"WHEATGRASS ENJOYS QUITE a bit of its popularity due to ...

"Wheatgrass enjoys quite a bit of its popularity due to me," says Stewart Borowsky, with a bit of a swagger. The wheatgrass entrepreneur has been selling the stuff-the young grass of a wheat plant-from his trademark '87 school bus at the Union Square Greenmarket since 1994, around the time of the American juice bar craze. Borowsky recalls the fateful visit that gave him a competitive edge in the wheatgrass market.

"In '94 or '95, Martha Stewart bought wheatgrass from me; I guess she cooked a ham on it," says the wiry thirtysomething, squinting out from under a thatch of tousled dark hair. "People were coming up to me and saying, 'This is the grass you cook a ham on!' and I was like, 'Uh, no, maybe you're thinking of chives.'"

It turns out that in addition to having a host of purported health benefits-from anti-aging to energy enhancing-wheatgrass can also infuse ham with a pleasant rye flavor. Although cooking wheatgrass kills the enzymes that make it good for you and, though humans can't actually digest it, Borowsky still credits Stewart with introducing it to middle-class consciousness. "I was very fortunate to start out this business when people with access were pushing the product."

Years later, his business, Greener Pastures, is a staple at the Greenmarket. Borowsky, now with the help of his fiancee, Paulina Danilczyk, a dancer with a Polish sod farmer in her family, is pushing grass in the forms of juice shots (still the most popular way to take it), decorative flats and smaller plants for household pets (they apparently crave it for digestion). Borowsky relocated his farm from Monticello to Brooklyn when he found himself falling asleep at the wheel on his frequent drives to Manhattan. His small growing operation is now based in a Gowanus garage, which Borowsky souped up with the proper irrigation and growing equipment to turn it into a year-round wheatgrass-growing facility.

The multipurpose garage/loft space is at once a farm, a storage area, a business and a love nest. You'd be as likely to catch Borowosky and Danilczyk (who live here with their cat and two dogs) doing laundry, which hangs on clotheslines attached to the ceiling, as you would to see them filling terra cotta pots with soil. Almost every day, the couple germinates organic wheat seeds, plants them and places them in one of three rooms constructed to mimic a spring day on the high plains-the ideal weather for wheatgrass.

"The trick to growing wheatgrass," explains Borowsky, "is to think like a wheatgrass plant. They like to be cool, they like to get enough water, but they don't like to be soggy."

Borowsky achieved these conditions by outfitting the rooms with sprinklers and gymnasium lights. His efforts are rewarded with a product that goes from seed to thick carpets of kelly-green grass within a week. He also grows other dewey greens, such as pea shoots, buckwheat and sunflower greens, that are often snatched up by restaurateurs who prefer local produce.

Not only is leading a farmer's life in the city perfectly normal to Borowsky, he says he's keeping it real. "New York City started off as a community of farmers and growers," he says. "What we're doing is natural."