Community Gardens and the Nature of Communities

On April 21, I spent about six hours working on a community garden in the Matthews Mill Village, one of the old mill villages that make Greenwood, SC so distinctive.  The garden is in the backyard of a house-turned-community center owned by Community Initiatives, Inc., and I was there with about a dozen other guys who all came out to work on the garden as part of our church’s Operation Inasmuch local missions project.  

      The entire experience was eye-opening for me for a range of reasons although I’ll only discuss two of them here.   

1. I had never been to this particular mill village.  By their nature, mill villages were built to be self-sustaining (this one has its own miniature downtown and post office), and so Matthews Mill Village is cut off from the rest of Greenwood even though it is virtually in the middle of it.  None of Greenwood’s major thoroughfares actually take people straight through it, so folks who live in the rest of Greenwood can live their lives without ever seeing or thinking about this neighborhood.   
2. It made me think about the nature of neighborhoods and communities.

This community garden is going to take the collective effort of a group of people.  We planted 28 tomato plants, about 24 banana pepper plants, a patch of lettuce, and a little herb garden.  The people in that community are going to have to water the plants, weed the garden, and gather the produce.   

This means that they will have to both handle the chores and operate within parameters of fairness:  Who will take those tomatoes home?  Will they be the same folks who put in the hard work?  How many tomatoes should a person take home from a community garden? 

At first glance, all of this might seem like small potatoes, but it isn’t.  I live in a great neighborhood. I’m proud of how my neighbors maintain their property, and I’m proud of the neighborhood’s diversity.  Here, in the heart of The South, in this completely middle-class neighborhood, four of the houses I can see from my front porch are home to African-American families, and this diversity is pretty consistent throughout the neighborhood. 

In comparison to the Matthews Mill Village, however, my neighborhood is not a community. The social arrangement with my neighbors goes something like this: we will smile and wave, and we will wait patiently for each other if one of us is checking the mail—from the car—while other is trying to pull into the driveway.  Our shared spaces are scarce, and they are under the care of a landscaping company.  We know more about each other from the political signs we put in our yards during election season than from conversations we've shared.  If put to the test, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t provide the police the names of my neighbors, just as I’m pretty sure they couldn’t provide mine.

Last Saturday, the Matthews Mill Village had a neighborhood cleanup.  That was a coordinated event that culminated in a community dinner.  In my neighborhood we all just did our customary yard-work and then retired to our individual backyards.  

Years ago I sat in classes and heard professors lecture about how American communities have lost the real “sense of community” that made the nation strong in its youth—the type of “sense of community” that would enable people to come together to raise a barn or hold a “real” town hall meeting to determine the best course of action on a given issue.  But only now have I come to realize—really feel in my guts—the difference between a neighborhood and a community.

Food Revolutions, Cafeteria Ladies, and School Gardens

 I would wager a month’s salary that school cafeterias have never received the level of public attention that they have been granted since the first season of ABC’s Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which aired in 2010.  Since then, ABC has aired a second season of the show, focused on schools in Los Angeles instead of the first season’s Huntington, West Virginia.  Both seasons of the program provided buckets of footage shot inside cafeterias and treated actual cafeteria workers as characters in a drama—some were villains who resisted change while others were heroes who soldiered on against obstacles presented by USDA regulations, school administrators, and basic economic realities.  

Not to be left out, the Food Network has aired shows featuring cafeteria workers.  Chopped, for instance, pitted four “cafeteria ladies” against each other to see who could produce the best appetizer, entrée, and dessert with ingredients commonly found in school cafeterias.

With such attention being paid to school lunches, cafeterias, and the like, it has also become apparent to me that schools are increasingly adopting school garden programs that provide at least a part of the produce their cafeterias prepare.  My wife recently saw an outstanding example of this at Arcadia Elementary in Spartanburg, SC.  When she told me about what was happening there, I wanted to know more about school gardening.  As it turns out, the South Carolina Department of Agriculture has a School Gardens Program, as do many other states. In California, the School Gardens Program is sponsored by the state’s Department of Education.   

While most states seem to have similar programs, school gardening is also supported by a number of impressive nonprofit groups like Real School Gardens (based in North Texas), Food Corps (operating in 10 states including North Carolina) and the California School Garden Network.  The CGSN is especially impressive for its resources on using gardens as teaching tools that show teachers how garden-based lessons can help teachers meet state educational standards. As long as I am doing “teacher-speak,” I should also point out that at least one group of experts has already figured out how school gardens can be put to use in meeting Common Core State Standards (note for non-educators: The Common Core State Standards are a new set of educational goals that have been adopted across the United States except in Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia).   

As I often suggest in this blog, there are many things related to food and agriculture that are deeply disconcerting, but this attention that has been paid to school lunches, school gardening, and the value of food and gardening to curricular issues—all of this is undoubtedly good news. 

If your schools have gardens, share your story below!