Photos by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Ron McCorkle of the Roanoke Community Garden Association picks okra grown in a community garden inside Roanoke.

Nancy Maurelli, a local caterer, prepares food for the Roanoke Community Garden Association Harvest Festival.

When Nancy Maurelli and her friends fix food for a party, they don't go to the supermarket. They go to the back yard of one of their homes and pick the ingredients for vegetable gumbo, as they did on recent drizzly Thursday afternoon.

Maurelli, a chef, and Ron McCorkle, a retail auditor, curled their fingers around cobs of corn and tomatoes that were growing in an otherwise nondescript Southeast Roanoke back yard. They lifted watermelons from the ground, and pulled basil leaves and black-eyed peas from a plant.

They stood a stone's throw from Interstate 581 and could see the Wachovia Tower in the distance.

In recent months, a few dozen Roanoke residents have taken back yards and empty lots zoned for factories or warehouses and turned them into collective gardening areas. Reflecting a practice seen in urban areas across the country, they've rented tills and used soil within the city limits to grow much of the food they consume.

"I can be in the busiest part of the city, and I can be really at peace when I'm gardening," McCorkle said. "It's a place where everything -- all the trivialities, and all the worries, they come together and they all formulate into a peaceful resolution."

They've incorporated into clusters such as the Roanoke Community Garden Association and Grandin Gardens and are celebrating their summer harvest with an open-to-the-public free dinner Sunday night at the corner of Seventh Street and Highland Avenue Southeast, and Monday dinner at Grandin Gardens. The dinners will be made almost exclusively from produce harvested in Southeast Roanoke.

For the Roanoke Community Garden Association, which includes two gardens in Southeast and two in Southwest Roanoke, the celebration coincides with its first-year anniversary.

Last month, they were awarded a $1,500 federal grant to place fences around their crops, according to association director Mark Powell.

"It's already growing," said Powell, who's also a taxi driver. "With our organization, we have a model, and it's something that's really catching on."

The group is looking to get public space from the city to use for community gardening. Earlier this week, members of the association and other community gardeners met with city officials to share their expertise on community gardens, according to Faye Gilchrist, assistant to the city manager.

What they're doing is in line with the movement of people who eat only -- or almost only -- food that has been farmed within their region. The locavores, as they have been called since 2005, say that by eating local produce their food is less likely to be contaminated, will leave a significantly smaller carbon footprint on the environment and will better stimulate the local economy because more money stays with the farmers.

Maurelli runs a catering business and gets her food from farmers near Fincastle or Rocky Mount. As she prepared the food for Sunday's dinner, her mouth stretched to a broad smile as she talked about the freshness of food grown in a community garden.

She was given ingredients like swiss chard, a heat-tolerant summer green; Asian-style eggplants; and Juliet tomatoes, which have a sweet taste. She turned those and almost a dozen other ingredients that came from the gardens into a four-course meal:

Summer vegetable strata -- "I like to think of it as a cross between a pizza and a quiche," she said -- vegetable gumbo, vegetable quiche and apple crisp. And was it difficult to cook with a table of random vegetables she and her friends grew in the city?

"To me, it's like a jigsaw puzzle," she said. "You have to see what you come up with."