Detroit's Urban Gardens: A Food Revolution

Housing foreclosures and vacancies have turned many blocks of downtown Detroit into empty, abandoned land. Urban gardening initiatives throughout the city, such as the Garden Resource Program Collaborative, are transforming these lots into productive gardens to feed residents, foster a sense of community and prevent Detroit from falling into ruin.

Detroit had 80 registered urban gardens when the Garden Resource Program Collaborative started in 2004, according to Kristine Hahn, a key leader and board member of the collaborative. Today the count exceeds 700.

One of Hahn's first childhood memories from the 1960s is of visiting her grandfather's house and garden near her hometown of suburban Royal Oak.

"Grandpa yanked a carrot out of the ground, rubbed it on his overalls to get the dirt off and took a big bite," Hahn recalls. "Because he was my grandfather, I thought anything he did was so, so cool, and so I've been eating carrots ever since."

Hahn, 49, in her adult life has shown hundreds of other people how to grow carrots, collards, cucumbers and virtually any vegetable that flourishes under the sun as a horticulture educator with Michigan State University Extension in Wayne County.

From "Motown" to "Growtown"

Urban farm gardening in Detroit has grown to the point that advocates began making their planting plans as early as the dead of winter, envisioning new life in the hard-pressed community. Arrangements made in January, February and March will come to life in April, May, June and July. Detroit's urban farm gardeners are preparing to till the soil and plant during the spring weeks to come, carrying out their proclamations that "Motown" is transforming into "Growtown."

"Urban gardening is one of the best community development tools," Hahn says. "Everybody eats and everybody can talk about it."

Children join elders in the urban gardens. Sometimes the neighbors create so much produce that they have extra to sell at locations such as Detroit's legendary Eastern Market.

Community spirit grows from the urban gardens, along with community power. Neighbors may not be intending to make social statements, but in the process they are combating what advocates such as Hahn describe as "food deserts." These are inner-city areas that lack major supermarkets.

"Stores in these neighborhoods most often have fruits and vegetables that not only are of lower quality, but also are higher priced," Hahn says.

Another phrase that advocates often use is "food security." When increasingly frequent contaminated food scares happen, such as during recent years with lettuce and then tomatoes, the huge chain supermarkets that ring inner cities like Detroit are forced to clear their shelves. Urban gardeners, meanwhile, do not have to worry about their food being among the contaminated, as they have been growing their own.

Detroit Collaborative Extends Its Reach

The Detroit-based Garden Resource Program Collaborative extends all the way up Interstate 75 to Saginaw, where 29-year-old Bakari McClendon is coordinator for the Saginaw County Youth Farm Stand Project.

McClendon says young people who maintain a pair of inner-city vegetable gardens learn about self-sufficient agriculture, cooperative work and the environment. They are connected with adult mentors. They engage in physical exercise and learn about healthy foods, which both are vital to addressing today's epidemic of child obesity. When the time comes to reap and sell their harvest, they gain lessons in entrepreneurship. Literacy even enters the picture when students write about their experiences.

Main organizers are the Houghton-Jones Neighborhood Task Force and MSU's Saginaw County Extension. Teammates who have enlisted include Houghton Elementary School, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems, the Saginaw-Bay Watershed Initiative, the Downtown Saginaw Farmers Market, Saginaw Valley State University, the Saginaw Community Foundation, the Saginaw Urban Food Initiative, Good Neighbors Mission and the Mustard Seed Shelter.

Partners also include the legions of donors who came forward during the summer of 2008, when the Youth Farm Stand Project courageously replanted after vandals destroyed the original urban gardens. Residents from the city, the suburbs and the rural outskirts reacted by donating everything from seeds to garden tools to cash money.

"The way that the gardens were ruined seemed terrible, but the community response was so overwhelming that the overall result was positive," McClendon says. "A great deal of public awareness was created."

Garden sections display names such as "pizza garden" (for the peppers on pizzas) and "taco garden" (for the lettuce and tomatoes in tacos). This strategy demonstrates to students that their favorite meals don't simply originate at fast-food restaurants.

A joint Department of Agriculture and Mott Foundation grant enlists Saginaw, along with Detroit, among eight Michigan communities involved in urban gardening. The Saginaw Community Foundation sponsored the painting of a colorful farm stand mural on the side wall of a former neighborhood market that has been converted into a church. Professors at Saginaw Valley State are demonstrating no-soil indoor gardening through a process known as hydroponics.

Meanwhile, McClendon has adopted statewide leadership in the urban gardening movement. He took part in an MSU Extension panel that explored "urban food security access." Many corporate agricultural methods are analyzed as not sustainable, he says, because of abuses such as soil erosion and the tight packing of farm animals in cages and corrals. Therefore, urban gardens are considered as a form of food security.

McClendon says that while green-collar jobs often are linked to alternative energy, such as solar power and wind power, there also is vast potential for green-collar jobs in urban gardens and urban agriculture.

MSU Plays a Leading Role

Michigan State University is among the nationwide land grant colleges established during the 19th century, with a primary focus at the time to promote and support agriculture. Through many decades, few would have envisioned that the so-called "4-H" approach would turn full circle from rural farms to urban gardens.

In her MSU Extension role, Hahn prefers to describe herself as a facilitator or an organizer, rather than as a leader. She sets up workshops that guide neighbors in establishing their own urban gardens. This involves everything from obtaining land and a water supply, to planting and nurturing the gardens, to harvesting and distributing the rewards.

For example, Detroit's Capuchin Soup Kitchen has established the Earthworks Urban Farm "to restore our connection to the environment and community in keeping with the tradition of our spiritual patron, St. Francis. It is a working study in social justice and in knowing the origin of the food we eat."

Patrons at the Capuchin Soup Kitchen often dine on produce from the Earthworks Urban Farm, rather than the usual canned goods.

"We strive for peace, respect and harmony between Neighbor and Nature," states the Capuchin Soup Kitchen Web site.

Hahn notes that previous generations grew their own food, often as tenant farmers in the South. When families migrated to Detroit and Pontiac and Flint and Saginaw during the first half of the 20th century for jobs with the auto companies or in other industries, they still planted gardens, even if they had limited yard space.

This aspect of culture gradually was lost during years of urban decline, Hahn says, but urban gardening has sparked a revival.

"There are two groups that are mainly involved," she explains. "There are the middle-age and older-age people, and then there are the younger families with small children. Urban gardening is a great way to encourage these inter-generational relationships, in the same way I was influenced when my grandfather pulled that carrot out of his garden."

When the Garden Resource Program organized its annual bus and bike tour last summer, a record 600-plus neighbors took part. Hahn participated proudly.

"I went on the bus tour for the first time in 2004," Hahn recalls, "and I told myself, 'This is the kind of work that I want to do.' I had always felt badly that Detroit wasn't doing better. I took that bus tour and my reaction was, 'This is it. This is what needs to be done.'"

Sources:

http://detroitagriculture.org/
http://www.cskdetroit.org/ewg/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7495717.stm
http://michiganmessenger.com/28476/race-dynamic-seen-as-obstacle-in-detroit-urban-farming