From Rare Peppers to Blight Tickets, This Detroit Garden Shows the Promise and Challenge of Urban Gardening
A Detroiter spent decades growing a healthier self and city. Here’s why he might move on.
This is the final story in “The Healing Soil: Detroit’s Urban Farms,” a three-part series being co-published with Outlier Media and Planet Detroit, and is supported by the Michigan Health Endowment Fund.
He stooped to point out a red one whose seeds he had ordered from Peru. Another, the chilaca, is from Guerrero, the Mexican state where he was raised. Some are especially spicy, others have an extra helping of healthy amino acids. He knows them all — all 60-plus varieties — by sight and taste.
“Four of these and one tomato — that’s a recipe for a very good salsa,” he says, pointing to a knee-high plant heavy with dark-green chilis.
Ortega Urban Farms, which Vargas built from scratch over two decades on a pair of vacant lots, is a labor of love rooted in his rural childhood, where agricultural techniques were part of the family lore.
Agriculture “is what keeps me alive, it’s my passion,” he said, speaking in Spanish.
Like some other gardeners throughout Detroit, Vargas credits his good health, at 59, to the farm — to the healthy food it gave him, and the emotional and physical benefits of working the land.
Still, this fall’s harvest may be his last in Detroit. Vargas plans to move to the west side of Michigan after the farm was hit with thousands of dollars in blight tickets from the City of Detroit. A friend has property near Lake Michigan where Vargas could farm and run a restaurant.
City officials told Outlier Media they’re willing to work with Vargas to help him continue growing food in Detroit, but that he needs to improve the condition of the property before they can cancel the blight tickets.
Growing healthier
When Vargas tells the story of his journey to the U.S. and his life here, he divides it into two parts: before and after he began growing food on Julian Street in Detroit’s Midwest neighborhood.
In Mexico, he’d found a government job, tracking and fighting agricultural pests, but violence in his hometown pushed him to attempt the difficult migration north in 1988. He ended up in Florida, where he worked in the restaurant industry for 15 years.
Cooking, for Vargas, is a passion linked with his love of growing food. He liked the restaurant industry. Still, the stressful lifestyle and unhealthy foods he was eating back then took a toll.
In 1999, a doctor told him he was prediabetic, which Vargas attributed to a combination of stress and poor diet. Hispanic adults of any race in the U.S. are 60% more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to be diagnosed with diabetes.
He began taking medicine to help, but he still struggled to get his blood sugar into a healthy range. A turning point came after he moved to Detroit and noticed a vacant lot across the street from his house and decided to sow some seeds.
Pretty soon, he was growing healthy food for himself and his family.
“I eat a lot of vegetables,” he said. “If I had to buy vegetables at the store, believe me, I wouldn’t buy them. A pound of heirloom tomatoes costs $8. I wouldn’t pay that. It’s a lot for me.”
As his diet improved and he spent more time working outside, he watched his health steadily improve as well.
“My blood sugar lowered a lot,” he said. “I will always have diabetes, but it is controlled. I use medication. I don’t exercise because I don’t have time, but I get a lot of movement from being active at the farm. It lowers my stress.”
Vargas’ experience is echoed in gardens across the city.
Diabetes relief was just one of a long list of physical and mental benefits reported by 28 gardeners who spoke with researchers for a 2022 study conducted by Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and the nonprofit Keep Growing Detroit.
Living off the land
Now, about 15 years after planting those first seeds, Ortega Urban Farms produces more vegetables than just a single family can eat. Selling what he grows has increasingly become a part of Vargas’ livelihood.
With assistance from Keep Growing Detroit, he’s expanded his operation and built a greenhouse. When the weather is warm enough, he spends Saturday mornings at Eastern Market, where he has a dedicated following among cooks looking for more than the usual variety of jalapeño or habanero peppers.
“These are peppers you can’t get at the store,” he said. When customers request rare varieties, he’s happy to set them aside.
Vargas also works part time for the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s Office of School Nutrition, helping students tend the garden at the Charles R. Drew Transition Center, which supports students ages 18-26 with special needs.
A connection to home and family
Vargas is eager to share his agricultural know-how, whether with Detroit students, visitors to his garden, farmers around the city, customers or anyone else. More than a livelihood or even a way to maintain good health, he views his knowledge of agriculture as a cultural inheritance, one that is in danger of dying out.
Growing his peppers links him to where he grew up and to the people who passed their knowledge on to him — his mother, who taught him how to select, dry and store seeds for the next season, and his uncles who showed him how to plant seeds, harvest, and work outdoors on their farm in Mexico.
Many of the vegetables he sells remind him of home. Farming also allows him to grow crops simply because they are meaningful. Like cempasúchil, or marigolds, flowers whose bright color and distinctive smell are an iconic part of the late October and early November Day of the Dead celebrations, when many Mexicans honor their ancestors.
Vargas says his deep connection to the plants he grows leaves him with feelings of pride and calm. This, too, helps his health, and it helps explain why he often goes straight from his day job to maintaining the greenhouse, and why he’s eager to expand his operation onto a neighboring vacant lot.
“This is where I kill my stress,” he said this summer, gesturing to the farm.
Fast forward a few months, and Vargas is hoping he can find the same peace on the other side of the state.
In September, the City of Detroit hit him with thousands of dollars in blight tickets for offenses including overgrown weeds, “unsafe conditions,” and storage of solid waste. City officials told Outlier they are willing to cancel the tickets if he fixes the problems by Oct. 31.
“Associate Director of Urban Agriculture Patrice Brown is taking the lead in helping Mr. Vargas work through these issues, toward a goal of him being able to continue his urban farming work in compliance with city codes and other related requirements,” city spokesperson John Roach said in an email.
He added that Vargas technically doesn’t own the property. Vargas acknowledged that he hasn’t been willing to pay the necessary tax bill to take over the property from the Detroit Land Bank Authority.
Instead, Vargas said he plans to accept an offer from an acquaintance to take over a much larger property in Covert Township, about 30 minutes north of Benton Harbor, with the possibility of buying it after a few years. Just a few miles from Lake Michigan, the property includes mature apple and peach trees and a restaurant that is fully equipped but inactive.
“I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and now (the city is) giving me a hard time?” he said.
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