From the Ground Up
How Our Community Food Forest Project Began, and Where It Might Go
I received a suggestion from a reader that I ought to document the process whereby our nascent community food forest organization, the Food Forest Coalition of Chattanooga, has come about. I think now is a good time to look back over the last few months of organization building and site preparation, to reflect on what has worked and not worked, and in the process hopefully be of use to others out there looking to do similar things. I’ve found that, cliché as it no doubt sounds, simply knowing that ordinary people can really get things done in their communities really helps with motivation, from moving to a generally articulated idea to, in our case, literal shovels in the ground and concrete plans moving forward (look to my next bi-monthly newsletter for some more personal reflections on this matter). In what follows I lay out the background to this project, how we got started, where we are now, and reflect a bit on lessons learned, things we could have done differently. I’ll aim on following up in a few months after we’ve gone through our first planting and growing season, so stay tuned for that!
Like a (probably unsurprising given my general pro lot of things in my life, it all started with a book, Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre, and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates. I read it in June of 2023 en route to Washington, DC for a conference, starting in the airport and wrapping up just before landing at National. It’s a great little book, with a clear forward-moving narrative and some autobiographical details thrown in, all oriented towards its central message of what is possible on even the worst and least promising urban soils (‘soil’ not really accurately conveying the pocket wasteland Toensmeier and Bates confronted). After I finished the book I began thinking about how its lessons might be applied in urban Chattanooga: could we build, say, a demonstration urban food forest? How would that work? My conviction that we could indeed build something beautiful and productive had been further strengthened by a serendipitous visit, just a week or two prior, to a little community garden in West Jackson, Mississippi, and my conversation with its founder and main gardener, Norma, who had pretty much single-handedly gotten permission to turn what had been a vacant city-owned lot into a thriving vegetable and flower garden. What she had managed to do in a short amount of time and with fairly limited resources was just incredible, and deeply inspiring.
Since moving back South, I had had it in my mind to do something—I was very fuzzy on the details—that would be both community-oriented and related to agriculture or permaculture or ecological restoration. My main concern was to avoid replicating existing efforts, but rather to come up with something that could complement what other people were already doing. Now with the ideas that Paradise Lot set in motion inside my head alongside the inspiration Norma’s garden had stirred up, when I came across the concept of the community food forest or forest garden—something of a cross between a “conventional” community garden and a park (especially one more on the wild side of things, not the sort with neat trimmed lawns and non-fruiting trees)— I thought to myself, this looks like something we could do here in Chattanooga. At the time no one was doing it—someone had made a brief attempt just before the covid pandemic, but as far as I was able to ascertain it had not taken off (and I would later learn that the inauspacious emergence of the covid emergence was indeed the crucial factor in derailing the project). So, I determined, why can’t I try and get something going?
My first step, very much in keeping with my generally academic cast of mind, was to do a fair amount of research, and then put together a pretty detailed document laying out an overall philosophy, long-term vision, with references to the deep past of the Chattanooga region included, elements that will come as no surprise to my readers. My second step was to cast about for people who might be interested, assuming such people existed. I made use of a local email listerv, centered on the neighborhood of St. Elmo, which is the second-closest part of Chattanooga proper to us and also just happens to be the part of the city most amenable to a concept like “community food forest.” I sent out a email, posted to a couple of spots on social media, and waited for responses. Somewhat to my amazement by the time our first meeting was over there were more people discussing and listening in at the tables we’d pushed together on a coffeeshop patio than had signed up via the Google Calendar invite. We were able to refine the plan of direction, get a sense of who potential partners in the short and longer-term could be, how we might find more volunteers, and so on.
I didn’t really have any sense of where I would go after that first meeting, thinking we’d probably have a couple months of discussion and back-and-forth on potential plans, sites, that sort of thing. Fortunately, one of the early joiners was a resident of the St. Elmo neighborhood, Denise, who not only was already well acquainted with the food forest concept (she has one in the making on her property in fact!) but had also already gotten a project started at her church, the United Methodist congregation in the St. Elmo, to transform their landscaping into a more environmentally and ecologically friendly and robust manner. She suggested a sloping lot owned by the church but currently basically vacant, growing lawn grass and unutilized. We decided at that first meeting to pursue this location—and in short we were succesful, thanks to the enthusiasm of the church’s pastor and the willingness of the congregation to give our idea a go.
As a first site to act a sort of showcase for what our nascent organization could accomplish we really could not have asked for anything better: size-wise it’s just about what we can manage right now with our level of volunteers, resources, and public visibility. The relatively steep slope is something of a challenge, but it also maximizes visibility, which is further improved by the site being right next to a major greenway which receives a lot of pedestrian and bike traffic; the main route through the neighborhood is a mere block away, and parking is available in the church parking lot.
Once we had the permission to get to work, we held another meeting to explore the site and start to formulate a plan; Denise did most of the drafting of plans (and it helps that she is literally a professional on this front!), while we managed discussion and debate via email primarily, working out details on the ground during meetings and work sessions. In general, just lots of things and most importantly people have come together over the last few months: one group member is a soil scientist and tested our soil for free (it was as we suspected basically biologically dead, a blank slate if you will); we needed some tree work done so I contacted some arborists, and one of them agreed to do it for free, saving us from what would have been a possibly cost prohibitive expense. My next-door neighbor volunteered to construct us a gorgeous intepretive kiosk which will go up (once we clear the labyrinth of permit application!) near the greenway and provide information and guidance on just what to do in and with a food forest and its produce.
In advance of work days folks collected cardboard, dead leaves, logs, woodchips, composted manure, concentrated it all on site, all of it sourced nearby, mostly as salvage, without us having to pay a cent. We have now almost completed the prep work of berm building, woodchip spreading, and so on, and will start planting in earnest over the next several weeks.
On the organizational and publicity front, I have spent a decent amount of free time the last few months emailing and meeting with people in as many broadly goal-congruent organizations and groups as I can, of an urban agriculture nature but also in other areas as well, from folks at the city’s major urban farm to the leader of a student sustainability group on the campus of the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, looking for ways that we can all cooperate and mutually support one another, while also getting a better feel for how to do this sort of community organizing work. For me at least this has all been a process of learning; I have volunteered and participated in all sorts of things on a regular basis my entire adult life, but pretty much always as a volunteer, someone who shows up and is given a hammer or shovel or apron, not even having to fully understand the details of what was being done. Without the direction and enthusiasism of all of the people here who have been doing community-oriented work for much longer I am certain I would have spun out early on.
Not too long after we started work on the St. Elmo site we were able to add a second, smaller site in a different neighborhood, this one attached to a wonderful little non-profit supported community library, ELLA Library, a place to which I had taken my own kids, getting to know the folks working there, incuding the founder and director, Jazmine. As it turned out, she was already interested in starting some gardening projects at ELLA, and was happy to let us try out a mini-food forest installation on a strip of land adjacent to the library. It is smaller than our St. Elmo site—the library is in a building that started life as a store, and so has a sizeable chunk of asphalt former parking lot next to it—but we have been slowly exploring its affordances nonetheless, and I think have hit on a plan that will result in a really gorgeous and productive pocket forest garden, oriented towards kid-friendly fruits and spaces. So far our work sessions here have been lower-key than at St. Elmo, though we are planning a bigger work session in a couple weeks in order to tackle the one big-ticket item, a pallet fence that will apportion the garden section off from the section in which kids kick balls around and ride scooters, hopefully minimizing inadverdent damage to our plantings. And as we build out in this available space, we’re also eying a city-owned lot just down the street, which couild become an extension of what we’re planting beside the library…
There are other possibilities in the works, including partnerships with other organizations in town, collaboration with an assisted living home and a nursing home, and possibly in the future access to currently city-owned land suitable for urban agricultural purposes. But our main goal for the coming months is to plant out trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants in our two starter sites, experimenting with what works best, to see what people respond to, what gives us the most proverbial bang for our limited space buck, and so on, while continuing to build our volunteer base, the reach of publicity, and organizational and institutional connectivities (see what we’re planting and if you feel so moved consider sponsoring a planting via this document). Non-profit incorporation is likely going to be a next step soon, which will entail building up a financial base of some sort; I’m planning (and my supervisor is ok with the idea!) on reducing my day job working hours a bit this summer and working on building out the organizational and ground infrastructure more, and seeing where that goes.
Some lessons that I think apply broadly to anyone wanting to do something similar in urban agricutlure or otherwise (and if you are thinking about it, stop just thinking and do something, even something very small!), some of these I was fortunate to have inadvertently followed, others I wish I would have had in mind from the start:
Figure out the lay of the land ahead of time, both literally and in terms of organizations, resource bases (obvious and not so obvious), associations, government bodies, and so on. Avoid replication of existing efforts, and avoid stepping on the toes of already established groups and organizations.
Cultivate networks and relationships, and do it early: figure out how to find “like-minded” people initially, then figure out how to expand your ambit. Finding individuals who can straddle multiple “worlds” and communities is key (and much easier said than done). Think expansively in terms of who to contact and incorporate.
Start relatively small, and do it well. I am fighting the impulse now to take on every proposal and possibility, knowing that we have to make our “demonstration” sites work well if we are to really get more people and organizations on-board.
Make bold requests—the worst you can get is a “no.” And expect unanswered emails or interactions with no follow-ups.
Roll with contingency, and be ready to operate within the affordances of your local environment. It’s good to know what other peopel have done, but your situation will necessarily be different, and you have to make do in that situation, not that of others in another place and time.
I’m sure I’ll have more profound findings as this work progresses—it is a learning environment on every front, from the entire field of perennial agriculture and public permaculture to that of community organizing and organization building. I didn’t learn any of these things in college or grad school, although I will say that aspects of my training and work experience have definitely translated decently well.
Finally, on a personal note (and if you’re not keen on reading autobiographical soul-searching, feel free to ignore this section!), the last several months have been for me not so much a re-evaluation of my life (that’s something that I would like to think I carry out on a regular basis, in the sense of continually examining what I am doing, my habits, plans, goals, and the like) as a growing openness to possibilities beyond those I have previously plotted for myself. I have never been one to rigorously plot out every detail of my life, or to have five year or ten year plans or whatever; indeed, some of the more significant decisions of my life have been made rather on the fly, working out in the end, usually. As I’ve written about here previously, the period of enforced slow-down that was the height of the covid pandemic, coupled with my growing realization of how untenable staying in the tenure-track rat-race really was, led to my mentally breaking with a lot of things that had, mostly unconsciously, structured my life decisions up to that point. Despite not being keen on long-term plotting and planning, it is the case that most of my adult life was, deliberately or not, oriented well into an ill-defined but tantalizing future that stood as the culmination of my work and many temporal displacements.
Let me continue being honest. When I finally pulled the psychic trigger and decided I was done with a conventional academic career, that it was time to adjust my priorities and give up on—well, to give up on my dream of making it academically and scholarly, I was pretty bitter. I felt as if I had wasted years of my life, as if I had been led on my others, taken advantage of, and that my talents and efforts had been ignored. I had even more uncharitable thoughts I’ll not air here. I don’t feel that way anymore, and not just because I’ve had to confess and work through my sentiments and attitudes towards others and grapple with my own inflated ego. Rather, with distance comes a degree of clarity, and I am increasingly grateful for all those search committees that didn’t call, the job talks that didn’t pan out. What I regret more are the opportunities I missed because I was fixated on what I thought was my role in the world, my right or obligation or both.
At the risk of counting my eggs before they hatch—or in this case, seeds before they’ve sprouted—I do hope to over the coming few years shift largely or even entirely into whatever it is precisely I’m already doing, whether you want to call it community agriculture facilitating, public permaculture, green infrastructure building from below, take your pick. Maybe the best descriptor is that of repair: ecological repair, social repair, spiritual repair. Of course that’s hard to articulate when someone asks “what do you do for a living,” but then I’ve never really had an easy answer for that question, indeed I sometimes feel like my entire life has been a refusal to make sense within such a framing.
Perhaps where it all ties together is my desire to build genuine productive commons whose benefits rebound to as many people as possible regardless of existing material means and status: on the scholarship front, what we have been doing is exactly that, building tools, platforms, and networks of people in order to make available without respect to location, academic affiliation (or lack thereof), or specialization the riches of the pre-modern Islamicate textual heritage. A scholarly commons, really, in sharp contrast to the gatekeeping and paywalls and institutional enclosures that typify so much of scholarly life and infrastructure. Our community food forest project is in many ways quite similar: the sites we hope to help build and manage will be commons in the true sense, forest gardens open to anyone who wishes to harvest or just enjoy the space, with the ecological benefits and environmental and social effects also radiating out regardless of class or race or status. We also hope to use these sites as incubation sites for bringing perennial agriculture and permaculture practices to a much wider audience, ultimately acting as hubs for a commoning of knowledge and relationship and infrastructure. In an ideal world, no doubt, I would not need to be building either of these commons—they would be part of the expected infrastructure of daily life. But if we’re going to live in such a world the reality is that people like me and like you have to build it from the ground up, without knowing beforehand whether we’ll ultimately be successful.