If you’re in the market for a new house, you likely have already experienced the massive shortage of single-family homes plaguing 2022. Karen “Mimo” Davis and Miranda Duschack embody one possibility: a farm and house smack dab in the middle of a big city. Davis and Duschack are the owners of Urban Buds: City Grown Flowers, a small urban farmstead where they grow high-quality flowers in the Dutchtown neighborhood of St. Louis. The evolution from an abandoned, vandalized, and overgrown lot to a colorful and productive flower farm was challenging, but one Duschack and Davis look back on with pride.
Urban Buds is located in a diverse, working-class neighborhood 7 miles south of the Gateway Arch. Its neighbors include a mosque, one of the largest Spanish-speaking Catholic parishes in St. Louis, two Buddhist temples, and a host of residences.
Over the years, Urban Buds received roughly $150,000 in city and state agricultural grants for the research and development of the Missouri-based cut-flower industry. Urban Buds applied the grants toward cultivating the soil and building a high tunnel for growing flowers, among other projects.
Now, Davis and Duschack own seven of the 14 lots on their block, which includes the 1-acre farm, the glass greenhouse, a flower shop that’s not currently in use, and two adjacent brick bungalows, one of which is home.
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