The Tower Grove Farmers’ Market and Bazaar in St. Louis is not only a community center piece, but a regional one. And the group is candidly joining a nation-wide line of community-minded organizations who are in economic straits and need support.

Understanding that there are many worthy groups asking for assistance these days, the one that organizes the Tower Grove market is asking, in particular, for those who already value what it creates in the St. Louis region — shoppers and friends who stop by, even just twice a season — to consider stepping forward. The support can be monetary or otherwise.

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Here in St. Louis, Backdoor Harvest seems to agree. And that’s fantastic news for me — and novice gardeners like me — because I’ve got almost no idea what I’m doing when I start digging into my yard.

Lucky me, my wife, who knows a little more than I do about plunging seeds and such into our tiny backyard plot, enjoys doing the research to figure these things out. Even luckier for us, Backdoor Harvest is hanging its open-for-business shingle in the coming days, just to help urban growers, even ones as inexperienced as in the Williams household.

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Spring is coming. In the Midwest, as in the other currently cold areas of the United States, that makes a difference.

As I think about expanding my own, as of yet, modest urban food and plant growing efforts, it’s a massive inspiration to review the work of the Dervaes family in Pasadena, Calif.

The family has popped up here and there on sustainablog.org in the past several months. You can listen to GreenTalk Radio host Sean Daily’s conversation with them, or read about the family’s 100-Foot Diet Challenge, as posted by sustainablogger Brian Baughan last month.

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Everyone knows the very tastiest tomatoes are homegrown, lovingly staked and watered at regular intervals until they’re big and red and ripe. Until recently, such simple pleasures were reserved for rural dwellers but the growing movement for urban farming is starting to change all that. While container gardens and green rooftops have made urban agriculture more common, a new system called a Portable Farm may take it a step further.

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Yes, gardening in hot, steamy Florida is — to be charitable — a challenge. My own summertime gardening efforts (I live in northwest Florida) yielded a pretty sad harvest: four or five beans, a dozen tiny strawberries that the snails usually got to first and a reliable supply of chives from a flowerpot. July and August are simply too brutal around here.

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Located downtown near Union Station, City Seeds employs clients of the St. Patrick Center, a non-profit that “provides opportunities for self-sufficiency and dignity to persons who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.” Combining hands-on farming with horticultural classes, the farm attempts to empower these people with skills they can use to build independence.

The farm’s workers aren’t the only economically disadvantaged people that benefit from its harvest, though. Vegetable seedlings grown in the farm’s hoop houses are distributed to community and backyard gardeners. And, the farm also serves as a distribution point for a pilot food distribution program that provides rural farmers with access to inner city markets: a low-cost CSA-type program provides weekly boxes of fresh produce to residents in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods for $7 a week.

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To me, the fact that an urban farmer leading a nonprofit for the benefit of teaching communities to grow, in a slew of meaningful ways, can receive such a prestigious fellowship — and the associated financial boon — is remarkable.

Along with Allen, there was a saxophonist genius, a lighting designer genius, a neuroscientist genius, an astronomer genius, a fiber artist genius, a geriatrician genius and on and on.

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One of 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2008, Allen will receive the $500,000 over the next five years. The financial award is designed to give Fellows a level of financial independence so they can “accelerate their current activities or take their work in new directions,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.

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Lovers of fresh eggs and healthy compost will have some limitations on their chicken-keeping capabilities, though. Each residence is limited to no more than six chickens (sorry, roosters, you’re out: it’s your loud crowing that sealed the deal). Birds also must be kept in secure enclosures that are at least 15 feet from the property line. (That’s probably also a benefit for the chickens, though, just in case the next-door neighbor has a poultry-hating dog or cat.)

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Image courtesy of Chris Oliver

My Farm does all the work, and depending on how much your garden produces, you can get a box of goodies weekly, and also have My Farm chefs make a fresh food feast out of what you and others produce. And what if you don’t have a back yard? The garden’s collective harvest exceeds the needs of the garden owners, so My Farm provides CSA style veggie boxes as well.

While this is all a lovely idea, their intention here is beyond that.

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