Glance over her résumé and you'll think Taja Sevelle is an unlikely advocate for urban farming. She's a singer who got her first record deal as a teenager in the 1980s and went on to work with music greats such as Burt Bacharach and Thom Bell. (Her big hit was the pop song, " Love is Contagious .")

But look a little deeper and it makes more sense. Before she got lucky in the music business, Sevelle wanted to be a botanist. She had lived in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods with her family as a child and later on a potato farm. In 2004, while in Detroit recording a new CD, Sevelle noticed empty lots across the city and thought: We could do something with all of this.

A year later, her nonprofit Urban Farming was born. The group, still based in Detroit, has helped to start more than 1,000 gardens across the country. In partnership with Kraft Foods, Sevelle is personally breaking ground on 50 new gardens in 20 cities this spring and summer. She will christen the group's first garden in the District today at the Urban Planning Organization on Rhode Island Avenue in Northwest.