of the space and engaging the local community with its resources. As someone who lives in the neighborhood, Lomax said she feels like she’s in a better position to connect with other residents about the project. “This place is a healing place,” she said. “Unity is the main thing I would want people to get out of a space like this. We still have a few people that are skeptics. We’re trying to build trust. That’s the thing we’re working on now, doing outreach.” In addition to the fruit and nut orchards, community garden plots, medicinal herb garden, and apiaries, the space is also a place for the community to gather and learn about the environment. Mario Cambardella, the former director of urban agriculture for the city of Atlanta, said creating the food forest has been an evolving process. There have been tough conversations between community members and local officials on what the role of the city should be in the space, creating guidelines and structure for the food forest, and mistakes that were made along the way. While technically a public park, team members have emphasized that the food forest was designed for community members with limited access to fresh produce. As a former African American farmstead, the seven acres the food forest is now on has actually been providing food for generations, and now as the Browns Mill project, it is part of Mayor Keisha Lance Bottom’s goal to increase access to fresh food and food systems in the city. “The city of Atlanta is a food forest,” Cambardella said. “The food forest is all around us in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Our southern Georgia landscape provides fruits and vegetables to not just us, but also birds and bees in the neighborhood. It’s really upon us to understand that food system and how that food cycle works. We only reveal the food producing landscape at Browns Mill.”
( T O P ) T H E Y O U T H T R E E T E A M W O R K S I N T H E U R B A N F O O D F O R E S T. P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T R E E S AT L A N TA ( L E F T ) T H E G A R D E N S AT B L I S S M E A D O W S . P H O T O B Y AT I YA W E L L S
Defining Success
Ked Stanfield, director of Louisville Grows in Kentucky, sees the community garden as a way to connect people with each other and with where their food comes from. “I take the definition of a community garden literally in that the community itself has to be the primary focus, the plants being secondary,” he said. “A lot of times, the successful community gardens are the ones that have a good leadership structure and have engaged people. They help their neighbors in the garden, and then they’re more successful growing plants.” Louisville Grows helps groups establish a garden through grants and training, working with community members on how to structure job roles within the space. “A lot of times, a garden leader will take on everything.” Stanfield said. “They’re the organizer, the composter, they’re pulling weeds, and mowing grass. They get burnt out, quit, and then nobody’s there to take it over.” In 10 years, the organization has helped almost 30 gardens around the city of Louisville get started, and although some have come and
gone in that time, many are still thriving. The most successful community gardens are the ones where everyone works together, pulling their weight and enjoying the fruits of their labor. And Stanfield said success isn’t necessarily measured by the pounds of produce grown. That number doesn’t tell the full story of what a space can provide. One project Louisville Grows worked with was a collaboration between a daycare center and a garden across the street growing sweet potatoes. The kids helped start the plants, pulling the shoots, weeding, and then digging them up in the fall. At the end of the process, the group cooked the sweet potatoes with the kids, who were able
to be a part of the process from start to finish. “The way they do it carries a lot more than just, ‘hey, we grew 200 pounds of sweet potatoes,’” Stanfield said. “That’s an important thing that community gardens offer—they involve other people from the neighborhood and get them access to how food is grown.” Other gardens they support are centered around a specific neighborhood or community. At the Hope Community Farm, refugees who have relocated from East Africa to Louisville use a fiveacre plot of land to farm for a local CSA program. They can also harvest foods they’re unable to find in local grocery stores, like an heirloom eggplant that plays a large role in many East African dishes. “They use them in a lot of their cooking as a soup thickener,” Stanfield said. “A very important thing for their diet is to make these traditional dishes. You got to have these eggplants. They’re not commercially available in the U.S. Nobody grows them. They bruise easily. They’re hard to transport. They don’t last very long. This gives them a way to have that connection to their culture that they’ve lost since moving to the States.” Although community gardens may be structured differently or have diverse goals across the region, each space is meant to bring the idea of food back into the neighborhood. “We’ve lost all that knowledge of where our food actually comes from,” Stanfield said. “Community gardens can be a way of just showing people where their food comes from.” M AY 2 0 2 0 | B LU E R I D G E O U T D O O R S . C O M
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