 Just three months ago, this land was not utilized by people. It had weeds so high you couldn't walk through it. And today it's a thriving, abundant garden where black, indigenous, and people of color can come together and grow community and grow food and grow medicine. The community garden started in my dreams a few years ago, and I was finally able to realize that a couple of months ago when we broke ground on this property. The BIPOC Community Garden is a small garden that I've put in, kind of right in my side yard. And it's a place for the BIPOC community in my area to come and be able to garden. Most of the beds are communal beds, so we're growing a lot of vegetables and herbs and folks can come in, they can help tend, they can harvest, they can make medicine. And then we have a few beds that are individually stewarded. So folks who want to have kind of the whole experience of planting the seed, planting the garden, tending it, they have the opportunity to do that here with a bed as well. We have a community herb drying shed. It houses our tool lending library, a lending library of books related to herbalism, and a library of medicine-making supplies. So if folks come to the garden and they don't have any tools or, you know, anything to make medicine with, everything is in the shed for them. It's also a place where folks can dry herbs. And so if they grow something in the garden, they grow a bunch of mint. And they're like, oh, I would love to have this over the winter so I could have tea. They can harvest the mint here, and then they can just take it in and put it on the drying racks. It'll dry beautifully for them, and then they can take it home and have tea for the winter. The garden is the Jane Minor BIPOC Community Medicine Garden. And it's named after an amazing herbalist and healer, Jane Minor, who was enslaved in Virginia. And in 1825, a fever epidemic swept through Virginia. And she was so skilled that she not only healed other black folks, but her enslaver enlisted her to also heal white folks as well. And because she was, you know, so adept at that and so many people got better where everywhere else folks were dying, they granted her her freedom. She didn't stop there, so she kept working as an herbalist and healer and saved up her money and was able to purchase the freedom of 16 other enslaved folks. The inspiration to create the garden was to be able to have a space where BIPOC folks could access the land. That is a really big challenge for a lot of folks nationwide, but even in my community where there isn't a lot of free land access. I also wanted to create this space to be a safe spot for BIPOC folks. So I wanted just to have like a sanctuary, an outdoor sanctuary where people can really feel like they're themselves and feel safe and be able to connect with the earth. The garden is just such an amazing place of connection. It's a place where folks can really reclaim their connection to the earth. Lots of folks have been disconnected from the land, just having a space where you can put your hands in the earth and get to understand the cycles of the plants and the seasons and how the light changes as we move through the year. That all just kind of like helps to connect you to the land, to the seasons. And I think to yourself, like your own innate rhythms that we've been disconnected from, it's also a beautiful place of community connection. So folks are coming out to garden together and then they make medicine together or go for a swim together and it just really builds these beautiful friendships. It's just a way to kind of tap into something that's bigger than yourself. Earth is the source of everything. It's our life. It's our food. It's our medicine. It's our clothing. It's our housing. And so just being able to touch that is really magical and I think brings people home to themselves. One thing that a lot of folks have mentioned, like this is just their happy space. This is a place where they can feel totally themselves and feel safe because it is a sanctuary. It's a place that was created by folks of color, for folks of color, and that we're navigating through a lot of white dominated spaces in our day-to-day life. And so it is just nice to be able to come to a space where it's just your community. It just helps us to breathe a little bit. People also are, you know, growing vegetables, so they're getting good food to eat. They're growing plants for medicine, so they're also being able to harvest and make medicine. 2020 has been such an intense year and there's been so much trauma and pain that we've all experienced and folks have really been able to come here and to just let go of that for a moment and that's such a gift. There is no community garden without community. Absolutely not. When I came here and I was like, oh, I have a yard. I could have a garden. And I was like, oh, great. I could grow this and I could grow that. And then it was just like, wait, that just feels like something's missing. Like if I have this opportunity, I want like the community to have this opportunity. And because I opened up this space for other people that also opened up the community to want to support it. So it's been like this really beautiful coming together. In just three months, it went from like six foot high overgrown brush to all of these amazing beds and really without a lot of work, we used the tarp, which was great. So we didn't have to bring in machinery to cut things down or till a bunch of times. After the tarp came up, the neighbor came in with a tractor and they tilled just once. And then I had a work party. 15 folks came out and we got all the beds made in a few hours. We planted the beds over the next couple of weeks and then we've just been kind of weeding and mulching. It's also, I think, really helpful for folks to see the scale of this, like to see, like, you know, I could totally do this in my yard as well. Like I don't have to have like a bunch of acres. I don't have to even live in the country. You can turn any plot of earth into like a beautiful abundant garden. It's just all right there. Like it's such a huge potential. I feel like, you know, we can't continue to rely on big agriculture and monocropping and like the degenerative ways of which food has grown. And I feel like there's so much potential and land that can be turned into flourishing gardens for community. Don't be intimidated. It's something that you can do just in a yard. You can do it literally in just one bed if you lived in a city. Even if you have a porch, you could just have a community garden of potted plants. There's no limit to where you could do this. You could absolutely do this anywhere. And I think it's about community, though. So make sure, like, you connect with your community, see what's needed, see what's wanted. See how a garden could serve folks and then just do it.