The guerilla gardeners of Long Island City are going legit.
The Smiling Hogshead Ranch — veggie beds and fruit trees rising on the decommissioned Long Island Rail Road’s Montauk Cutoff along Skillman Ave. — wants to officially lease the site from the MTA, which hasn’t used the tracks since 1989.
Gardener Gil Lopez and partner-in-vine Stephanos Koullias built the produce oasis in 2011. The MTA found out about it the next year. Hence, the down-and-dirty negotiations.
“The LIRR had no objection to the use of this property for a garden,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said in a statement. “So we contacted Smiling Hogshead Ranch and have been working with them on a year-to-year agreement.”
If it all works out, it’ll be a diplomatic ending to a clandestine campaign by the gardeners, who didn’t seek official permission when they broke ground.
“I thought it was better to go ahead and do it and then ask for forgiveness,” said Lopez, 35. “There’s no reason for vacant lots to blight our communities.”
Lopez grew his own vegetables until he moved to the city in 2010 from Florida. The green thumb quickly realized he would wither on a waiting list for years hoping to score a highly sought after lot in a community garden.
So he and Kouillas scouted empty lots in Queens before finding the decrepit former rail spur.
“It had no fence and no ‘no trespassing’ signs — and as far as we could tell had no developer plans,” Lopez said.
But it was in bad shape. Kids drank there. Homeless men stored their belongings by the tracks. And the site was home to feral cats.
There was even a hog’s skull in the rubble — hence the farm’s name.
Now, two years later, the group harvests a bumper crop of edible greenery, and Lopez is setting up a non-profit that can take responsibility for the land.
More gardens are popping up on empty eyesores because there’s less available land for green thumbs.
But Koullias advised would-be growers not to wait for the bureaucracy to file permission slips in triplicate.
“If we had gone to the powers that be for permission, we would have still been knocking on their door,” said Koullias, 34. “We showed them what’s possible.”
