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It’s a warm autumnal afternoon in Buenos Aires, ash leaves dot the pavement and sun streams between the mid-rise buildings in the hip barrio of Palermo. At Huerta Luna de Enfrente, a sustainable urban community allotment, a small group of green-fingered neighbours are taking advantage of the amiable weather to transplant seedlings into 30-cubic-metre vegetable beds, while a father and his two children drop by to empty a bag of eggshells into a composter.
Taking its name from legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ 1925 poetry anthology, just two months ago this urban garden was an unseemly concrete corner located on a slice of prime Buenos Aires real estate. Dimly lit at night, with a few unkempt benches and little else going for it, Plazoleta Luna de Enfrente was a magnet for boozy dossers, football hooligans, frisky teenagers and far worse. It was high-time someone showed this neglected square some love; cue Pablo Rivero, the restaurateur behind Parrilla Don Julio, located a block away, who wanted to give something back to the local community.
Rivero has long lived in this part of Argentina’s busy capital. In his early 20s, he lived on the second floor above the steak house and today lives a short walk away. Over the years he’s seen this public space deteriorate and, ultimately, be rejected by the people who should most enjoy it, the community.
“I’ve worked a block away for 21 years and it had become a meaningless plaza – local residents were afraid to go there,” he says. “We wanted to revitalise this place, improving it to create a community garden that forms new connections with agriculture, local schools, neighbours and our cooks. The aim is to transform the place we live in and create a virtuous circle for anybody who wants to get involved.”
Photo by: Government of the City of Buenos Aires
Rivero’s dream for this square to flourish took root when Buenos Aires City Hall passed the Ley de Agricultura Urbana (Urban Agriculture Law) last December. Together with Guido Tassi, culinary director of Don Julio – which ranked first in Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants 2020 list – and El Preferido de Palermo (fun fact: it’s name-checked in that aforementioned Borges anthology), they proposed to godfather a new scheme, committing the gastronomic group to creating, investing in and caring for Huerta Luna de Enfrente until 2026.
Led by a professional gardener tasked with taking a sustainable organic and biodynamic approach toward agriculture, it’s the first such private-public initiative in the barrio of Palermo, one that City Hall surely hopes to roll out across the city.
A key part of the agreement ensures the fruits of all joint agricultural efforts are strictly destined for comedores (soup kitchens), ONGs and social projects based in Palermo; second in line are neighbours. The end destination for root veggies such as carrots, herbs including mint, and leafy veg such as arugula, fuelled passionate discussion among residents in local media, some wrongly believing the square was being privatised for the two restaurants to reap the harvests. That was never the intention, indeed any such action would break the sponsorship agreement, says Tassi.
“As the initiative’s godparents, we proposed to City Hall that we would invest in and maintain a garden that solely benefits the community; neither restaurant will ever receive any produce,” he says.
At the end of February, carpenters busily constructed ten purpose-built raised vegetable planters and four composters on site; at the start of March, Ana Armendariz, a gardener who has managed an array of community gardens and worked with psychiatric patients and former inmates, began working three days a week to create a biointensive cultivation map. While she plans the biodynamic calendar – the first seedlings to be planted according to the lunar phases included garlic, fennel, chard, chives, kale, beans and potatoes – she also runs workshops on agroecology and healthy eating habits for school children and local residents. Later this autumn, Armendariz will introduce the ancient Central American milpa cultivation system to sow corn, bean and gourd seedlings.
Photo by: Government of the City of Buenos Aires
Like many metropolises during the pandemic, community gardens have sprouted up in Buenos Aires, from around 13 to 33, but Huerta Luna de Enfrente stands out for being sustainable and well organised. “While some other community projects are anarchic and spontaneous, with people planting whatever they please, this is a pedagogical garden and one of its goals is to donate its ingredients,” says Armendariz.
In a city that manages to recycle 46 percent of 6,000 tons of waste produced daily, neighbours are encouraged to bring their organic residues to feed the four composters, which in turn fill the raised vegetable beds. And besides breathing new life into Huerta Luna de Enfrente with an additional 55 m2 of greenery, local fauna is also flourishing, bees and butterflies darting and floating around the chamomile and lettuces. Sooner or later, it seems everyone will be winning, comedores and ONGs receiving tasty organic veggies, green-fingered neighbours whose view has been much improved and the urban ecosystem, all coming together to form a new community.
“This was a lost public space, but by September it will be filled with life,” adds Armendariz.
Huerta Luna de Enfrente opens to the public daily from 10am-6pm, Gurruchaga and Soler, Palermo, Buenos Aires.
