Lenore Schwartz is sitting at a picnic table under a towering Norway maple tree, smoothing printed labels onto plastic plant sticks: Sungold, Chianti Rose, Mortgage Lifter, Indian Moon, Red Calabash, Green Zebra.

"How many varieties is it this year, honey? 86?"

"95 this year," her daughter answers. "Next year it's the Pittsburgh 100."

Mindy Joy Schwartz believes she has discovered one of the keys to urban renewal, and it's not government money, massive demolition or tax incentives for developers.

It's small and red, unless it's pink, purple, orange, yellow, white or green.

"The heirloom tomato is the draw that pulls them," Ms. Schwartz said. "It's the bait on the end of my hook."

What she wants to hook people on is living sustainably on their own patch of Earth. It starts with growing their own food, which she already is doing using organic methods at Garden Dreams, her urban farm and nursery in Wilkinsburg.

Now she and Natrona Heights organic farmer Greg Boulos, a graduate of Slippery Rock University's Sustainable Systems Program, want to create the nonprofit Hamnett Homestead Sustainable Living Center, a demonstration and education project that will show people how to conserve energy, minimize waste, grow fruits and vegetables, renovate older houses to keep energy costs down and more.

"I want people to come here and see this and say, 'I can do this,' " Ms. Schwartz said. "The way we're living on this planet is not sustainable. I know we can figure out how to do it."

This fall, she may get a big helping hand from a multidisciplinary team of students and teachers in Carnegie Mellon University's Urban Lab program.

Ms. Schwartz's vision "ties into everything we want to relate to in terms of sustainable design," said architecture professor Steve Lee. "It's a holistic approach. It's not just a green building."

If the students, as a group, choose Hamnett Homestead as their project, they'll begin to design it in the fall and start to build it next summer. The project includes the green renovation of a three-story brick house that will incorporate a commercial kitchen for cooking classes, guest room for visiting speakers, greenhouse additions and a central, exposed stone fireplace that will radiate heat and act as a support post when interior walls are removed.

Ms. Schwartz and Mr. Boulos also want the center to include a farmstand, an edible-fish pond, blacksmith forge and other features. They're working to line up support in the funding community.

This spring, Ms. Schwartz is growing about 20,000 seedlings in her basement, including 95 varieties of tomatoes and 16 varieties of peppers, along with onions, leeks, eggplants and herbs. This weekend, she'll be selling some of them at May Market in Mellon Park.

In eight years Ms. Schwartz has purchased two vacant lots where derelict houses stood and purchased or co-purchased four buildings, creating a small compound of like-minded friends and family.

On a recent Monday afternoon, she and her new farm manager, Bob Madden, are moving seedlings from the basement into daylight, and shifting others from a small greenhouse into a larger one still under construction. With the help of Mr. Madden and a few friends, she's building it herself, pretty much the way everything has come together at Garden Dreams. The 26-foot by 28-foot greenhouse, purchased from an Iowa manufacturer, has been a special challenge.

"They said it was a kit but you have to cut the metal pipes and drill the holes," she said. "It's a great product but they need to look the word 'kit' up."

An environmental science major at Michigan State University, Ms. Schwartz returned to Pittsburgh after graduation to work for a company that helps businesses meet federal and state environmental safety regulations. Her job, as manager of the Right-to-Know division, included overseeing a database of information about hazardous chemicals.

"I'm a systems thinker," said Ms. Schwartz, as if her online seedlings catalog, where tomatoes are organized by size from largest to smallest within each color category, isn't proof enough.

As a consultant to the non-profit Social Innovation Accelerator, she is development and IT manager at Construction Junction, the perfect day job for an urban farmer ever on the prowl for building materials and other castoffs to put to new use.

How does a Texas-born kid who grew up partly in Mt. Lebanon, the self-described "adopted daughter of Jewish socialite parents who never touched dirt," end up an urban farmer in Wilkinsburg? She started gardening at age 10 despite her parents' reluctance, until they saw the produce she put on the table.

"Maybe my first reaction was 'Don't ruin the grass,' " her mother admits. "But she just loved it and wanted to do it so I said just do it. Wherever we lived, she had a garden and it got bigger and bigger. In New Jersey she had a huge garden."

Now her diminutive, white-haired mother comes to help, pulling on plastic gloves before potting seedlings. Both Manhattan natives, she and her husband Bill, a retired Hills department store executive whose job kept them on the move, are amazed at the capable, earthy woman their daughter has become, and Ms. Schwartz clearly derives some of her strength from their unwavering support and positive outlook.

It seems no accident that Joy is her middle name. If charisma is passion demonstrated, this gal's got it in spades (garden spades). She's stand-up funny, radiates warmth and has an easy, friendly smile. It's not just the heirloom tomato that's winning over supporters and converting customers into homesteaders.

When Jack and Erin Schmitt came to buy plants from Ms. Schwartz last year for their Homewood Cemetery garden plot, the conversation turned to urban homesteading and she suggested they buy the house with the big back yard across the street, one of four derelict historic houses recently restored and renovated by Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation at the invitation of the Hamnett Place Neighborhood Association. Ms. Schwartz is quick to point out that those efforts, as well as other initiatives such as street patrols by MadDads, a men's leadership group, also are having a positive impact.

The Schmitts, who were looking for a sustainable way of living in an urban setting, had been considering a move out of state to find it. Instead, they bought the house across Holland Avenue from Garden Dreams.

"It's going to be a great little lab" for their two young sons, said Mr. Schmitt. "You can't go wrong by instilling agrarian values in urban people."

Ms. Schwartz's agrarian values are driven in part by a passion for the tomato in its myriad manifestations.

"I love them," she said. "It's almost like being a collector."

Almost? This is a woman who's growing 100 varieties next year.

"I want to become a connoisseur of tomatoes."