Cleveland Homesteaders Aim to Bring Fresh Food to New Markets Across the City

If Eugene Miller still thinks about one doctor’s visit, it was the one in 2011.

Miller was in his early thirties, and had landed a seat on Cleveland City Council two years prior. Shortly after taking the seat, Miller started getting bad headaches, pain in odd spurts. He lost 60 pounds in two years.

“My doctor told me, ‘Live or die’,” Miller recalled. His physician eventually narrowed the cause down to Miller’s diet and his love of fast food. “He said, ‘Look at your blood pressure, look at your cholesterol. ‘You control what you eat, you control what you put in your mouth.’”

“I wasn’t paying attention to fruits and vegetables,” Miller said. “Not one bit.”

Thirteen years later, Miller, now 49, is one of thousands of community gardeners with plots inside city limits. There on a section of a former car lot off East 185th and St. Clair in Collinwood is where Miller spends a decent chunk of his week, attending to about two dozen outdoor containers of fruits and vegetables—tomatoes, watermelon, kale—and a neat row of gated fruit trees. Any plant, he said, “that can survive in our climate.”

But Miller’s pursuit of growing healthy food himself in the past four years was, like anyone who believes gardening is largely a passive act, not without outside guidance. Last spring, he enlisted the help of Veronica and Michael Walton, a married duo that manages a close-knit group of gardeners on Cleveland’s East Side. Homesteaders, as the Waltons like to call those like Miller who have taken up the hobby and benefited from instruction during the pandemic years.

But some are thinking of it as much more than a hobby. Miller can see the next step of his four-year experiment in Collinwood: fashioning his car lot garden into an enterprise that could make him money. Locally.
[content-1] “Should I give my produce away to some restaurants or sell it? That's where my mind is,” Miller said, fandangling with a series of water hoses in his beige straw hat. “I’m that homesteader who's trying to figure out how to provide food for myself and sell it to others.”

Though Cleveland has had city programs to pay volunteer urban gardeners for growing in city-owned plots since the 1970s, selling one’s own homegrown collard greens and oregano has taken on a new meaning against the backdrop of post-Covid economics and global inflation.

The economic landscape, as you may have heard, is giving headaches at the checkout aisle. Compared to early 2020, grocery prices across the U.S. are up 20 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with fruits and vegetables up about 15 percent. Pandemic-era stockpiling, spiking delivery costs, staffing issues, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2021—a perfect storm of factors has led to many wondering how they’ll afford to fill their fridges.

A sense of unease that food economists say won’t be alleviated anytime soon. “We’re not going to go back to prices that we were used to before Covid,” David Ortega, a professor at Michigan State University, told the New York Times last week.

But is homesteading—growing enough food to slash hundreds from your annual grocery costs—an actual doable alternative? Seeds and raised planters are startup costs. Soil needs to be professionally tested. Land permits have to be obtained. With larger plots, homesteaders may need a farming number—accreditation, per se—from the USDA.

“You got to make time to do it,” Rufus Hill, 35, a chef at Wake Robin who lives in East Cleveland, told Scene standing before his plot of Idaho potatoes. “If you say that you want to do something, then you have to make time to do it.”

“But really, it’s not an industry for most people,” Hill added. “It’s why it’s more of a hobby.”

It’s against that paradigm where the Waltons seem to come in. Running community gardens since the Great Recession, the two stepped up in 2020 to blossom a network of East Side homesteaders with free time or simple intrigue in how to grow a tomato. Veronica headquartered the group of about 20 in Gateway 105, a one-room, indoors farmer’s market in Glenville she’s managed with Mike’s help for almost a decade and a half.

Like Miller and Hill, many of the Waltons’ proteges often brush up against Summer Sprout and Master Gardener, two support programs funded by the City of Cleveland and run by a team of volunteers at Ohio State. The former subsidizes Cleveland’s stock of 3,300 community gardeners with translucent hoop greenhouses and rakes and trowels; the latter trains the intrigued with an academic lens.

But this year brought a flurry of problems. In August, Summer Sprout ended due to “funding complications,” its website reads. (Which have persisted for two years, several homesteaders told Scene.) And the Master Gardener course, despite its “plant clinics” and lofty aim of “beautifying the community,” the Waltons said, inevitably falls short of the prime mover behind keeping homesteading alive and active.

“Yes, they offer a program that community is involved in. But it’s not a learning circle,” Veronica Walton said from a table at Gateway 105, in early August. “And that's not a real good engine for economic growth.”

Lena Boswell, 70, who’s mastered the art of growing Southern greens since her family relocated to East Cleveland from Athens, Georgia, agreed. Summer Sprout beneficiaries aren’t, after all, allowed to make money. “We are trying to turn our communities into these economic engines,” Boswell said, “so that they can take care of themselves.”

“I mean, we got to be able to sell this produce,” she said.

Jin Powers, 38, who balances a job at Marc’s in Cleveland Heights with tending to the Trinity Church garden off East 35th and Cedar, put most of her concern on Summer Sprout. “The funding for all of us,” she said, holding a bundle of zucchini. “And if they don't put more money aside to allow growers to grow for themselves, then we're not gonna grow.”

Both the funding freeze and the allure of growing produce during inflation puts homesteaders in a difficult place. Without the micro grants coming in to fuel those raised beds or that starter pear tree, many might not see that bridge to making actual money. And for everyone Scene talked to, revenue is the difference between growing basil on your porch and cultivating four rows of collard greens.

Let alone trying to solve the perils of food deserts. Like the closure of Dave’s Asiatown location in 2021, or the shuttering of Rite Aids and CVS locations across the city today, the few grocery chains that sit in East Side plazas—mostly Save-A-Lots and Family Dollars—only call homesteaders further into action to turn their operations inward.

“Being from Glenville especially, it’s only Dollar Stores and a couple barbecue spots. There’s nowhere to get real, fresh food,” Rodre'Ana Chapman, a 31-year-old health coach who grows potatoes in Mentor, told Scene. “If we don’t do it ourselves, it’s not gonna get done.”

That spirit is found throughout all of the seven homesteaders Scene interviewed: that, regardless of outside subsidies, of grocers blaming low population densities for not building, or of naysayers who don’t think their watermelons would be fit for market—there’s a sense of ownership.

Which may best be seen through Miller and his former car lot in Collinwood.

No longer that Ward 10 politician—Miller closed his political career in 2013, after giving his seat up to Jeff Johnson—Miller has seemed to catch energy for his new business.

Last winter, he converted a party bus into a "mobile farm" to grow peppers. (It didn’t work.) He bought a hoop greenhouse to grow fall crops. He regularly texts the Waltons for produce diagnoses. Why a watermelon won’t grow. (It needed to be raised off a tire.) Why a tomato attracted a ball of grey-green rot. (It "lacked calcium," he discovered.)

And Miller’s grand project: to convert the dilapidated building next door into his own indoor farmer’s market, complete with walk-in coolers and produce stands.

A big investment that’s led Miller to consider a tough question: Whether or not those in Collinwood will buy from him or stick to the chains.

“Sure, they trust Dave’s,” Miller said. He shielded his brow, and checked on contractors redoing the roof of his future market.

“It’s about trust,” he added. “They gotta trust you. It’s all like a relationship: nothing good in it comes without nurturing that relationship.”
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