NoC News
“We plan to expand the hard scape and beds, mulch the entire lot, plant more flowers, and put up some educational signage,” says In-Feed’s Jennifer Baricklow of the vacant lot garden on the 500 block of North Limestone that she helped cultivate last year.
Located across from the old Spaulding’s building on the property of James Maxberry, who runs the liquor store on the corner of Sixth, the garden is one of several established last year by In-Feed. The group is one of a growing number of local gardening activist organizations that have formed over the past several years. In-Feed uses gardening as a tool for making under-used land more productive.
“We encourage people to think…about the spaces in which they live and work, to see possibilities for growing food and saving seeds. These are things that will ultimately make them less dependent on store-bought food. You don’t have to have half an acre to grow something for your family. Every little tomato helps.”
In Feed’s does not aim to promote community gardens (though they acknowledge the community building that may occur), but rather to offer offer productive models for small scale gardening in the midst of urban and suburban waste. Their garden spots are more about giving residents tangible ideas for putting all that waste—private residential green space, vacant lots, business properties, church grounds, alleyways, sidewalk easements and city parks—back into use.
Faith Feeds
During the winter season, In Feed assessed what worked and what needed improvement from the year before. They realized they’ll need rain barrels at several of the plots that lack access to running water. For the time being, they’ve decided to abandon their market garden to better focus on their other spots, which like the North Limestone garden, provide food free of charge to anyone happening by.
Through connections with other local gardeners that arose partially through their work last year, the group was invited to join Faith Feeds, an umbrella group of different gardening organizations. The groups—Lexington Urban Gleaning Network, Seedleaf, the Lexington Farmer’s Market, Reed Valley Orchard—share a common mission: to address hunger by harvesting or collecting excess produce and distributing to those in need throughout the community.
In Feed’s mission to encourage the creative use of space for growing food fit in well. “We have a program that they want to see grow,” Baricklow notes, calling In-Feed “the gardening arm of Faith Feeds.” (Somewhere Wendell Berry is smiling at the economics of it all: In Feed encourages growing food for public gleaning; Faith Feeds encourages citywide gleaning efforts.)
Being connected to Faith Feeds has helped the small start up growing group in other ways. Baricklow and Bob McKinley are the organizational structure and mule-horses of In Feed. Establishing, weeding, watering and harvesting at the different lots left little time for organizational work, particularly since both lead full-time lives doing other things.
“Faith Feeds has access to human and capital resources that would have taken us a lot longer to develop: a board of directors with lots of community contacts, 501c3 status, even a financial donor base. Bob and I are now more free to focus on the programming aspects of what we want to do, knowing the nonprofit infrastructure we need to support our work is in place or in process.”
In addition, the group helps connect In-Feed with a needed market. Faith Feeds’ established connections with citywide emergency food agencies offers the vacant lot group “a distribution network to which we can both contribute and direct folks who garden with us.”
“We can’t address food system inequities at any level,” Baricklow observes of her work, “but we can make a difference for individuals on a day-by-day basis. Showing people what they can do, making them more aware of the food-growing potential around them, gives them more options.”
UPDATED March 2012: In-Feed will be hosting a seed sale on Saturday, March 17, at Woodland Christian Church, 8am-3pm, 530 East High Street, across from Woodland Park. For more info on the seeds that will be available, visit www.faithfeedslex.org. For more info on In-Feed, visit http://infeed.wordpress.com/
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