SAN FRANCISCO  Some might look across this city's rolling hills with its waves of roofs and see some of America's priciest real estate.

Trevor Paque saw virgin farmland.

He calls his enterprise, MyFarm, a "decentralized urban farm." His aim is to turn San Francisco's under-used, overgrown backyards into verdant plots of green that will provide organically grown food for the city's residents.

Since May, Paque, 29, has planted half an acre of vegetables if you add up all 55 gardens that his farmers have sown. He hopes that the 150 or so families his enterprise will be feeding by spring will represent the dawn of a new age of local foods in even the biggest cities.

"This is revolutionary, really one of the coolest things I've heard in a long time," says Dan Sullivan of the Rodale Institute, which has been teaching about organic agriculture since 1947.

For time-starved residents, MyFarm is a way to get organic produce grown steps from their kitchen without having to touch a trowel. For yardless neighbors, it lets them effectively buy a share of their neighbors' gardens.

"It's turning grass into productive landscape, and it's not only feeding the people who own the grass, but feeding other people who want locally raised organic food," Sullivan says.

And what gardens they are. MyFarm has been building two to five a week since Paque tipped the first bucket of mulch five months ago. Its crew of farmers shows up by bicycle, towing trailers of shovels, rakes and an irrigation system.

It was late September when the farmers pedaled up to the home of Craig Tiballi, 34, and Annabrook Temple, 35, on Potrero Hill, just before their order of three cubic yards of organic composted soil arrived by truck. It was dumped in the street, and the four farmers began a three-hour bucket brigade to carry the mountain of dirt through the basement and into the backyard.

There they carefully spread a 6-inch layer, leaving small pathways from which MyFarm's farmers can get to each plant.

The couple have a 1-year-old son, Reno, and Temple loves the idea of growing organic foods for him in their admittedly untended yard. That's the selling point to many customers, says MyFarm's operations manager, Chris Burley, 26. "We can make a backyard a productive space and a beautiful space, and a place that actually grows healthy food for you and your kids."

By late afternoon, what had been a 128-square-foot area of hard-packed dirt had become a planting bed with a timer-based drip irrigation system.

Three weeks later, "it's thriving. It's pretty incredible how much it's grown," Temple says. Their farmer, Matthew Lowe, comes once a week to maintain it. Last week for the first time he left them "a big bag of baby greens" for salads or sautéing. They were, Temple says, "delicious."

MyFarm charges customers $800 to $1,200 to install the garden. Then for a weekly fee that varies according to the size of the plot, a gardener weeds, tends and harvests the garden, leaving the owner with a week's worth of vegetables.

There are similar services out there. In Portland, Ore., Portland Organic Gardens installs organic vegetable gardens and does weekly maintenance at a cost of $90 to $130 a week. In Charlotte, Instant Organic Garden has put in 150 gardens in two years.

Sun, soil, space

What makes Paque's venture different is that he sees all the gardens as merely components of one large farm. Local real estate agent Howard Reinstein of Prudential estimates that if it were all contiguous, the half an acre of land would sell for about $1 million.

Paque's plan is to take that land and use it to create what's called a CSA, for Community Supported Agriculture. CSAs are one of the hottest trends in farming, says Ed Wells, chairman of the Environmental Studies Department at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa. The school's Robyn Van En Center is the nation's largest research group on the trend.

In a CSA, a farmer sells shares of his or her harvest to a group of customers in a nearby town, providing each with a weekly box of whatever's in season, delivered to the customer's door or a nearby location for pickup. The farmer gets paid in advance, and the customers get local, fresh, seasonal food — and a relationship with the person who grew it.

MyFarm combines these two innovations — outsourcing vegetable gardening and CSAs — to get something new.

When the MyFarm farmer comes to evaluate a potential yard, he or she does three things: estimates how much sun it gets; tests the soil for lead and other toxins; and measures how big a plot it can support.

If there's not enough sun, dirty soil or less than 16 square feet, they say thanks but no thanks.

If there's sun, soil and space, they put in as big a garden as they can. MyFarm plants by the box size. A 4-by-4-foot garden will produce a box of vegetables a week for one family. Gardens range from 4-by-4 to 12-by-12-feet, enough for three families' vegetables a week.

The more extra produce a yard grows, over and above the owners' needs, the less they will pay for weekly upkeep.

It's that extra capacity, above and beyond what the person living there can eat, that will provide the vegetables for the CSA that MyFarm hopes to have running in the spring.

The MyFarm CSA has sold 50 shares for the spring so far and is on track to sell out by the new year, Burley says. A share that provides a box of vegetables for one person a week costs $25 and $35 for two, a cost comparable to other local CSAs. But instead of the food being trucked in from farms 50 and 100 miles outside of San Francisco, it's bicycled over from gardens within a mile or so of the CSA member's house.

MyFarm's mission resonated with Anne Fisher Vollen, 44, who is raising two children, ages 9 and 12. "I joke that the only thing more neglected than my husband is my backyard," she says.

Now that formerly unproductive swath of dirt is home to a flourishing garden. On a brisk autumn day, her gardener, Max Goldstein, stopped by on his bike, weeded, dug up some zucchini that had gotten out of hand and harvested chard, escarole, tomatillos, corn, lettuce and Jerusalem artichokes. Her daughter, "a really picky eater," says the backyard broccoli "just tastes better," Fisher Vollen says.

That special taste, true freshness, is something people will pay a little more for once they're exposed to it, says John Ikerd, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and expert on sustainability and small farms.

"After a few years of that, you don't want to eat stuff out of the grocery store. It just doesn't taste as good," he says.

Preparing for winter

As fall days cool and shorten, the MyFarm farmers are turning their plots to winter mode. Although it's possible to grow gardens year-round in San Francisco, its first year out, MyFarm wants to work on building up the soil. So the farmers will be hoeing under plants in the coming weeks, planting perennials and putting in soil-enhancing cover crops such as vetch and fava beans for the winter.

Over the winter they'll expand beyond vegetables, putting in herb gardens and fruit trees during the wet months.

Though what grows in San Francisco is going to be different from what will work in Memphis or Dubuque, Iowa, the basic concept isn't. And MyFarm's staff wants that concept to spread faster than dandelions on a summer's day. Calls have come in from Chicago, Portland, Washington, San Diego, Los Angeles, Nashville, Minneapolis, Australia and the United Kingdom with requests for information.

The MyFarm staff is putting together a business manual, so no one else has to reinvent this particular wheel.

"We want to be able to offer consulting to individuals in other areas so they can learn from our experience," Burley says.

Neighbors come together

Michelle Mammini, 65, knew that her Italian mother-in-law used to feed the family from the garden in back of their house in San Francisco's Marina district. But she wasn't quite up to it herself, so she called around to landscapers to help get her started. "I said I wanted herbs and flowers, and the plans I got back were all grass and trees," she says.

She read about MyFarm in the local newspaper and called. Paque put in the garden on Aug. 6 and within three weeks she was getting radishes and lettuce. By Sept. 18, a cornucopia of vegetables was growing, including Chinese cabbage, fava beans, arugula, several types of kale and mustard greens, broccoli, carrots, beets and peas.

The weekly basket has taught her and her husband to eat things she hadn't known about before.

"I'd never cooked mustard greens or kale before. Now I steam them, cook them with garlic. They're quite tasty," she says.

Having someone else think about staggering the plantings is also wonderful, she says.

"I've gardened for years, and my least-favorite part was harvesting, because everything is ripe at once and it's too much."

As Goldstein works, Mammini's next-door neighbor, Brock Benson, 32, leans over the fence to take a look. Soon they're talking animatedly about different kinds of peas, and she brings a double handful for him to taste and take home.

That, too, is part of Paque's vision: "We can use food to get people to know each other."

He's already hatching plans to get neighbors whose farms are near each other to have a harvest dinner together, featuring foods grown in their own backyards.

READERS: Do you have a "my farm" of your own? Tell us what you've grown.