From Garden to Shelf
Exploring the Production and Consumption of Produce in Community Gardens in Mecklenburg County
This page focuses specifically on Community Gardens in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. No matter the type of farm or garden (big/small, volunteer/employee, produce/livestock) all food producers have a place in the Piedmont foodshed ecosystem. Community gardens provide a welcome refuge for individuals looking to create green space, be involved in food production, or enjoy outdoor activities in Charlotte's urban environment. Community gardens can be overlooked when the everyday consumer thinks about major food producers, but community gardens produce hundreds of pounds of fresh produce every year to distribution centers.
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This page examines growing fresh produce in local community gardens, food distribution in Mecklenburg County, and memories/insights about gardening from individuals. It highlights three community gardens - University of North Carolina at Charlotte Student Community Garden, Avondale Presbyterian Community Giving Garden, Myers Park Baptist Church Community Garden - as well as two food distribution centers, Friendship Trays and the Jamil Niner Student Pantry, as a way to explain community garden production and consumption in one county in North Carolina.
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Community gardens provide not only a space for growing locally sourced and healthy produce, but they also provide green space in urban environments that allow individual's a place to grow physical produce, but also grow as individuals. In many of the interviews with gardeners, you will hear the life lessons that they learn by planting the food they eat. Learning where the food comes from, how much care it takes to grow that produce, and realizing the impact of nutrition on our daily lives was a recurring theme with community gardens in Mecklenburg County. The interviewees recount how rewarding and fulfilling working in a garden can be, especially for youth, which is a theme recognized in the secondary material regarding gardening across America. As access to food because cheaper and more commercialized, Americans are losing touch of the labor that drives food production. Community gardens are a way to revitalize that. They also create a sense of pride and attachment to neighborhoods.
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Below I have included quotes and audio clips from the community gardeners interviewed, as well as local food distributors. I chose to highlight two community gardens that give their produce to Friendship Trays, and one community garden that gives their produce to the Jamil Niner Student Pantry. By doing so, you can see the entire life-cycle of produce grown in community gardens. Much like farm to fork, community gardens grow healthy produce that then goes back into the hands of community members.
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Full interviews are available on the Queens Garden website.
Avondale Presbyterian and Myers Park Baptist Church Community Garden
Discussion Topics:
In their full interviews available on the Queens Garden webpage, interviewees Cindy McKenzie, Robert Suydam, and Ed Williams discuss growing vegetables in the garden including tomatoes, lettuce, eggplant, beans, and cucumbers. They explain the challenges with watering the vegetables while using a volunteer base. Ed briefly describes a bug infestation in the garden. All interviewees discuss how growing produce is affected by volunteer schedules, watering systems, insects, and pollination. They also describe the joy of growing vegetables and the fun involved in growing produce. In the selected audio clips below, you will hear clips from Cindy and Robert's joint interview, followed by clips from Ed's interview.
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Originally from Mississippi, Ed Williams has been a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina since the 1970s. Ed Williams is a member of the Myers Park Baptist Church. Together with friend and congregation member Fred Allen, Ed founded the Myers Park Baptist Church community garden in the spring of 2012. Myers Park Baptist Church has a long-standing relationship with Friendship Trays and all food produced in this specific community garden is donated directly to Friendship Trays.
Cindy McKenzie is a member of the Avondale Presbyterian Church and one of the founders of the Avondale Community Giving Garden. She began working on a community garden at Avondale through a connection from Myers Park Baptist Church, who introduced her to Common Grounds Farmstand.
Robert Suydam is a member of the Avondale Presbyterian Church and became involved in the garden roughly five years ago (around 2014). He introduced new ideas to the reinvent the Avondale Community Giving Garden by partnering with Friendship Trays. The Avondale Community Garden / Giving Garden produces over 500 pounds of fresh produce which is donated to Friendship Trays. He provides an interesting perspective on the challenges of sustaining a volunteer labor force, experimental produce, and community gardening in the Charlotte community.
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The audio clips from these interviews provide context into different challenges and solutions of community gardening (such as the watering system) as well as the memories and joys of gardening. I included these clips (especially the personal stories) to provide a better understanding of the joy that gardening brings community members.
UNC Charlotte Student Community Garden
Discussion Topics:
Rebecca Byrd discusses the UNC Charlotte Student Community Garden and the challenges and benefits of working through a student volunteer run organization. She describes working in the garden, the types of vegetables grown, pollination methods, and utilizing a volunteer base to upkeep the garden. While Rebecca touches on the challenges of community gardening (watering system, heat, and vandalism) she also describes the joys of working in the soil and providing green space on campus for students to relax in.
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Rebecca Byrd was raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a current graduate student at UNC Charlotte. Prior to finishing her undergraduate degree at UNC Charlotte, she attended Queen's University and Howard University. Rebecca transferred to UNC Charlotte in spring of 2016. As a way to connect with the UNC Charlotte community, Rebecca joined the Community Garden Club. After being a club member for the spring semester and throughout the summer, she became the president of the Community Garden Club in fall 2016. During her time as president, Rebecca worked to keep the garden running smoothly, attract new student members, and promote the benefits of the community garden. Some of the particularly interesting highlights of this interview include the involvement of college students in community gardening and the redistribution of food from the UNC Charlotte community garden to the student Jamil Niner Student Pantry. The Jamil Niner Pantry provides food to UNC Charlotte students that experience food insecurity, and the student community garden helps provide fresh produce to the pantry.
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Rebecca's audio clips provide context to the Student Community Garden and the different types of vegetables grown in the garden and mixing different plants. Her interview clips provide insight into what is grown in local gardens and then distributed to food distribution centers. She discusses growing produce such as leafy greens, herbs, and tomatoes, which are produce that food consumers find in supermarkets across North Carolina.
Friendship Trays and Jamil Niner Student Pantry
Discussion Topics:
Perhaps one of the most important topics surrounding community gardens is the distribution of the food and produce grown in the gardens. Examining where the food goes, what community it stays in (or how far it travels), if it is sold/donated, and what community members do with the food helps us understand food distribution in the Piedmont foodshed. Friendship Trays, a nonprofit organization located in Charlotte, North Carolina Delivers food to the elderly and infirm. Both the Avondale Presbyterian Community Giving Garden and the Myers Park Community Garden donate fresh produce to Friendship Trays. ​The Jamil Niner Student Pantry provides assistance to UNC Charlotte undergraduate and graduate students that struggle with food insecurity. In 2013 the USDA defined food insecurity as a condition that occurs when people do not have enough resources to feed themselves. The pantry offers a variety of nutritious meals and frequently give demonstrations on what meals can be made with the food in our pantry. The UNCC Student Garden provides fresh produce to the Jamil Niner Pantry.
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UNC Charlotte Student Garden contributes fresh produce to the Student Pantry, while both the Avondale Presbyterian and Myers Park Baptist Church community gardens contribute to Friendship Trays. By including the full cycle of the produce, it provides a better understanding of how community members receive access to fresh, locally grown produce.
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Lucy Bush Carter is the Executive Director of Friendship Trays, a nonprofit organization located in SouthEnd Charlotte. Friendship Trays is the only non-governmental Charlotte-based organization creating and delivering healthy meals to elderly and infirm community members in their homes. Friendship Trays produces over 700 meals per day and operates with a volunteer base of over 1,300 volunteers. It takes 101 volunteers per day to deliver the meals throughout Charlotte. Lucy began volunteering with Friendship Trays in 1985, she was then hired as staff in the 1990s, and became Executive Director in the 2000s. In this interview, Ms. Bush provides an interesting perspective in regards to the mission of Friendship Trays, daily operations, the creation of Friendship Gardens, and food distribution throughout Mecklenburg County. She explains how Friendship Trays introduced the concept of Friendship Gardens in Charlotte, started the Urban Farm (now located at Garinger High School), the collection of produce they acquire and how Friendship Trays incorporates fresh produce into their meal program.
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Dr. Kim Buch is a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Originally from Iowa, she earned her Ph.D. from Iowa State University. Dr. Buch’s research interests include service-based learning, which in part sparked her interest to start the Jamil Niner Student Pantry. After attending a Statewide Hunger Summit at Elon University in 2012, Dr. Buch became one of the pioneers behind the Jamil Niner Student Pantry. She and her cofounder, Sean Langley, have overseen the growth and development of the student pantry from its days as a storage closet in Colvard to its potentially permanent home at 1224 John Kirk Drive. Dr. Buch is involved in the management of the pantry, regularly volunteers there, and holds her service learning class there on Tuesdays.
Quotes from Community Gardeners and Food Distributors
"So that's a great system. So the garden is down lower than the church. It's all gravity fed, so we have decent pressure. These toes, which are kind of commercial big cubes, they hold 350 gallons, maybe more than that. They hold a lot of water."