KUFM Commentary- April 2007

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Community Gardens Grow Healthy Neighborhoods

by Kathryn Hutchison

As the growing season came to a close last fall, I fell back into memories of where I had been and what I had seen growing this season. It didn’t take long for six foot sunflowers falling over under their own weight in the hot New Orleans sun to fill my mind. So I called Earnest and Miss Peggy, a family I worked with in New Orleans last spring. Before hurricane Katrina, they ran a 24 hour day care out of their home, watching all the kids in the neighborhood. Now, the ability of the entire neighborhood to return from Houston, Lafayette, Baton Rouge and the farther reaches of the New Orleans diaspora hinges on Earnest and Miss Peggy re-opening their day care. Without them to watch their children, no one can go back to work, and no one can come home.

When Earnest answered his phone, he told me he was standing on the bayou down the block, fishing. He said he’d almost caught enough today to give one fish to each of his neighbors, something he’s done on this block since he was a child.

My first impulse was to interrupt him, spit out things I know about toxins, contaminants and public health, and urge him not to eat fish from the river, not to even touch the water. When the hurricane hit, Miss Peggy’s day care was flooded with pesticides banned by the EPA twenty years ago, from abandoned barrels inside a pesticide plant directly across the street from their house. It left the land and the water in their neighborhood basically a dead zone. But I hesitated a moment as I heard, the glimmer of happiness, of hope in his voice, after what can only be described, a long winter. I didn’t say a word. He had to go anyway, Miss Peggy was waiting to go to the casino, an opportunity she won’t have again when the day-care reopens, and he had some fish to deliver.

I am back in Helena now, where I grew up, working on a project that hopes to place community gardens within walking distance of all residents of Helena, so that we might bring about a greater sense of community and interdependence with our neighbors. To work together in a garden might connect us all to the land and each other, so that we might get to know our neighbors most different from us. I’m in Helena now for the same reason I was in New Orleans last spring, because I think its important that people get what they need from where they live, whether that’s safe food or a stronger neighborhood community, or mostly likely, both.

For the most part, we don’t have the problem of the Mississippi river or the tons of toxic chemicals sitting in our topsoil here in Montana. We don’t have overfull landfills of moldy drywall, lead paint and car batteries; but what concerns me is we also don’t have Earnest knocking on doors with a fish from his Friday night catch, either. About the same size as Missoula, New Orleans has 52 community gardens. The ninth ward, so often sited in the news as one of the most devastated areas after Katrina, has the highest percentage per capita of backyard gardeners in the country. It’s when I hear of that strong connection to the land that I am not surprised that so many low income residents of New Orleans are fighting, still, a year and a half later, to go home.

We do have challenges, of different kinds. In Montana’s low income urban areas, we don’t often have the kind of communities that support each other. I have been teaching a class about community gardening at the Project for Alternative Learning in Helena, a public high school for at-risk youth. One day I asked a student, what do you think a ‘community’ is? He told me, he wouldn’t know, he didn’t live in one. I said, “well, where do you live?”, and he replied, “In Helena.” That got me to thinking back to Earnest and days in New Orleans when, before getting to work we would stand on the corner and he’d point to each house on the block and tell me how everyone was doing, and I wondered how do we get there, here, to that kind of caring community? Well, the same way Earnest does, by building a space for people to get food, and share it with their neighbors, right here, in Montana’s urban neighborhoods. By building community gardens we might foster a little of what seems to be so strong in New Orleans, a sense of community. By growing our own organic food right here in Montana, we can make it a little easier for Earnest to live his life in New Orleans without a pesticide plant across the street.

We don’t have big cities in Montana, but we don’t have to look far to find the problems they have, to find alienated people and neighborhoods, disempowered youth, and food insecurity. We don’t need to look so far to find models of growing community vitality and vibrancy either, Missoula’s Garden City Harvest has built community gardens for years in low income neighborhoods, where people are often without access to their own yard space. Garden City Harvest’s season opens soon, April 7th. If you are interested in a plot you can visit your garden of choice on Saturday at 12. Cost is $25 for the season plus a $15 clean-up deposit. Look for more community gardens and plot availability in Helena this summer, too.

I’m Kathryn Hutchison for the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. AERO welcomes your comments and perspectives. AERO is a grassroots membership organization working to help create farm, food, and energy solutions for communities throughout Montana. For more information about our programs call us in Helena at 406-443-7272.