Gardening rules ok!

Gardening can reduce crime in a crime ridden neighborhood..

Local folks in Flint, Michigan were tired of seeing vacant lots fill up with trash and troublemakers. They wanted to turn empty spaces into productive property. It wasn’t only greenery they sought. Some Flint residents had a hunch that corn and tomatoes cultivated by neighbors in community gardens could supplant fear and distrust in everyday urban life.

 

The Flint Urban Gardening and Land Use Corporation and the Flint Neighborhood Violence Prevention Collaborative got “the troublemakers” and “trash mongers” to work together to make a garden grow, and to participate in a project called ‘The Community Garden Storytelling Project of Flint’.

The committee have published a book “From Seeds to Stories: the Community Garden Storytelling Project of Flint.”

The book promotes the existing community gardens and encourages other neighborhoods to start their own.

Here’s one of the stories, from a 14-year old girl who works and eats at the East Bishop/East Flint Park Block Club garden:

“I still work in the garden now, even though we’re not getting paid anymore. ‘Cause, it’s just the beauty of it. I’ll take the money, but if there’s no money involved then that’s okay with me. ‘Cause the money, I really didn’t spend nothin’ with the money, but candy and junk, and that’s really not worth it all the time. One day, I was going to the store, and before I went to the store, I went down to the garden with some of my friends. And we looked to see if there was any tomatoes, and there was one, big, juicy, red tomato. And I was like, oh, I want this, so I grabbed it, I washed it off, I took it home, put some pepper on it, and then I was eating it on my way, going to the store. And I was going to the store, I was thinking like, this tomato is better than the Now and Laters that I want. And so the garden did make me so I didn’t want any more candy, ever since. I eat it some of the time, but basically, I have a fruit or something. I used to be a candy freak, but now after all the vegetables that you get, they’re good. They’re like candy, but they’re healthy!”

Our mission at Home Grown Food Network is to help such projects as the one at Flint become more widespread in communities everywhere. As one of the participants in the Flint project said, community gardening is one of the most effective ways for a neighborhood to plant roots, and to assume ownership of its own land.

And, maybe, communities that grow food together will stay together.

This post was first published on Home Grown Food Network’s website
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