Gil: I decided that I was going to start a garden in New York City because that’s something that I kind of need. It’s just something that I need. It started as a guerrilla garden. We still are a guerrilla garden. I think that New Yorkers in particular really need an opportunity to kind of depart from that harsh urban atmosphere and really kind of just get into a place where there’s birds and there’s worms and there’s insects and there’s butterflies and there’s leafy stuff. It’s collectively managed and run, lots of people come out and help do things. The expectations are really loose.

Jennie: We’re making a preparation for our soil. And this preparation was made with a compost that was — it was actually the poop of a cow. And it was put inside the horn of a cow and buried in the earth for seven years. After that we’re going to take this broom and we’re going to take this liquid and spread it through this farm. It’s going to wake up the soil to the energy of earth and above.

Gil: We started Smiling Hogshead Ranch on an urban farming kind of agricultural basis. We started by plowing up ground, sod-busting, making row crops and planting them and making sure they got water, spending lots of time babying our plants and harvesting later on in the season.

Gil: We’re like this really leafy spot in the middle of this industrial wasteland, really. I mean, I hate to refer to my neighborhood like that but it’s ratty sometimes. You know, it’s kind of the same here, we have a lot of stuff lying around that looks like it might not belong but hopefully we can use it all for some projects in the future.

Gil: I would like this to be a healing place for the community in the sense of regeneration where people can come and recreate in the classic form of the word. Recreation used to refer to kind of a mental rehabilitation, where we recreate ourselves. We now have a beautiful place where the community can gather and do other things. And have it be community run and community supported and have community things happen back there. Whatever people can envision for these spaces, I want people to be able to do. And that doesn’t always have to be growing stuff.

A group of activists, led in part by Gil Lopez, founded Smiling Hogshead Ranch in Long Island City in February 2011. Gil had moved to New York from Florida for what was supposed to be a temporary job in landscape architecture. But he ended up staying and setting down roots, in the most literal way.

“We just knew that we needed to start something. And if we started something and it was good, then people would eventually like it,” he said.

Over the last three years the group has stewarded the 2-acre site from an overgrown vacant lot to a well-kept garden and farm with everything from peach trees and berry bushes for eating to oyster mushrooms for processing and cleaning the contaminated soil.

The group started up the farm without permission from the MTA, the landholder of the site. But they are now in talks to occupy it legally so they can get funding for new programs, like setting up a shipping container that will be used as a workshop for bike maintenance, and collaborations with local organizations.

“We were right in assuming that we needed to start something good and ask for forgiveness,” Gil said.