The pumpkin patch that the Rev. Roger Scott Powers and his fellow congregants built doesn't offer hayrides. It has no view of rolling pastures or grazing cows, no corn maze, no quaint country shop selling jams made from fresh berries grown on the farm next door.
Instead, visitors will likely hear the roar of ambulances, the lurch of city buses stopping nearby and the click-click of fashionable heels hitting the well-traveled sidewalk. There is a lovely view, but it's of 19th-century townhouses. And if there were any berries growing around the place, you wouldn't want to eat them.
When you put a pumpkin patch in the middle of Baltimore, there are going to be some limitations.
But Powers, the associate pastor at First and Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, has assembled a team of undaunted volunteers. For the second year, they've managed to create a pumpkin patch in their stately courtyard at the corner of Madison Street and Park Avenue in the heart of Mount Vernon.
Powers says the church's Urban Pumpkin Patch is the city's first. And while firsts are always hard to prove, the pastor and his team get points for creativity.
They spread hay on the grass covering the 8,000 square-foot gated courtyard. Then they placed pumpkins along the brick paths, arranging them by size on pallets to make sure they wouldn't rot. They put up a scarecrow on the gate, made some ghost and goblin crafts to sell at a tented table, and completed the fall look with a cornucopia of gourds.
The Urban Pumpkin Patch is in keeping with the church's mission to serve the underprivileged and reach out to inner-city children whose parents might not be able to take them to a country farm to pick a pumpkin.
"We wanted to reach out to the community and let people know that we're here and interested in what goes on in downtown Baltimore," Powers said. "We thought a great way to reach out was to bring a pumpkin patch into the center of the city."
This year, the church received about a thousand pumpkins from Pumpkin Patch Fundraisers, a North Carolina-based group that pays Navajo farmers to grow the gourds. In mid-October, the group trucks pumpkins to more than 1,300 mostly suburban and rural churches in the United States, which sell the pumpkins until Halloween.
The organization trusts that participating churches will send back about 75 percent of what they make and keep whatever's left for church activities.
