From dead earth, okra

Calvin Dixon squatted in the fading light of the afternoon sun as he examined the dark, coarse leaves of a collard green for signs of wilting. Nearby, two friends raked the soil and plucked fallen sycamore leaves from the neat rows of plants.

The harvest was almost upon them. Soon, the collards would grace Thanksgiving dinner plates throughout Charleston's East Side. The men stepped back and grinned, marveling once again at the rich bounty springing from a patch of dirt once filled with broken glass and trash.

Over several months, a group of friends and neighbors have transformed a grungy, vacant lot on Columbus Street into a vital community garden for an inner-city neighborhood that has struggled with violence, poverty and drugs.

What started as a lark quickly became a passion for a group of young men who never had grown a thing in their lives.

"People from the ghetto ain't seen nothing grow like this," Dixon said, laughing. "People would keep asking 'What do you think you're trying to do?' Then all this food popped out. It was amazing."

The garden got its unlikely start in March when Zachary Stansell, a chemist with the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, got tired of looking at garbage littering an empty lot near the home he was renting.

He marched across the street and started picking up the rubbish. A couple of people joined him. Then others chipped in.

Dixon, a 29-year-old who grew up on the East Side, asked Stansell what he was up to. "Kind of joking, I said I was going to put a garden in there," Stansell said.

Joking or not, the idea caught on, even if not everyone thought it would work. "We didn't think we would be able to get anything to grow in this soil," Dixon recalled.

Stansell showed them how to check the acidity of the soil and add nutrients to make it fertile. Through friends at work, he found some extra pallets of okra and collards to plant. He got a load of fresh horse manure from the police mounted patrol stables.

Then they really went to work.

Dixon and his uncle, a Vietnam vet named John Lambert, joined in and enlisted the aid of friends Mike Hayes and Arnold Bellinger. A disabled friend, Kevin Coaxum, sat in his wheelchair on the sidelines, offering words of encouragement. They needed them.

The land, once occupied by a barbershop, was hard and full of rocks, broken bottles and chunks of old foundation. Hayes said he lost track of how many loads of bricks they pulled from the soil.

Painstakingly, they cleared the land, tilled the soil and planted their first crop. They used fallen tree branches to fashion a fence around the small plot, a craft Lambert learned in Vietnam.

"You used to see them all over the countryside," he said. "We called them O.K. Corrals."

The men tended to the crop night and day. It seemed that every time Stansell looked out his window he would see Lambert out there picking weeds or raking the garden's soil.

When they needed help, others from the neighborhood pitched in. Kids picked up trash for the price of a soda. An older woman let the men run a hose from her home to water the plants.

"Ultimately, it was about just having a good time," Stansell said. "But the more we worked, it really did become something that brought the community together in a meaningful way."

Soon, the earth gave back, pushing out succulent okra, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and more -- an abundant harvest that kept the neighborhood stocked with fresh produce. "It tasted fresher than what you would get in any grocery store," Bellinger said with pride.

Alverna Hayes, Mike's mother, sipped a beer and laughed. "Oh yeah, I gained 10 pounds off that okra."

The garden lost its technical expert when Stansell moved away over the summer. His truck had been caught in the line of fire when an angry man unloaded a full clip from an AK-47 into the street after an argument one July night.

Stansell escaped unscathed, but the episode left him rattled.

Undeterred, Lambert, Dixon and their friends carried on the work and have kept the garden going. They planted collards to make sure people in the neighborhood would have greens for their dinner tables on Thanksgiving.

They'll find something else to plant for the colder winter months, maybe cabbage or another hearty green. The important thing is to keep moving forward, on to the next harvest.

"You have to keep it going," Coaxum said, watching his friends. "To see something beautiful like this growing up in this community, something so fresh ... people just love it."