Welcome In
Getting to know our neighbors one seedling at a time
Before we ever knew anything about the possibility of a global pandemic, we made the perhaps unusual decision to plant a large vegetable garden in our front yard.
The other morning, as I planted transplants in the garden, a couple from four houses down the hill walked up and stood in the street, watching me. One asked, with a smile, “how’s the victory garden going?”
Victory gardens are a throwback to the last century when world wars disrupted supply chains and people all across the country took to growing their own food. In my day job I study war zones. I teach students about the origins of civil wars and how populations respond to political violence through collective acts like protest and civic participation.
Since we are all now facing the oppressive, shared challenge of a pandemic, I am not too surprised by my neighbor’s comparison to a war-time garden. But my partner and I didn’t garden to fight a human enemy or offset an economy rerouted for arms production. Up until a few weeks ago, our garden was just about simple pleasures and a personal commitment to the land and fresh food. While we hoped one day our vegetables could become a source of community among our neighbors, we never quite imagined how that might unfold.
The decision to put a garden in our front yard was simple—we like to eat and we like to be outside. We followed the light and realized the best light for vegetables lay in a 400 square foot area in the left side of our front yard. Yet, as newcomers to the neighborhood, we were hesitant to break the mold—we had seen precisely zero front yard vegetable gardens in our neighborhood despite the South’s history as a place where large gardens once sustained entire households for up to a year at a time.
“You sure it’s legal?” I asked my fiancé one morning while staring out at our street of grassy lawns.
“Yes, of course it’s legal.”
“Is everyone going to think we’re making the street ugly?” I wondered anxiously, peering at the yard cutting crews that hovered with mowers and blowers to help keep all the yards looking neat.
“Not when they see all the food we grow.”
We are comfortably queer farmer types who wear cut-off jean shorts, shabby hats, and flannel shirts while we work outside. We are newcomers to Nashville, but not to the South—a place we longed to return after our stint in the Southwest. We ached for a sense of rooting down, for expansive woodlands, the scent of nutrient rich soil, unfurling ferns, and—essential for gardening—the rainfall of the region where we first met.
We started by building a post and wire fence. We secured square corners to make it look tidy. We didn’t want to scare away the neighbors we hadn’t yet befriended. After we turned over the ground and let it lay fallow for four months, we loaded seven cubic yards—an entire dump truck of soil and compost into the future garden using a shovel and a wheelbarrow. Whether our neighbors looked on with a sense of curiosity—or contempt—we couldn’t really tell.
That was back in January. Today is a new season and Buttercrunch lettuce swirls with delight in the warm breeze. Arugula nestles in next to beets and radishes. Scotch Blue kale curls alongside Thousand Head kale. Sanguine Ameliore lettuces, a green variety speckled with red dots reminiscent of birds’ eggs, grow steadily next to upright onions. Waltham broccoli, Volcan chard, Dragon-tongue beans, Early Prolific Straightneck squash, and Jiabi Shimo Sharazu cucumbers all root together in our front yard garden.
What would normally be a private endeavor—a slow witnessing of growth—has become a community focal point.
Folks in our neighborhood have been home, sheltering in place. Working from makeshift desks pressed up against windows, juggling new virtual schedules, and taking frequent walks on new loops and routes. People we’ve never seen before pause to admire the garden at a twelve-foot distance. Musicians who are often away on tour. Older neighbors who typically work early hours at the YMCA. Young couples with new babies who push strollers up the gradual hills for a little exercise.
We are fortunate to have a large yard with our small cottage home. In the back yard we have a modest greenhouse which we built this winter to start vegetable transplants. While you don’t need a lot of space to grow a little food, not everyone has the time and resources to do it. But we do, and the sudden surge of walkers with interest in our garden has led us to think differently about the self-sufficiency of our endeavors. How could our garden reach other yards and plates?
We have now shared over fifty seedlings across the neighborhood, dropping baby plants on stoops or asking others to do ‘pick-ups’ on our own. Our little plants are taking root in yards along our street. We’ve made garden baskets of fresh food and shared them too. Our seventy-six-year old neighbor grew some of our carrot and corn seeds. Neighbors eight houses down the street traded us toilet paper for beans, squash, cucumbers, and other seedlings that they planted in their yard with the help of their six-year-old. Three houses down in the opposite direction, our neighbors are adding our seedlings to a new, small, backyard garden using cardboard as a base. One friend, who lives a few minutes away in a small apartment in the recently tornado-hit Five-Points area, is now growing our seedlings into large beautiful kale stalks inside reused yogurt containers. Everyone awaits hot weather plants with watering mouths. We laugh out loud, dreaming together of a tomato right off the vine, sliced and sprinkled with salt. We exchange numbers from the street and yell out recommendations for how often to water the plants. They text us later to ask for tips: what can the lettuces be planted next to? How far apart should the kales be?
Talking about plants is a whole lot more healing than talking about politics. In a time when people long to ‘come together’ but fear physical touch and, perhaps, fear judgement, the plants in our front yard connect us in ways that we cannot connect ourselves. Like the underground network of our garden’s bed, plants invite us to envision new forms of reciprocity and endurance together.
I still do not think of our garden as a victory garden in the war-time sense. Dig on for Victory! Our food is fighting! These slogans do not resonate. Plants do not lead us down a path of polarization, using crisis to create enemies of one another, to polarize, to nit-pick, to divide, to war. Our food our freedom! Share a seedling down the street! Are phrases perhaps more apt for a garden today. And this is how we can learn to nurture our neighbors during times like these–through our plants—which is a new kind of victory, one that reimagines our future as an echo of our past.
Photos by Hanes Motsinger
Contributor
Cassy Dorff
Cassy Dorff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University where Cassy teaches, researches, and writes on political violence, conflict dynamics, political resistance, and political methodology. In addition to academic research, Cassy writes essays and poems on political ecology and the environment.