again in late afternoon, they take on the roles of urban farmers, cultivating and harvesting vegetables grown on a lot that they own in the 4500 block of Delmar Boulevard.
The Villarreals, in their 30s, had begun raising food in back of their home in University City more than a year ago because their three young children suffer from food allergies.
"We wanted to take control over what we were eating," says Jeri Villarreal.
The initial effort morphed into Our City Farm, which produces and sells several varieties of non-genetically modified vegetables. The St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority gladly sold the couple the city-owned lot for the farm because it offered the agency a way to put vacant property back on the tax rolls.
Jeri Villarreal says Our City Farm is a unique venture, offering consumers unusual varieties of broccoli, turnips, beets, lettuce, Swiss chard, kale, tomatoes, and summer squash.
"You can get broccoli in the grocery store, but you can't get purple broccoli and white eggplants and the different types of vegetables that we grow," she says.
In addition to producing vegetables at the Delmar site, the couple still maintain a pen of heritage hens behind their home. The hens have names, such as Hen-rietta and Buff, Dominique and Eagle, to match their personalities, Jeri Villarreal says. She calls them "happy hens" that lay healthy eggs because they get sufficient fresh air, space to move about, dirt to walk on, and organic feed. She also notes that the different breeds lay eggs in colors ranging from olive to blue to green to chocolate.
"We're not raising egg machines; we are raising hens with personality and great temperament," she says. "We wanted something that was not only good for you but something that you couldn't just pick up in a local grocery store."
She takes pride in the fact that both the produce and eggs are certified as naturally grown. She says the certification is important because "we want our customers to trust that their food is free of pesticides, herbicides, and that we are following wholesome growing practices."
The couple hopes to eventually create a collection of small farms specializing in varieties of vegetables and eggs that aren't common in St. Louis. One of their aims is to put more high quality vegetables on the tables of area residents, although most of their customers come from outside the neighborhood and outside the city.
"When we started raising food for ourselves, I began to think that everybody should have access to this type of food," she says. "My degrees is in business, so that's what I'm thinking. People are in business selling things that are less wholesome, so it should be just as easy to sell something that is."
The work during this first summer of farming at the Delmar site has been far from easy, mostly because the couple hadn't counted on an unprecedented heat wave.
During early spring, "everything was growing like crazy," she says. But water became an issue. Because there was no longer a tap at the Delmar address, the coupled had routinely filled a 125 gallon container to bring water to the site. That might have worked well except for the fact that this summer turned out to be the hottest on record.
"We'd water it twice a day, morning and evening, and that wasn't enough. We'd put down 80 seeds and maybe 10 would germinate. We had to keep trying over and over to get things to grow. It was just too hot."
They recently spent about $6,000 to install a tap at the site to make certain plenty of water is available.
Carlos Villarreal was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and his wife grew up in St. Louis. Neither had farming experience, but both say the venture has made them appreciate the taste and purity of naturally grown food. It was her idea to market some of the vegetables to customers through a prepaid plan.
"I think my husband and I are a perfect match," she says. "He's very supportive if I have something that I'm passionate about."
The project has required lots of labor, she says. In addition to hours put in during the week, she and her husband usually work in the garden all day Saturday and a couple of hours each Sunday. The tradeoff, she says, is giving consumers tasty and healthy new gastronomical experiences.
She's looking toward a future of broadening the business venture by educating and informing people in and around the neighborhood about untapped opportunities to grow and market new varieties of vegetables under the Our City Farm label.
"We want to show people why they need to pay more attention to the food that they are putting in their bodies," she says. "It's amazing that we don't try to preserve what has been given to us."
