the pioneer park of la huerta with which Rosario won an international award

Every day there is someone in Huerta La Tablada Park. Because as Rafael says, with his wife he works part of the garden and thanks to that they can live after coming from Rufino, “For this to bear fruit, you have to be there every day and you have to love it”.

“We also had a garden in Rufino, where we lived for almost five years. We had a trash can, but the pandemic caught up with us and we headed back to Rosario. I used to come here to buy vegetables and in October they gave me land where I planted cherry tomatoes. I collected a lot of it, ”he said.

Each park-garden has a coordinator, a person responsible for making sure everything works. And in Tablada appears Damián Barbiero, an agronomist who has worked in the Huerta Park for 20 years and has coordinated it for seven years: “There are about 30 working families. Before, it was a dumping ground, a pit with hard earth. It was filled with leaves, compost and organic matter. The laurels began to be planted: they were small and now it is the trees that are around the park”.

The orchard worker

Miguel is in tune with Rafael. So that Last Christmas it was 5 p.m. and he was in the orchard park, watering and tending to his area. “This is my life”, he rocks.

What strikes most about Miguel’s sector are the fruits he managed to produce, which is unthinkable in this part of the world: passion fruit, papaya and guava. With that, Damián says that “having passion fruit here is crazy”.

Miguel is from the neighborhood and, At 63, he walks the five blocks every day that separate his house from Huerta Park to take care of production.. He is originally from Goya (Corrientes) and arrived in Rosario at the age of 19 after working as a corn and cotton harvester. We still remember that he arrived “in winter, around the month of May. We didn’t have a lot of land: we came with a swimsuit and a camper van to work by the river ”.

orchard park

Rafael and Damián, showing a specimen of Swiss chard.

Silvina Salinas / The capital

His wife started in Huerta Park almost 20 years ago, and one day he asked her for help to give him a hand with tomatoes. Although he made it clear this time that he would only do so because he didn’t want to know anything more about the estate and continue to devote himself to masonry, little by little, the on-site visits became more continuous: he left work at 3:00 p.m. and went to the garden.

This encounter with activity and a broken ankle after a motorcycle accident made work farther and farther away: “I couldn’t stay still for long and started to like the way vegetables are. Venus. I went back and forth between the building and the orchard, until one day I said to myself ‘it’s over’ ”.

Differentiation

At the Friday fair, which is held right there (Belgrano 4902), from 9 to 13, as the things that are brought to the gate are finished, they go gardeners to cut fresh vegetables so that it only passes from one hand to the other, without any intermediary.

Rosario was selected from 262 proposals from 54 countries on the theme “Inclusive cities for a changing climate” by an independent jury of “urban leaders and visionaries”. The other four finalists were the cities of Ahmedabad (India), London (United Kingdom), Monterrey (Mexico) and Nairobi (Kenya).

According to the Secretary for Human Development and Housing, Nicolás Gianelloni, Rosario has differentiated itself from other candidates, that the city practices urban agriculture but with “public gardens, 40 hectares of public production that belong to the State . Agroecology guarantees you that the process is accompanied and that it arrives at the fair”.

>> Read more: Rosario received an international award for an urban agriculture project

“It’s designed so that families live with it, with what they sell at the fair. The people who participate in the garden do not receive any plans, they come to work, produce and sell“, He adds.

The 250 thousand dollars that Rosario has won will be used for the expansion of the park-garden network, according to the manager, because “there is more demand than the production that we have”. At the moment, there is no chosen location, although the north and southwest areas are taken into account on land allocated by individuals.

In addition, he details: “The award is designed to strengthen the urban agriculture program and for the reconversion of the quinteros of the green belt. The idea is that they are converted into agro-ecological production ”.