The next time you find yourself in the East Side of Detroit, you'll coast through a neighborhood full of the signs of a city in the midst of a transformation both unprecedented and painful. You'll see homes full of families and life. You'll also see vacant lots and rows of abandoned houses, some of them burnt shells that only addicts and dealers seek shelter in. And, if you look hard enough, you may just see the optimistic half-cylinder of a newly built greenhouse, surrounded by squares of brilliant, orderly rows of sunflowers, strawberries, sweet peas, and spinach.

You've found Rising Pheasant Farms.

Carolyn Leadley, 32, is deeply into her third pregnancy as she sits in the shade of a tree on an unusually hot day for southeastern Michigan in the fall. Her two tow-headed sons rattle around in a sandbox by a yard full of greens. Every once in a while, Leadley's husband, Jack VanDyke, pops in or out of the house that Leadley and he have been living in and gradually rehabbing. For guests, a cleanly cut tree stump serves as a stool, a somewhat taller stump as a laptop-holding desk.

Originally from the suburbs, growing up outside of Kalamazoo, Leadley didn't see farming anywhere on the radar: "I'd help my mother plant the annual flowers, but besides that? I'd never experienced growing anything food-wise." A "whim" college job at a local gardening company's farm changed that.

"It was eyeopening: I pulled a carrot from the ground, and it was pretty intense," she says. "I was hooked on the idea of growing my own food. "

Five years later, in 2009, Leadley had begun what would become Rising Pheasant Farms. Leadley and VanDyke were living in a cooperative house in the city. In the back of the complex was an abandoned, bar-style display fridge that no one had figured out how to get to work. Leadley turned the fridge into a grow chamber, installing shelves and grow lights, and planting seeds into plastic trays full of soil: her first sprouting operation.

"We grew mostly sunflower shoots," she says. "It was a lot of trial and error. The trays then definitely didn't look like they do now."

Nevertheless, Leadley's fledgling business found its niche, and her sunflower shoots found a small but growing loyal following.

"The first year we got our first wholesale customer, Russell Street Deli, and I'm proud to say they've been with us seven seasons now."

By the end of 2009, Leadley and VanDyke married and moved into a small house they rented in the East Side. They converted a tiny eight-by-15-foot attic nicknamed "the dollhouse" into grow space.

"We were really very low-budget," Leadley says. "I had a watering can I was filling up in the bathroom and taking up two flights of stairs several times a day. We eventually lived in a house with a hose. There's a reason people don't grow in attics."

The circumstances changed dramatically when the couple bought their house from a nearby family in exchange for paying off about $5,000 in back taxes, in 2011. That same year, Rising Pheasant got its table selling directly to the public at the Eastern Market farmers' market. Now, what started as essentially a backyard operation has now grown into an 11-lot farm. "From there, it's been mostly investing in this little corner of Detroit and continuing to grow the business."

Ali Lapetina

The core of the business is still the shoots—sunflower, sweet pea, buckwheat—which grace the plates of many of Detroit's finest restaurants, and, thanks to the Eastern Market stand, of more and more families sitting down to dinner at home.

"It's a pretty unique product, and just having us there to offer samples and have one-on-one conversations with people helped introduce them to shoots ," Leadley says. "They're pretty easy to use—salads, sandwiches. Now we have dedicated customers who come every week to get stuff."

Over the years, other vegetables and fruits—spinach, strawberries, curly and lacinato kale, beets, carrots, chard, cherry tomatoes—have popped up on the farm.

Though Rising Pheasant is small by any rural farm's standards, it's exactly where Leadley wants it. "At this scale, we do everything by hand," she says.

She does the majority of the farm work, and VanDyke is responsible for transporting the produce and selling it at the market. Like Leadley had mentioned before, the couple doesn't own a car—VanDyke, who once worked at a bike shop, pedals the goods with the help of a specially made cart that hooked up to his bicycle. Often, the couple's young sons come along for the ride.

"People have lost that sense of community that they look out for in a farmers' market setting, where people come by even if they don't by produce," Leadley says. "People have enjoyed watching our boys grow up. Some of them who haven't been around for a while come back and say, 'Oh my gosh! He's walking now!'"

Though Rising Pheasant will probably never be a giant farm, it's still open to suggestions about what to grow.

"We're definitely open about people's feedback, and with our restaurant customers, we'll let them know, 'If you know of any of those fancy microgreens you'd like us to try, tell us,'" Leadley says. "We've tried fenugreek and things like that that restaurants have suggested. We do our radish microgreen mix, buckwheat—it's nice to make it more interesting for folks. Customers love these green beans. They're so much work, and I don't now if we're making any money at all, but it's hard to give up things people like because it brings people to the table."

Still, the East Side is a neighborhood in the troubled city of Detroit. Over the winter, someone broke into the house and stole all of the family's power tools. More recently, someone set fire to several abandoned houses, including the one right across the street. (Trying to make the best of it, an ingenious used spray paint to turn the empty husk into a giraffe.) But Rising Pheasant is here to stay.

"Pheasants are ubiquitous wild birds in this city, believe it or not," Leadley says. "They're a symbol to a lot of folks of the changes that have happened, the vacant land that has turned into a brand-new habitat for this creature to thrive in. We chose our name because we can create a new city, and a new vision, of what cities can be."