Trenton, a city of nearly 85,000 people, contains only one full-service supermarket. It is one New Jersey’s several food deserts, where access to groceries — let alone fresh produce — is scarce.

Now, as the coronavirus pandemic has provided some with more free time and plunged many more into poverty, local community groups and residents are getting their hands dirty to address the problem.

Urban gardens have experienced a boom in community interest and participation in recent months — more people are learning new skills, connecting with their neighbors and, importantly, helping to fill nutritional needs.

“People are very interested in growing their own food," said Jim Simon, the deputy director of the Trenton-based nonprofit Isles. "We’ve had more interest in people joining community gardens.”

Isles manages and supports about 70 gardens throughout Trenton, Simon said, with planting beds spreading across vacant lots, school yards, church grounds and community food pantries. Simon said Isles’s gardens support 200 people, and he estimates that Isles has seen a 25% increase in the number of people participating in its community garden programs this year.

Simon said while community gardeners grow produce for themselves, they are also donate much of their crop to neighbors in need. Isles itself donates to local food pantries, like the Mount Carmel Guild, he added.

In recent years, Isles launched a training garden program that serves as a year-long apprenticeship of sorts for 12 participants. Simon said the goal is to boost the number of skilled, experienced gardeners in the community, to ensure the the large network of gardens is properly cared for.

“It’s kind of training wheels for gardening,” Simon said of the program.

No fences

Paige Vaccaro, the founder of the nonprofit C.R.O.P.S. in Atlantic City, said that interest in her group’s gardens is booming this spring.

Atlantic City is another food desert. The resort city lacks a full-service supermarket, though that may change soon, as officials work to bring a ShopRite into the community.

C.R.O.P.S. manages four gardens around the city, with a total of nearly 60 raised beds. All of those beds are currently being used.

“They’re all in low socioeconomic neighborhoods,” Vaccaro said.

Much of the food grown by C.R.O.P.S. is donated, Vaccaro said, particularly to Covenant House, an organization that provides services to homeless young people.

Vaccaro said that anyone from the community is able to walk into the gardens and take produce they may need. There are no locks or fences around the beds.

“[They] can’t steal what belongs to them,” Vaccaro said.

C.R.O.P.S. also runs three farmers’ markets, Vaccaro said, in Atlantic City, Pleasantville and Linwood. The farmers’ markets accept SNAP and qualify for the Double Up Bucks program, she said, providing community members another option to bring home fresh food.

As COVID-19 restrictions linger, the Linwood location is open for online ordering and drive-thru pickup. Vaccaro said the Atlantic City and Pleasantville markets will reopen in July with walk-up services for SNAP customers.

In Camden, the Center for Environmental Transformation’s urban gardening program has also seen interest spike this year. Jonathan Compton, the group’s program director, that said the initiative, relaunched in 2019, has 10 beds planted this year at a garden in Liney Ditch Park, in the city’s Waterfront South neighborhood. Last year, there were only two beds.

Compton hopes the surging interest will continue; the goal is 40 beds to fill the space.

“Since before I got here, the desire was to turn that space back into a community garden,” Compton said.

‘Eat and live better’

In Newark — where city officials estimate there are already about 100 community gardens — the husband-and-wife duo of Bilal Walker and Breonna Walker launched a new one this spring called Jannah on Grafton.

The idea is to transform a vacant lot — leased through the city’s “adopt-a-lot” program — on Grafton Avenue in the city’s North Ward into a community hub. The garden has already received plenty of support; as of June 17, the GoFundMe campaign for Jannah on Grafton had raised more than $17,000.

“We’re excited to get people out here,” Bilal Walker said. “We’re excited to teach people about how to live in an area that is a food desert, to teach people how to eat and live better.”

Walker’s goal for the project is to be able to support the nutritional needs of 20 North Ward families.

“We would like to think that we could continue to support people that are already getting some type of additional assistance with nutrition programs, but we also want to look at families that are just above the cap for income,” Walker said.

Though work at Jannah on Grafton has been underway for weeks now, the garden had a de-facto coming-out event on Friday: an inaugural Juneteenth Produce Pantry. The event was a chance to give food away to Newarkers, with produce being supplied by partners like La Casa de Don Pedro and Table to Table, since Jannah on Grafton’s gardens have not yet matured enough to meet demand.

At a time when New Jersey and the rest of the nation is grappling with the realities of systemic racism, Walker said the Jannah on Grafton project is way to help lift up a community that needs help.

“We need to celebrate the small things," Walker said. "And I think that having a garden in Newark that was a vacant lot for 15 years, where we found over 100 heroin syringes in the ground, and to transform that into a garden, thats something to celebrate.”

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Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com.