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“I just got back from looking at the tomatoes, and they look awful,” Megan Phillips, Executive Director of The Growing Project says. Leaves torn, stalks bent, bruised and broken, and the tomatoes themselves slowed, small, scarred. Megan talks about replanting and points out that all these spring storms are out of the ordinary and now we’re into the real hail season.
Volunteer Helen Skiba says, “It seemed that the whole atmosphere was conspiring to defeat The Growing Project. Jenn’s seedling boxes were filled with ice, and the melon seedlings I had just transplanted were flattened into barely-recognizable pulp. My heart was crushed.”
 These hardworking farmers are fighting against more than hail. Early in the season, not long after getting potatoes, peas, and brassicas in the ground, The Growing Project got a call from the owner of their Vine Street garden. They had to get off the land. Twenty-four hours later the place was cleared to make room for a new storage rental business (several months later the land still sits bare and vacant).
Honestly, I was ticked when I heard about this. I wanted to talk to city zoning officials; I wanted to write fired-up letters to the landowner. Helen says it best when she tells how she went around town screaming “I can’t believe people have so much shit that they can’t keep it all in their house! I can’t believe people would rather have aluminum-sided prison cells full of unwanted crap than a garden of great food! I hope those potato plants push up through the foundations and tear those damn things down!”
I love the image, I love the rant, but I get that lending your property to a non-profit, non-paying community group in hard economic times might be a difficult thing to justify. Sadly this is not the sum of their land woes.
They lost land elsewhere in town: Swing Station Way, a small plot on Plum and other places they were promised never panned out. Their summer crops have been all but ruined. As Megan says they’ve been “Hailed out, kicked off, pretty much destroyed in all of our production efforts and we still took 300 plus pounds of food to the Food Bank.”
With crushed plants and crushed hearts I ask Jenn Lockheart, who has been involved with the project from the beginning, why they don’t quit? She calmly says, “Nature is unpredictable. Struggles of growing food in the Colorado climate are not limited to just The Growing Project. Many of our fellow growers have encountered some of the same, if not more problems in their fields.”
Jenn adds that “Being able to provide even the smallest amounts of fresh produce to the Food Bank is great encouragement. The simple pleasure of enjoying a juicy, heirloom tomato with fragrant basil freshly picked out of a local garden belongs to everyone in our community. The group of individuals that have come together to make this happen are passionate about food and will persevere.”
I find it really hard to doubt someone with this kind of conviction. I’m not sure if these people are even capable of quitting.
Helen offers this memory as evidence for why she doesn’t quit. She says, “On one occasion, Megan, Jenn and I were out at the Hollywood plot planting melon seedlings and beans, and the smell of the hay mulch we had put down was intoxicating in the late-afternoon air. Purple clouds hung over the reservoir and the sun glinted through the cottonwood leaves. It was blissful and idyllic working with my friends on something I cared deeply for.”
I can see how this would be hard to give up, but I still wonder what exactly do they do? For a while I have a hard time holding the big picture in my mind. Fort Collins has CSAs like Happy Heart and community gardens including Mulberry and Spring Creek. Good-hearted growers work hard at Colona Farm, Grant Family Farm, and Native Hill Farm. The Growing Project differs. They take the concept of growing high quality, organic, local food, and the idea of stewardship one step farther, or one step backwards toward the community. I’m reminded of H.C. Flores book Food Not Lawns and how empowering growing food was for her.
Flores’ involvement in gardening sprung directly from her radical political activities. Gardening, concern for community, and investment in local food systems all echo political values and philosophies decrying the alienation of post-industrial America. Contextually, we’re looking at the birth of Permaculture, the activism of vintage Ralph Nader, one of those reflective moments in human history when an overwhelming sense of something being wrong gives rise to a movement: when people confined to cities explored the nature of their disconnection from the land and saw the state of things as untenable.
Flores is but one voice of that movement including Bill Mollison, Joe Hollis and others; she write “growing paradise gardens and giving away the surplus makes communities better in the most fundamental ways: First we regain control of the quality and availability of our food supply, which results in healthier, more confident people. Next, when we share the harvest, our neighbors become more like family. This reduces waste from all directions.”
The Growing Project comes out of this tradition of community empowerment. The Growing Project’s work is socially just, radical, and right.
 Put simply, they’re growing food for people who need it. They’re working to shape the local food system because it’s hitting a critical point. Board member Chad Chriestenson tells me about a farmer’s market he went to in the Bay Area. He describes beautiful produce, and brilliants arts and crafts: a well organized event. Between restaurants certified local and organic and the Farmer’s Market, Chad estimates that 95% of the Marin County food system is local and no one can afford it. This feels all wrong.
Helen agrees, and she says she “was immediately attracted to The Growing Project just by meeting the people involved. I met Megan Phillips and realized that her project was exactly what I was looking for: a community gardening endeavor that catered not just to a set of enlightened foodies or hippies or ‘localvores,’ but to people who really need readily available, fresh, local produce—the food insecure and low-income families of Larimer County.”
Chad says The Growing Project is “making sure that [local food here] didn’t start at a certain income level and go up.” They want to see to it that healthy, locally grown food reaches the “invisible third” of the population: those living in Fort Collins below the poverty level. Megan calls this closing a gap in the food system. When I understand all this it is even harder to listen to their struggles.
I can tell Megan feels frustrated at times with the whole effort, I don’t blame her. Every time I stop by some other calamity has befallen The Growing Project. “God hates The Growing Project” seems like a logical conclusion. Instead she says, “I get down on the project. My first instinct is to say we haven’t done anything well, but we have a good group of people who do stuff.” Modesty aside, less than a year after the conversation started they’ve navigated the difficult legalities needed to gain non-profit status. For every failure they’ve learned something, and they’ve got committed volunteers.
When it comes down to it, people make all the difference. Chad makes sure I understand that without Jenn Lockheart and Megan Phillips, without volunteers like Helen Skiba, The Growing Project would have fallen apart. He speaks directly, with his voice full of respect, carefully making sure I know these people and a few others are the heart of this project. He says they’re “stubborn enough that [The Growing Project] doesn’t have a choice but to succeed.” He adds, “they had all the excuses to quit and they didn’t. Without Jen and Megan this would be no where.”
I think about rushing emotions: Helen’s rant, Jenn’s desperate bike ride to the Food Bank, Megan dirty and tired in the sun. I think this rollercoaster must keep them going.
And then I think sometimes the rush is not a rush at all. One of the difficulties I’d never fully considered is that farming takes time. As Chad says, “Part of growing food, the tangible part that goes counter to the country’s culture, is that it takes a season. You have to wait, you have to slow down. You have to slow everything to the time table of that plant, thinking in slower terms rather than speeding up. We had a lot of people who got excited about the idea of The Growing Project in the beginning. A lot of people get discouraged” Chad laments the expectations of people in this digital age and I see the irony of me writing this for a free online news source.
I don’t know if The Growing Project solves the problem of connecting us, and they mean all of us, to our food. They’re trying. They’re a model, and they are stubborn. Talking to them I’ve learned a great deal about what it takes to succeed as a non-profit. I feel sympathy for them and excited about their purpose. I realize that much of what it takes to do any kind of non-profit work is sheer will power.
They need help. They need to find land, a good acre for now they can work this year and return to, maybe in the future three to five acres. They need to find a way to pay someone to do their organizational work so that they can focus on what their best at: growing food.
As Chad says, and it may be an easy metaphor but it’s the right one “The Growing Project is little more than a seed right now.” As hard as this has been, everyone holds a distinct sense of potential, a real sense of purpose, of dedication. I push at everyone I talk to, try to get them to tell me this is going to fail, no one does, and today that’s something to admire.
To contact The Growing Project, to get involved, to fund them, to offer them land and mean it, to read about their trials and tribulations in their own words go to http://groprofoco.wordpress.com/.
UPDATE 9/17/09:
The Growing Project merged with Mulberry Community Gardens in August. Together we are trying to launch both Garden Time and support Farm-to-School initiatives in the Poudre School District. Between the remaining Growing Project gardens, MCG, and Native Hill Farm, we've delivered almost 1000 pounds of food to the ole' bank. We'll be hosting an Open House/ Season Celebration on October 24th at MCG. Everyone is welcome to join us in the offering of thanks for the great abuandance and the beckoning of better things to come. -Megan Phillips |
Comments
Heres to a better season in 2010!
I agree with the Growing Projects mission that feeding Fort Collins' low income residents with local organic food is one of the next frontiers in the local food movement.
The hope that is grown by our efforts is so immense and healing!
Thanks for all you do!
Bailey & Dennis Stenson
Happy Heart Farm
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