PITTSBURGH — In the mildly musty basement of their 112-year-old Mount Oliver house, under banks of ultraviolet lights, Raynise and TaRay Kelly — aka the “Soil Sisters” — are growing the future: future plants, future food, and quite literally their own future.
Roughly 250 varieties of fruits, vegetables and herbs they’ve grown from seed are neatly arranged on industrial shelving. Paraphrasing the Souljah Boy song, TaRay says they have “racks on racks on racks” of everything from bok choy to heirloom tomatoes to mint growing big enough to eventually go into the ground.
It represents the seeds of the business they’re building, Soil Sisters Nursery, on the fertile ground of their family roots — an empty lot on Gearing Avenue a short distance away in Beltzhoover where their grandparents’ home once stood.
They gush with enthusiasm, and each talks a mile a minute about their passion and fascination for the process.
“It starts from our hand all the way to wherever it’s planted,” said Raynise, who lives in this house with TaRay. “They come in this little packet of nothing, and we see them start to sprout up and then the whole process of caring for them. We touch them, talk to them, sing to them. It’s a connection. The tiniest things ever are going to turn into food. I’m about to eat for weeks off of this?”
“I love it, it’s just amazing,” TaRay said. “But now all seedlings are not created equal. Some are problem children, like rosemary — you could die and come back from the grave before that’ll grow.”
What’s become their life’s calling started as a seed of interest in nutrition for Raynise 12 years ago when her daughter, Doné, was born.
“Me becoming a mom, I had a moment of reflection on that,” she said, recalling how she started thinking critically for the first time about what she was feeding her baby daughter and herself.
She wound up going back to school to study horticulture at Bidwell Training Center in Manchester and graduated in 2015.
“Their horticultural program was amazing. They gave me all the exposure and connections and made me realize I really wanted to grow food.”
She interned at Brenckle’s Farms & Greenhouses, which she said was another transformative experience.
“Brenckle’s was an eye-opener. They’re a small family business, and they gave me the motivation to go out and do what we’re doing right now.”
She now works for Grow Pittsburgh as the garden resource center manager. TaRay is no stranger to working with her hands and in the dirt as a member of the University of Pittsburgh’s groundskeeping team.
The sisters are only 32 and 30, respectively, but they’re old enough to remember numerous small neighborhood stores from their childhood around Beltzhoover and surrounding Hilltop communities that grew and sold their own produce.
“There were small coolers with fresh produce there. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough for people who wanted a head of lettuce or some garden tomatoes,” Raynise said.
In the years since, those stores have disappeared, and the area largely became a “food desert” — typically a lower-income mostly minority neighborhood bereft of easy access to fresh fruit and vegetables and other nutritious foods.
“In our neighborhood, we’re into growing flowers, too, but we need food,” she said. “We need to make sure that we’re eating properly and that we can get all the vegetables that aren’t available in our nearest grocery store, however close that is. But that’s a whole ‘nother conversation.”
It’s a conversation that the Soil Sisters and others are forcing. The Hilltop Urban Farm on the site of the former St. Clair Village housing project has been a yearslong project to become the city’s largest urban farm.
“Having the ability to feed yourself and support yourself with a nutritionally quality vegetable that you grew is totally different than going to the store and not knowing where it came from or how long it’s been there,” Raynise said. “So that was the whole rabbit hole we went down, and one day it was, ‘OK, enough of this “Twilight Zone,” what are we gonna do about it?’ “
“We thought, ‘Why not us?'” TaRay said. “We’re from the city, and we know what it used to be like when we were younger, and the next generation should have the opportunity to see what it was like when we were growing up. We can’t leave that to someone else, so we took it on as our responsibility to give back to our community.”
The house where their father, Raymond, grew up burned down about 15 years ago, but their grandparents, Jake and Diane, kept the lot in the family and gave it to the Kelly sisters.
“The universe aligned in a tragically terrific way,” Raynise said. “We are going right back to our roots where we got so invested and connected to Beltzhoover. It’s a part of us. Now we’re gonna put this nursery there, and it’s coming full circle.”
Full circle for their family history — Raynise said that her forebears are from the rural South but came north to Pittsburgh — as well as for their neighborhood. Raynise recalled doing a fifth grade report about Beltzhoover’s history and how it originally was a farming community, as was neighboring Knoxville. “It warms my heart ….”
They aren’t simply aiming to produce food for people to buy but rather to change some perceptions and provide education, tools and training for people to do it themselves, she explained.
“I worked with kids in school who said, ‘I’m not doing that slave work.’ There’s a stereotype that developed somewhere between being African American and farming that it’s ‘slave work’ and so we’re not getting the whole gratification of feeding ourselves and the connection we have with the earth. You don’t understand how much you’re nurturing life and what you’re putting back into yourself.”
They hosted a summer camp last year for neighborhood kids to take part in outdoor activities including planting and trying different foods. They’ll do that again this season, as well as a garden equipment giveaway and swap meet from May 1 at the Warrington Recreation Center. On Sunday, they’re a part of Ascend Pittsburgh’s Earth Day celebration on the South Side.
“We’ve been ambitious, but we’re about not pushing projects to make a sale,” TaRay said. “Before you can go and grow this and get anything out of it, we want you to know exactly what you’re doing.”
“Everybody is buying their seedlings from [big box stores], not somewhere local that is intentional about the crops that can survive in our climate and be sustainable in our weather and our soil and things of that nature,” Raynise said.
“Someone told us last year, your kale did amazing. We know it did because we know what will grow here.”
And they have one golden piece of advice and encouragement for anyone looking to learn how to garden, which TaRay summed up like this: “You might not have a green thumb, but you do have nine other fingers.”
