"We have an opportunity to do something right here in front of City Hall," the mayor said. "We have a chance to lead by example and to inspire residents, to show that in an urban environment you can still maintain healthy eating."
The City Hall vegetable gardens will be more than bountiful - producing a very conservative estimate of $3,000 worth of everything from kale to corn.
They will be beautiful, too, said Angela Treadwell-Palmer, a landscape designer who planned the garden.
She at first envisioned a couple of small demonstration gardens: "I was thinking we could just show how pretty vegetables could be." But Bill Vondrasek, head of horticulture for the Department of Parks and Recreation, loved the idea and told her to run with it.
"The mayor set the tone with her cleaner, greener, safer, healthier Baltimore," said Vondrasek. "When you have her support, you start thinking about what you can do."
Although the scope of the city's vegetable garden might seem ambitious, he said, "The areas that will have vegetables are the same areas that the horticultural staff plants with annuals every year."
This year, the city will have extra help from the master gardeners who volunteer at the Cylburn Arboretum in Northwest Baltimore. Because of construction of a new visitors center this year, there is no vegetable garden. So they have some free time on their hands.
"This is a big effort on our part, as you might imagine," said Allan DeGray, a master gardener and volunteer with Cylburn who lives, coincidentally, in Gardenville in the city.
The Cylburn volunteers will maintain the beds, rotate crops from spring to summer vegetables and harvest the produce weekly so there is nothing on the ground to attract rodents - one of Dixon's chief concerns. Seeds are being donated by Baltimore's Meyer Seed Co. Water trucks that normally maintain the city's plantings will handle the watering.
"San Francisco did something similar last year," said Treadwell-Palmer, whose company, Plants Nouveau, introduces new plants to the market. "When you think about it, this isn't a whole lot more trouble than maintaining the bulbs and the annuals the city plants."
Treadwell-Palmer's plans are ambitious and her designs are classic.
The enormous urns at the foot of the City Hall steps will be planted with sweet potatoes and black pearl peppers. The 70 window boxes on the balustrade beneath the flags and in front of the bronze doors will be planted with a lime-green Swiss chard and more black pearl peppers.
