Mike Lempriere yanks a young blackberry bramble and slaps its roots against freshly tilled soil.
"That's what this all used to be," the he says, waving a hand over a south-facing hillside now planted with rows of wine grapes. "Just blackberries and weeds. I spent weeks clearing it."
The weeds will fight to come back, but this land, he says, is seeded with a bigger problem.
"The city owns this property," says Lempriere, the owner of Perennial Vintners. "I'm playing it cool, but planting here is scary."
Lempriere has learned that the blessings of publicly owned farmland come with the curses of municipal bureaucracy. While the city has repeatedly affirmed the value of local farms in written resolutions, studies and innumerable meetings, little progress has been made in putting city farms to work for working farmers.
Once famed for its strawberry fields, the island has in recent decades transformed into a high-priced suburban enclave.
The island's growing population has expressed strong support for local agriculture, both in city priority surveys and in dollars spent at the flourishing Bainbridge Farmers Market. Meanwhile, the island's farmers have struggled to hold on to land valued more for its development potential than its productivity.
In response, the city has acquired 60 acres of farmland to ensure a portion of the island remains crowded with crops rather than condos.
But much of the city-owned farms have remained fallow, despite a corps of experienced farmers standing by with tools and seeds at the ready.
"I've waited for four years," said Lempriere, who also grows grapes on a half-acre of his own property. "I can't buy anymore land to expand. If I can't use this city land, I might as well put up a 'For Sale' sign and move off Bainbridge."
A handful of farmers have put less than half the city's farms into cultivation, but the growers' yearlong leases don't encourage roots to run deep. Many farmers feel overwhelmed when they approach the city for a better deal or to ask basic questions.
"We don't do well with bureaucracy," said Betsey Wittick, who grew four tons of vegetables on an acre of city land last year. "Farmers aren't that type. That's one of the reasons we get into farming."
A recent report by a city-commissioned farm advisory group recommended the city turn over the management of its farmlands to a nonprofit agency better able to recruit growers, negotiate long-term leases, coordinate resources and generally foster a more stable relationship with farmers.
The Trust for Working Landscapes has served these purposes for years, and is willing to do much more with its proposed 99-year lease of city farms.
TWL was instrumental in obtaining the 14.5-acre Johnson Farm, the first of six farmlands the city purchased beginning in 2001. The group coordinated short-term leases with farmers on the city's 4.7-acre Morales Farm on Lovgren Road, organized volunteer maintenance projects and obtained federal funding for an irrigation project serving about 26 acres of city-owned farmland on Day Road.
Now its time for the city to stop stalling, and get out of the way, TWLs members say.
"The situation's embarrassing to us and hopefully to you," TWL member Ryan Vancil said to the Bainbridge City Council at a recent meeting. "The city needs to get out of the business of managing agricultural lands because you're just not doing it."
Vancil was frustrated when he learned the city might cut its share of funding for the Day Road irrigation project. TWL used a federal grant to buy the equipment and put volunteers to work installing the pipes. The project was stalled when the city dollars to spark the electrical system never came.
As a stopgap, two island farmers fronted $30,000 of the promised city money to get the water moving through the pipes.
"Hopefully, the city lives up to their end of things because these farmers took money out of their savings for this," Vancil said.
Mayor Darlene Kordonowy, who commissioned the farming advisory group, acknowledges the city's slow progress in putting farmland into productive use.
Last week, she asked the council to pass a resolution indicating the city's support for agriculture, and requested that the council's Land Use Committee deliberate on the advisory group's recommendations next week.
TWL Director Yolanka Wulff has heard enough resolutions and recommendations.
"We have had these committees, the reports and TWL's eight years of on-the-ground experience," she said. "It's time to take the next step. This isn't brain surgery. It shouldn't be this hard."
Bill Pace chuckles a bit about the struggles of Bainbridge farmers. He has for eight years grown blueberries on 21 acres owned by the city of Bellevue.
"The city knows I know what I'm doing and they just let me do it," he said. It's simple."
But it's not so simple for a city with a high staff turnover rate and a proclivity on the part of elected officials to dabble in city hall's inner-workings, Wulff said.
That's not a problem in Bellevue, said Geoff Bradley, who has administered the city's 47 acres of farmland for 13 years.
"We manage them like parks (and) give the farmers a lot of flexibility," he said. "It's working great. We get lots of kids on our farms, picking blueberries on sunny July afternoons."
TWL has a similar vision for Bainbridge's city farms, including trails, educational programs, affordable farmer housing, and rows laden with grapes on the hillside Lempriere untangled from the weeds.
"Some farmers have a year-lease, and that's a good sign if you're a row cropper," said Lempriere, who favors transferring farm management to TWL. "But I'm putting vines in the ground. I'm investing in this, but I won't see (grapes) for four years."
As the recommended transfer of farm management winds its way through city hall, Wulff is hopeful Lempriere's vines will stay firmly in place.
"Right now we just have to take them out of the center of the political winds," she said.
