 Thank you guys so much for being here to listen to this presentation. I'm gonna give I'm excited to be here. It's always a great opportunity to have to Speak to people about something you're passionate about and also to speak to people that have an interest in this kind of thing I'm here today talking about Alice's garden. It's a two-acre community garden in the north side of Milwaukee I'm gonna get into a little bit about that as we move forward So My name is fat my mod Since I'm gonna be talking to you guys about Historical perspectives and a program that we run About that. I'd like to tell you guys a little bit about my own history. I was born in Denver, Colorado And when I was about in third grade my family moved back to Ethiopia We're from Ethiopia, which is in East Africa and Yemen, which is in the Middle East And my family moved back there when the war was over and I was lived there through high school and a lot of my experiences of moving from eastern Africa to the United States sort of informed my passion in life and informed sort of the questions that I would ask myself academically and That was how is it that you know this country that has a population that's 95 percent agriculture based And is considered one of the genetic bread baskets of the world in terms of seed diversity Comes to represent the face of starvation to people all across the world So that informed me academically But what I realized as I went along was that It's great and all to analyze things and understand the reasoning reasons and causes But as I was working with small farmers it became very clear to me that I needed to be a very good far small farmer One to not romanticize traditional forms of knowledge but second to be able to offer other small farmers something when I would be interviewing them and So that's how my path came to farming So what I do is Alice's garden my role is I'm the urban farm manager. That's my title And what that means is that I help different families there with any sort of cropping questions They have and I also facilitate a lot of the programs that we're going to talk about My other role is I'm also a small farmer. I farm three and a half acres of vegetables with my partner John And we sell it directly to restaurants and then at farmers markets So I do both those things and This presentation today what I'd like to do is sort of talk to you guys about the history of the garden Because that's important to understand how we're able to teach our other programs like the field hands and foodways program And then I'd like to talk to you guys about field hands and foodways, which is the specific program I'm going to tell you about that highlights different history and Before jumping into that program, I'd like to tell you guys a little bit about what field hands and foodways means So the history of the garden Alice's garden like I said is two acres and it's located in northern Milwaukee in a very busy area Um It's a very historical setting So in Milwaukee Before 1967 any person of color couldn't live north of north Avenue All people of color had to live within a confined area that had about a 10 mile radius There's no silver lining to that but one thing about it is that it created a very vibrant black community So if you wanted a carpenter you had to get one within your community if you wanted to bank you had to do it there but what happened when Housing desegregation happened which became a federal policy Was that they decided they wanted to build a highway and that highway was going to cut right through that neighborhood And so they decided to build that there was a lot of opposition for different reasons And they began the process of building it, but then they decided they weren't going to build it So what that did was it left a lot of vacant land in that? neighborhood and you can kind of see here where the highway cut through and it wasn't until recently that They started to remove sort of the the parts that that they put in for the highway and replace it with surface streets But all around it created vacant lots analysis garden is One of those areas that was a vacant lot, and I'm sure you guys can all imagine and know what happens when you have vacant spaces Especially in places where there are economic issues It created a lot of vagrancy and whatnot so the idea behind Alice's garden is you know you put something Beautiful somewhere, and it makes it helps the community Kind of take ownership for what's going on in their neighborhoods Before 1967 Alice's garden actually for a long time was owned by a man named deacon brown in the late 1800s and he owned 40 acres that was all around that north Avenue area and deacon brown was an abolitionist so as slaves were trying to leave and move from places such as St. Louis and whatnot they were coming up through Wisconsin and going to Canada and the first Slave that was able to escape her name was Carolyn quarrels She was 16 years old and she was dropped off in a sugar barrel at deacon brown's home So there were a lot of people that perhaps had a desire to be abolitionist, but hadn't yet had the opportunity So he picked her up in the sugar barrel and then helped her make her passage to Canada An interesting thing about Wisconsin is that Wisconsin never signed the anti-fugitive slave act Which means that if a slave comes into your state you're required by law To return them back to their origin, but even though they didn't sign that it's still highly lucrative So there's a lot of slave catchers so you can go and look up her story You know they were hot on her trail and she eventually made it there. So right where we're located, you know, there's There's a little monument that sort of commemorates that passage that she made and started the whole Underground Railroad movement in Milwaukee I Also want to tell you guys that if you have any questions while I'm talking or if you would like me to Elaborate on something. I'm saying just raise your hand and I have no problem Answering it. So one thing I wanted to do was Play a video for you guys if I'm able to pull it up Okay, so this video is a video that Was recently made and it sort of talks about urban Farming in Milwaukee, I think it'll give you kind of a good view of what Alice's garden looks like It sits on land that Really was the vibrant African-American community in the city of Milwaukee 50 years ago If you look around us, there's nothing but vacant land here to the north and to the west It is so important that we reclaim the empty spots of the city and literally plant new life the philosophy for me with Alice's is I use Community gardening as the carrot And to claim a new lifestyle or a renewed lifestyle of healthy living and understanding urban agriculture as a means to support your family and to reclaim the wholeness and goodness in farming That kale looks beautiful This garden plot and the plot behind me represents a lot of what is grown here at Alice's collard greens kale eggplant corn okra sweet potatoes herbs The kale and collard greens here. Don't just represent The gardeners it also represents the economic viability that a city can claim through farming Because everything you see here and there are sold not only at farmer farmers markets But we also provide fresh produce to two local restaurants And so the young people who are growing this food in our young farmers program along with learning how to grow Fresh produce they also have developed a marketing plan and they have to develop a whole price Catalog for all of their vendors whether they be the farmers market whether it is local restaurants or the local corner stores But the broader spectrum of what we do is helping people to understand in this city that is so hit by Unemployment in neighborhoods like this and throughout the city that you can actually grow food Not just for yourself, but for others and have a living for yourself This is where we have yoga in the garden represents for me one of our biggest victories here at Alice's garden and so just a field of sweet potatoes in an urban Community that is African-American represents a sign of hope to every elder and every family who comes in here and simply recognizes this leaf and says I'm you know and and says I never thought we could grow sweet potatoes in Milwaukee For us it really is about economic sustainability for families for communities and for neighborhoods because of the incredible work of organizations such as Alice's garden the Fondie food center Walnut Way we have begun to impact The food that is available here in the city of Milwaukee and particularly in this neighborhood Okay, so that kind of let you visually see what Alice's garden looks like, but what is it? So it's a two-acre community garden We have about 95 different plots there different families that garden there and each family has About a 15 by 12 plot and some families have double plots Every gardener there gets a key to the gate and then there are sheds located throughout that you might have seen Where there are tools in there and the only rule is that when you leave you lock it? And then we have a lot of different areas where we have different programs. So one of my favorite things about sort of Education through gardening is that a garden provides you with a reproducible space It's not a finite thing. You're working with in a sense So as long as I have energy, there's a lot of different things I can do with that same space and that's what we do there and One important thing is that you know? Maybe some of you are just you know our farmers and have farmland and that's what you do And and I'm also a farmer but one of the amazing things about programs like this that are in an urban setting is that it Connects and reconnects people to sort of where their food comes from The toil that goes into it gives them that understanding so I run a program during the summer where I had About 15 young people from the ages of 14 to 21 and then we sell at the farmers markets on Saturdays And they're always cracking me up because they're so offended by the prices. We're selling stuff for you know They're just like oh my god We're gonna sell this bunch of carrots for two dollars like we got to sell it for more You know and and I understand that and that's a real you know issue that we have obviously is farmers Especially sustainable farmers is that you know? There's there's a real devaluing of our food in the system where a lot of things are sort of You know brought down in price because they're amended with corn and soy and what not So some of the programs we have they're listed here. We have a program called reclaiming and nourishing family tradition So once a week we do some sort of educational thing whether it's making herbal, you know beauty products to Making pesto or how you would can or dehydrate something or teaching the basics of organic gardening a lot of people think that if you're Organic gardening it means that you don't do anything to your to your vegetables But it's really about finish figuring out non-synthetic alternative methods of Controlling pests And also how you can use other crops to trap crop and whatnot We do raised beds there So it's also understanding sort of the logic behind mostly growing your soil because as farmers We we grow our soil and not so much directed at growing one thing We have a program for junior master gardeners There's an elementary school across the street and throughout the city young kids come twice a week and you know We do small gardening activities with them one of my favorite programs is called the healthy corner store initiative Like we talked about um the area that the garden is located in You know has a lot of economic issues Wisconsin is you know leading the nation in the disparity of income between African-Americans and Other communities so one thing that people will say is that you know over there. It's a food desert It's not so much about the term you use but certainly there's a lot of difficulties with accessing fresh food and That leads to this misconception that you know people don't want to eat fresh food And they would never even really want to garden and the reality behind it is that? People do want to eat fresh food. There's just certain kinds of fresh food They want to eat not everybody wants to eat kale, you know the organic farmer kale stickers They're great, but not every community necessarily wants to eat that so sort of getting feedback and figuring out what people want and what we've done is with our young people we grow on our plots and We found the venues where people do sell their food and a lot a lot of the places that they're accessing food Is that the healthy corner stores? So we've partnered up with them to figure out how to make displays and and then get feedback from consumers about what they want and So like last year the gentleman who was speaking before me was talking about heirloom tomatoes Those didn't go over so well. They did kind of scare people And they just weren't interested in it But one thing that people were really interested in was green tomatoes, you know, they just couldn't get enough and I was like Great, we can do green tomatoes all day long, you know in Wisconsin. It's a lot easier for us in the summer And then we have all sorts of other programs We have a healthy moms healthy kids program We have a new program this year called making sense of the garden and making sense of the garden is for visually impaired people and we try to figure out ways to experience the garden and Vegetables and soil using our different senses so Here's a picture of some of the young people from Brown Street Academy, which is an elementary school across the street. They're clearing this land and Here we did a three sisters planting after that of doing Squash Beans and corn and that allowed us to sort of talk about also, you know Native American planting methods and different stories that went along with there that made it interesting to them But also informative This is a young lady named sojourner. She's making beauty products and Teaching a bunch of women who came out for that day for the event For a weekly event How to do that? She was making chapstick using honey and lavender and things like that these are people from the vision forward group and This time they were doing yoga So that was a feel one and then the following week we were doing taste so all of our grounds there You know, it's either family plots We have programs going on but we have one space that has grass as you saw in the video and that space is where we have Twice a week free yoga classes and twice a week free dance classes And you might wonder like how do you do all these programs, you know? Venus who you saw in the video and who should have been here with me today She has a lot of energy. I would say is one way we do it But also we use our community resources There's a lot of people that have knowledge that want to be able to participate and give back and so it's sort of Comes through that so like our yoga teacher. She has a plot in the garden and we give her that plot for free and she teaches twice a week and and It makes her more connected to the things going on there. These are some of the youth that were in My young people's program. It's called garden mosaics Like I said, you know, we we do a lot of education with them a lot of history Spend a lot of time just dealing with being a teenager It's probably sort of the hardest of all my jobs even then working with the young kids It can be working with them and more I treat it as a work experience when I work with them So it's like what are your impediments to coming to work on time every day? And how can we deal with that? You know a lot of the young people? I will say they're not that excited to be working outside and doing physical labor and I don't come from this school of thought that you know Everyone should have a garden in their front yard and everyone should garden because Not everyone wants to do it, you know, I want to do it I'm excited about it, but I can understand that not everyone wants to do it But with young people it's kind of like well you got to do it and then you can decide you got to experience it And I think it's really important because for example not a single young person in my program this year had ever eaten a Beat, you know and let alone like sort of what they eat They had no idea that you know beets grow in the ground and That corn grows up. Just no idea. So Even if just that a little bit They understand how those things happen. I think there's sort of a lot of problems in The younger generation now and sort of urban environments of having any idea of where food comes from so You know sort of doing a lesson about that poultry and what what kinds of meat does that mean? You know that the butcher didn't just make it in the back there You know and that it came from somewhere so imparting that and Ultimately with them, you know, all I want them to understand at the end of the day is that when they eat so much seems out of Control to them in their lives, but just if they can understand that every time they're eating food they're making a choice some kind of choice and and I know that a lot of times it doesn't sink in for them then but over time Hopefully it does and you know a garden is certainly a good spot for healing and sort of Relaxing and listening to the sounds of nature, which I think is good for them. It's good for me It makes it easier to handle them at times So I'm here today to talk to you guys about a program that we have called field hands and food ways I'll read this to you and then we'll go ahead and just break it down and how we do it and what it means So it's an agricultural historical and cultural based learning opportunity for young people and community families to celebrate the farming food preparation and Folkways of African Americans and Africans throughout the desire diaspora the program is a demonstration garden project including a master's kitchen garden a slave allotment plot and three recreation areas in addition Field hands and food ways honors the historical setting of Alice's garden so kind of already talked about a lot of that and then Field hands and food ways also celebrates a great migration of Africans Americans from the south to the north and the hopes and traditions They carried with them so You know like I told you guys the area that we're located in is Historical and it was the first site of the underground railroad But a lot of African Americans settled in that area Wisconsin specifically So it's estimated that about six million African Americans migrated from the south to the north during the periods of Before World War two one, you know beginning of World War one and then World War two and that's sort of a long history But it's often a Something that's not historic and acknowledged and for a lot of them It was like moving from one place to a completely different country And they brought their foods with them, you know because before those times all African Americans were in the south, right? so What we're going to be talking about at this point is sort of The field hands what that meant as African Americans became slaves in the Americas and then the food ways that they Brought with them. So we know that between 1650 and 1860 Approximately 15 million people were enslaved and that's counting the people that actually made it right to the Americas because There are a lot of people that died on the voyage in the US a lot of them came in through South Carolina was a major Area, but as you can see more in the southeast and then you know, Brazil is one of the main places that a lot of Slaves went to so what did it mean to be a field hand, right? A lot of Africans when they came here were required to work in the fields, right and It meant 18-hour days. You were expected to pick upwards of 200 pounds of cotton in the beginning when slaves came They the main industries were sugar, right and then later it went on to tobacco But we lost a lot of the market in sort of Europe and whatnot with the American Revolution and With the cotton gin we start we started to go towards cotton and Then a lot of and then one main thing that a lot of people don't know about is that we also grow a lot of rice And they also grew indigo and it goes a dye That comes from India. That's like a blue dye that was used We're gonna talk a little bit more about that, but let's just say that in 1805 the slave trade was abolished That means that you know, you were no longer allowed to bring slaves across Atlantic, but You could still have slavery moving and a lot of it did move towards Texas and New Orleans and some people would say that that was sort of some of the worst times for slaves because that's when a lot of Families were separated and sold separately and whatnot In 1883, you know president Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation Which freed all slaves, but it wasn't until 1885 that we had the ban on Slavery, okay, so how do we teach of what? Sorry, we're oh, yeah, sorry Okay, sorry, you're right. Um, thank you So how do we do this? We have a demonstration area. It's about it's a little less than a quarter acre and In that area like I talked to you about at right at the beginning of the field hands and foodways Peace we have different signs that leads you through And it demonstrates what a plantation would have looked like with the master's kitchen garden and then slave allotments Um, a lot of people don't you know, how did slaves eat, right? This talks about that so slaves often got their food in three ways it was either provision procured or produced, okay, so If they were allowed at some plantations They were allowed to have their own plots and they grew their own food in those plots and usually in those plots the foods They grew were highly specific foods to Things that they brought with them from Africa sometimes You know the masters would give them some of the things that were not wanted and then the third way was that they foraged for their food So you can see here This is a demonstration of what the master's kitchen garden would have been and in the master's kitchen garden It's only specific foods that were grown there Because there was sort of a segregation in what was considered That they wanted to eat and what the slaves could eat and that informs our foodways as we go on So, you know, it was more like things that like eggplant Lattice Beets those were the kinds of things that would be in a master's kitchen garden and then the slave garden which is also called the huck patch had things like cabbage cow peas okra as you got further south and Sometimes it had corn so they also were informed And corn mainly came you know through their exchanges with Native Americans so We'll get back to them So when they came they brought a lot of foods with them that were Indigenous to Africa at that point they brought it in a lot of different ways one way is that when Slave ships went there They had to get enough food on this ship to bring back all of the people with them and the crew and whatnot So there was a lot of food that was on the ship that later some of the slaves would plant some of those foods are sesame seed Okra black-eyed peas and rice I just want to tell you that I'm highlighting specifically the foods that they brought with them here but there was also a lot of exchange with foods from the Americas also going to Africa and Example with of that would be corn right that was something that was from the Americas Rice is an important crop because now today in the US we produce at least 12% of the world trade right? Missouri is one of the biggest producers of rice as well as well as California, Texas Etc. So rice is interesting It's it's an interesting story because with rice they've specifically Picked slaves that were rice growers along the Sierra Leone Area in Africa and it costed a lot more to get those slaves But it's important to know because when slaves were brought here They were skilled in certain types of growing and that's why they were sought out and then taken to certain regions that Could accommodate that type of growing so even today a lot of the people that brought were brought and Unformed the ways we grew rice, which was a very hard job including, you know building a lot of ditches for irrigation weaving these Traditional types of things for fanning it and they were in the sea islands and southern Carolina and Georgia and the those people are often Not as supervised because of the type of work or because they were in the sea islands By their overseers and particularly after the Civil War and those people Because they all you know during slavery oftentimes slaves were separated if you were in similar ethnic groups It was effective to separate people So that they commit speak similar languages But in this instance because they wanted all of these people from the rice growing regions They all spoke the same languages had similar traditions and were not as supervised so they were kind of left and they still exist there and They've come to identify themselves as gullah people and I don't know if you've heard about them But they're still on the sea islands. They've identified themselves as sort of their own Indigenous group there they have their own language that has a lot of loanwords from African languages So We'll move on the next thing is that you know How did a lot of this food move into sort of the the foods that we eat today well, you know African Americans were Cooks first in the big house right under slavery So even if there was sort of this reticence to accept certain types of foods that were native to them It slowly came to infuse the foods that people ate Later on they were all often cooks in the armies particularly during the Civil War they became pioneers as people were moving west and Later more in the 60s, you know up until the 60s They were the people that were cooking in the houses They were sort of the hands that did a lot of the work in the homes A lot of that food came with the Underground Railroad As people, you know We're making their way out of slavery and then finally as a lot of people moved from The south to the north they brought a lot of their food traditions with them So how do we how do we teach people about this? Well, you know like I said we have that demonstration garden that helps we have a program called iron pots and wooden spoons So once a week we cook stuff with things that we grow on the vegetable into a single pot because that's often how people cook them and You know, you can think of all sorts of dishes like jambalaya or any single pot dishes that we're familiar with now But there's a lot more of those. So we do that once a week we Once a week, we have an African drummer that comes in he drums with the young people Can see him? Okay, so What are the lessons sort of we've learned through this program one is that you know Certainly talking about slavery is a sensitive topic, right? It's a sensitive topic you know, there's a lot of elder people in and In our community that you know, we're around when there was sharecropping it's a sensitive topic for them It's a sensitive topic for them to come back to the land But just because it's a sensitive topic doesn't mean that we have to throw out the whole sort of history That came into What we kind of consider the United States the foods we eat and how we grow it It's just figuring out how you do that and sort of give credence to to where we got their sources of knowledge a Visual is good, right when people come in and I can say this is what It would have looked like on a plantation. This is what it would have looked like for slaves to grow This is what they would have grown for the masters. It's it's not a political conversation it's just a representation of history right there, right and I'm sure you can all understand that, you know being able to look at things growing in that sense helps you to remember it and And engage you in that way It's helpful because it uses knowledge in our community. So There was a picture there that I skipped through but our oldest garden gardener his name is mr. Wilson and You guys saw Venus talking about the sweet potatoes in the video, right? People don't really grow so much sweet potatoes in Wisconsin. I think maybe you guys grow up more here, but It was my first year growing sweet potatoes at all and it was the first year for a lot of my young people But it allowed us to engage with mr. Wilson who had grown up in the South and he was able to teach us how to do it It was meaningful for us. We got to learn it from someone who's so good at it naturally does it It was meaningful for him because he got to see that we valued his knowledge and That we wanted him there and that we wanted to spend that time with him Again, you know opens up conversation about those things in the past it acknowledges that that past and it writes a history about it It's cross-generational We're able to engage with all sorts of different people in the garden and their experiences And lastly one of my favorite things is that it can be utilized in all of our programs, you know If you're there for Whatever if you're there for vision forward or you're there for reclaiming nursing family traditions You walk through that area. You see it. It becomes a part of your conversation Anyone can come to the drumming anyone can come eat with us at our single pot events so I Think it's good in that sense And that is the end of my slideshow I know that I gave you guys a lot of information If you have any questions, please ask me for me, I feel like I Didn't want to only tell you about the program today But I sort of wanted to tell you about the meaning and The history of those things so that you can walk away being as informed as I hope that the program does for people as well Yeah Actually we just this year Right now a couple weeks ago Incorporated ourselves as an independent nonprofit We get a lot of grants from a lot of different places There's only one, you know, there's the director Venus Williams and then there's me the urban farm manager We mostly take all of the funding we have and just put it back in programs We don't really spend money on overhead so much the community garden. It's it's different in the sense that Every there's different quadrants and they all have water access So one of the things that their people's rental So the rental there is it's $25 for a year. It's $50 if you have a double plot and that goes towards paying the our water bill But I mean, I don't know if you mean like specific numbers But our funding model is that we're mostly grant funded in that sense But we're trying to be more sustainable Which I think is a goal for any nonprofit, right? I have a farm I'm trying to employ young people coming out of different programs like this for me. I'm completely For a profit. I've always believed in that because I want to show that you can be a sustainable Organic vegetable farmer it seems You know, maybe I'm optimistic But I think I think you can like I have this other job because certainly most organic vegetable farmers Someone's got to have another job in in your partnership if you're two or three-way partnership So yeah, we keep our low our overhead really low we constantly try to come up with new programs and We try to utilize the people that are in the community and you know, whatever that means the community isn't just a certain zip code The community is the people that come and want to participate So we have no rule about zip codes for who can come and get a plot there at all It's very diverse setting that only really benefits the community We will give priority when we have a waiting list to people in the neighborhood certainly but but that's the best thing about food right when you walk around at Alice's garden and You go, you know You get to see a history of someone's culture and things about their culture that maybe you wouldn't pick up Just talking to them by looking at their food So, you know, we have some Arab gardeners when you go to their plot you see totally different things that their family sent them from Lebanon or Wherever and that they grow their different squashes or often when I go to the to the little plots of The mung farmers have their I don't often know what what how do I identify a lot of the things, you know But I learn a lot from that the climates of their area Why they mostly grew that type of thing and that forms you about history if you're interested in it do we um partnerships and you know all sorts of ways of You know doing like Workshops or forums or things like that We hold them in high esteem. They we do similar things to them So we're all sort of doing the same thing which is you know trying to bring Accessible food at a good price to people. That's non-synthetic pesticides and and fertilizers Our our partner agency before we became an independent nonprofit. It's called the Center for Resilient Cities and They also work with growing power as well. So You know, we're all in the same same boat together. There's also another place called Walnut Way Which is about Four blocks from Alice's Garden. They have a completely different model. Which is pretty awesome. They they went in and you know There's a whole block there and there was all these vacant lots on the block So they built gardens in the vacant lots, right? And then they bought one of the houses there That had been foreclosed renovated it made it this cool community space and they try to bring together this idea of Property property values making your house More energy efficient all those things that affect housing as well as raising the value of the homes in that area By growing crops and having people more engaged in that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of Growing power is great. There's also a lot of different organizations in Milwaukee that are sort of burgeoning now Choose them from certain areas, I'd never heard that No, no, you that's a great question and I think that you you understood it. I think Yeah So she was asking she you said that she said she'd never heard that you know that they went specifically To areas in Africa and brought them researching what they were capable of to come and work here Is that right? Just have Well the system, you know, it's good question the system of slavery was pretty highly thought out It lasted for hundreds of years, you know and to perpetuate that kind of system and then to make it become the economic backbone of a whole Continent to continents because really South America as well, you know There's definitely a lot of research in how you did that and because people invested so much in their slaves, right? That was property. There's a lot thought put into what kind of slave you were gonna have what they were gonna be good for It's certainly true, you know like Africans were very skilled farmers some Some Africans were prized for the regions they came from because of their physical build their physical build alone, right? In different areas of Africa people can look very different But here, you know rice is one of the main ones in terms of cropping where they were willing to pay a lot Higher price for the slave because they were able to do that growing rice is a very hard thing So yeah, yeah, and and I just like to say that one of the things about about this program and Talking about it is that there really isn't a lot of research about sort of the foodways themselves, you know I just recently got an ethno botany book about The the stuff Africans brought in and it's like there's so many other things like castor oil and a lot of like Herbal remedies they brought with them But it's something that's becoming more and more developed and something this is the only program of that kind right now And there's a lot of people sort of looking at it to see how successful it is and like I said I think a part of it is that it's a sensitive topic for people on either side of the conversation But but it's happening so That's a good question, I appreciate that question the way Okay, so her question was you know seems like the garden is established now How did you get to that point? So what happened was that that empty land? At first was taken over by the University of Wisconsin extension program, and it's actually named Alice me Taylor Which Alice's garden is named after was the director the only Woman and African-American director of the extension at that time and the history that we're talking about In the early 80s and so when they took it over it was kind of more farm-scale stuff happening It didn't seem like a lot of people were interested there was about Four among families and two African-American farmers, and they were kind of farming the two acres so Demetrius Brown, he's the extension officer and He brought in Venus Williams her name. She's the director my colleague and It's also his wife, and he was like she does a lot of youth work And he brought her in and he's like can you get a little you know youth program going and she she was like Yeah, I can do that. This was about seven years ago She's like but I also feel like there's a lot of adult things that needs to happen here the way that she successfully brought people into it and sort of Overcame this misconception that people in that community wouldn't want a garden was just grass roots knocking on people's door Telling them what was going on And that's really how she did it and it took about you know We're just kind of finally being established in our infrastructure getting all of our land covered really selling vegetables at the farmers market So So that's how I would say just knocking on doors One thing that people often will say to me, you know, oh you work in that neighborhood like you're just gonna park your car There like ridiculous things right or they'll come to visit and it's this really beautiful place and they'll say oh My god, how do people not steal all this stuff right because it's just surrounded by sort of this metal fence and People don't jump the fence and still stuff They really don't and the only times all of the gardeners They're familiar with each other now because we do stuff on a weekly basis So they'll sort of know if someone's in someone else's pot or whatnot But in in in times like I was driving here and someone had called me I was sitting in the car and they're like, uh, you know, you are you the farm manager there? I see so many vegetables that are just rotting and you know These people are just gonna let them rot in their garden Can I can I go in and take it and I'm always like God you guys are so good at calling at the end of the season You know, but our rule is that you know If some even if it looks like it's rotting in someone's pot they put the work in it They did that from the beginning. So I'm gonna assume they know what they're doing Even if it's sort of going back to the garden and the whole point is just to say that There have been times where someone will walk in, you know, and the gates open and I just try not to scare them you know, it's an opportunity to Bring somebody in instead of seeing it as a negative interaction. They're coming to steal. They're coming to steal food You know, I'll generally sort of be like, what are you doing? Like, what are you looking for? Maybe I can give you something for my plot, but that's not the appropriate thing to do If you want to come volunteer, you can I can totally give you vegetables at the end of this week We have a potluck on this day just come and if you want to have a plot next year, you can, you know Um, so I think that a lot of the negative interactions people would judge We kind of see as more of an opportunity to engage people How do people mark their plots? I mean, are they just a little tag with their name or can they be creative and do what they want or Um, well, we you know, really I mark the Plots and sometimes I have to remark it because people Push back but the way we do it is um, you know, we have those I don't know if you saw in the picture. You can see it See those wooden Like beam things See that how there's those wooden, um I don't know what you call it, but it's like a long thick law And it's usually about two of those for one side and one Going horizontal. So I mark them for them People can do whatever they want. There's some people that will be like this is the Jackson family plot or some people will put up a little You know sign or something Butterfly or whatever, you know, they're free to do Whatever that they want in their plot You know, we have no rules about sort of what you can Grow or not grow as long as it's something that you can legally grow, you know And and we encourage that diversity we get a lot of you know Donations for seeds and plants and stuff throughout the year that we're able to Offer our gardeners. Um, I I had space in a greenhouse this year So I was able to grow a lot of stuff and sell it to them at super discounted price mainly heirloom Vegetables and and that's cool because you know, I hopefully get them into that a lot of the gardeners there Like I said, there's a lot of elder gardeners and they do a lot of seed saving Um, like I said for me where I'm from that's one of the things that I'm working on is seed saving in Ethiopia And it's so cool to be around older people That that just do it naturally. It's not this big scientific lab project. They're just like, you know Does it pollinate like this? This is the kind of plant you're dealing with we need to save the seeds You know, so a lot of them do that so our only rule about um About plots is if you abandon it the whole season Um, which happens a lot, right at the beginning of the season people think that They're just gonna garden so much and they'll come out one two days and then you don't see them, you know Um, is that if you abandon it? You just have to get back on the waiting list for the next year You're not banned. You just got to get back on the list It was a waste of sort of space that a lot of people would like to have Okay, there's no other questions