In a few weeks, though, seeds will drop into soil enriched by turkey manure compost. Tendrils will climb trellises made from bamboo harvested on the site.

HOPE Gardens, by the railroad tracks on Homestead Road, is a community garden with an asterisk.

If all goes according to plan, local residents who lease its 25 plots will work shoulder to shoulder with three homeless people this spring growing produce for local restaurants and farmers markets.

Chances are the gardeners won't even know who is who.

The project is a collaboration of UNC's Campus Y Homeless Outreach Poverty Eradication (HOPE) organization and the Town of Chapel Hill.

The town owns the 14-acre site and is working with the students through the Parks and Recreation Department and its Active Living by Design advisory committee.

It's a long way for UNC junior David Baron, who took a year off from school to help start the garden.

Baron didn't even have a garden growing up in Atlanta. His father started one through their synagogue after hearing the director of the Atlanta Food Bank speak.

But the garden struggled. With the vegetables all going to the poor, it was hard to get enough people to regularly come out and work.

"It just wasn't sustainable," Baron said.

So HOPE Gardens will be a hybrid. Part will be a traditional community garden, where residents who pay $100 for a plot can take home what they grow. Part will be an urban farm, where volunteers and homeless workers will grow broccoli to blueberries. And part will be an education center.

"It's a very unique model," said Regina Blalock, chair of the town's Active Living by Design committee, who sees the biggest benefits as social.

Just like dog parks are as much about the dog owners getting together as their dogs, community gardens quickly become as much about the community gardeners, she said. The fact that some gardeners will be homeless can only help as the community continues talking about the issue.

"The more interactions you have, the [more quickly] they're not seen as the 'other,'" she said.

Park conversation

Maggie West, a UNC senior, got started on the garden as co-chair of HOPE. The group already had a microlending program for people needing job or housing assistance and a magazine, Talking Sidewalks, written by homeless and recently homeless people.

West was a teenager growing up in Raleigh when she talked to homeless people for the first time in a park.

"When the conversation started I didn't even know they were homeless," she said. The man had recently gotten out of prison. The woman had lost her job because of health problems.

"What it really came down to was she needed Pepto-Bismol," West recalled. "But she couldn't afford Pepto-Bismol."

Talk to students like Baron and West and they quickly tell you they feel privileged to get to know and work with people who are homeless.

"I don't deserve so much, to be in the position I was in, the family I was born in to," said Baron, a Morehead-Cain scholar who spent a summer in Tanzania, teaching African farmers organic agriculture.

"Everyone deserves opportunity," he said.

At an open house on a cold December day, Baron put on thick gloves to cut bamboo fence posts, stopping to answer questions when cars pulled up into the dirt parking lot.

His example and the philosophy behind the garden has won followers.

Christopher Rumbley of Bountiful Backyards, a permaculture designer, helped the students plant 35 fruit and nut trees. When he first met Baron, Rumbley thought "This is another undergraduate student with a lot of big ideas," he said.

"But after working with him he is definitely driven," Rumbley said. "I'm really impressed with his ability to pull this off."

Changing attitudes

Tyler Bench, a 19-year-old freshman and East Chapel Hill High graduate, wrote about HOPE Gardens for a social entrepreneurship class.

"I think Hope Gardens has the potential to change the way people think about homelessness in Chapel Hill," Bench said.

"The IFC and the institutions in place are good, but homeless people don't have a way to get out of homelessness," he said. "That creates a big problem."

"It's not just an issue of getting people off the street. It's about helping people get off the streets."

Baron said he saw the power of community in Africa.

Individually the farmers were wary of growing crops without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But when they all worked on a community plot and saw the benefits, their attitudes changed.

"The most important thing was they did it together," Baron said.

West thinks HOPE Gardens will change attitudes too, as her experiences with homeless people has changed her.

"I'm constantly overwhelmed by their humility," she said. "Once people share that with you, the humanity in you obligates you to fix systems that allow this to happen."