The ground up: Sarah Maness has an oasis of vegetables amid rows of houses

Tilled rows of corn and tomatoes aren't a sight you'd expect to find in most suburban neighborhoods where land is hard to come by.

Pinewood Forest promises just such a spectacle.

Amid lines of brick houses and manicured lawns on the corner of Evergreen and Marlborough Streets sits Sarah Copeland Maness's half-acre vegetable garden, complete with cabbages, peppers, eggplants and, yes, rows of corn.

Maness, who is 81, first plowed the land that would become her garden 40 years ago, when the roads were still made of dirt and before most of the surrounding houses existed. Her house, which is in the lot adjacent to the garden, was one of the first in the area. She continued farming even after the neighborhood's roads were paved and the landscape became more residential.

"We bought this house in 1968. I've been living here since. I bought that land right after I bought this house, for $2,000," she said. "When we moved here, there were no roads. It's been real built up since then."

The garden has since become something of a community project. Maness does most of the work, but her neighbors lend her their farm equipment and help with tilling and plowing. In turn, Maness shares her crops with the neighborhood. She also gives vegetables to her Sunday school class and frequently donates to a soup kitchen.

Right now, the garden contains eggplant, squash, swiss chard, spinach, corn, butterbeans, green beans, three kinds of cabbages and multiple varieties of tomatoes. The current assortment of vegetables is what Maness calls her "summer garden," which she just planted  when it started getting hot. The "spring garden" that she tended before the onset of the heat held more delicate vegetables, like lettuce and arugula. Maness will keep her summer garden until the first frost. In the winter, Maness leaves the land fallow, but she keeps busy with plowing and composting leaves on the soil because "that's what makes it so rich."

Maness said she grew up farming with her parents in the Great Depression and helped out with the family victory garden in World War II.

"My mother and father and I grew what we ate," Maness said.

 She's been farming ever since.

 "That's my hobby."

Although she had a knee replacement last year, she spends about two hours every day tending her garden and thinks farming is what's kept her in good physical shape.

"It definitely keeps you healthy," she said. "You get into a regimen you have to follow."

Maness encourages everyone to farm, although she knows that suitable plots of land are hard to come by in the suburbs.

"I think anybody who has any space at all ought to grow their own things," she said. "I  think it's really important."