Our April Updates

April has been a very busy month for the Food Literacy Project and our home gardeners. At the end of March, we hosted our first garden grant class, focusing on garden planning. Our gardeners followed up by sharing visions for their spaces and their fruit and veggie wish lists. At our upcoming class in April, gardeners will take home more seeds and starts to finish filling up their raised beds!

In April, the Food Literacy Project constructed 17 raised beds for six home and community gardeners and 13 additional raised beds were built by five home gardeners who felt comfortable taking the task on, on their own, after we delivered materials. We have been busy filling these new raised beds with soil this month and are excited to see them bursting with abundance, soon.

Our new home!

The Food Literacy Project is also currently settling into our new growing site, where our Youth Community Agriculture Program participants are eagerly planting onions, kale, collards, mustard greens, potatoes, (and then some more potatoes!), radishes, bok choi, and strawberries. More crops will get in the ground soon!

Our context and community

Our gardeners are spread out throughout Louisville with a concentration in the West End, a part of town where residents live under food apartheid. Louisville is one of the most segregated cities in the US, due to a history of redlining and other forms of institutionalized racism. Kentucky consistently ranks high in food insecurity with one in 6 children and one in 9 adults lacking access to food to meet their basic needs (What’s food insecurity? How it impacts Louisville’s violent crime | whas11.com).  In Louisville, the average number of residents served by one grocery store is 12,000. In the West End of Louisville, however, that number nearly doubles with only 3 full-service grocery stores for a population around 60,000 (Grocery store development in Louisville isn’t addressing the West End food desert (lpm.org)). The West End is also disproportionately impacted by environmental issues with more residents likely to be living in close proximity to hazardous waste, lead paint, and wastewater discharge (EPA EJScreen), making raised beds a safer alternative to inground growing for many of our home gardeners.

We continue to see and fight against the impacts of these policies today and believe that every ingredient harvested from your own back yard is a way to step into your power and resist against the systems that don’t serve our community. We have been so eager to expand the ways in which we support home gardeners, and this partnership with Grow Appalachia enables us to do just that!

 

Map of Home Garden Locations throughout Louisville.

Our home gardeners are a mix of former Youth Community Agriculture Program participants, Field-to-Fork afterschool club families, and neighbors that we’ve connected with through partnerships with other organizations including Play Cousins Collective and Change Today, Change Tomorrow.

Hazardous Waste Proximity in Louisville, KY.

Raised bed build day for a home gardener living on Northwestern Parkway in the West End of Louisville. Featuring Food Literacy Project team members Leticia “Lemon” and Taeci “Tractor”.

Strawberry planting at the Food Literacy Project’s Farm with participants in the Youth Community Agriculture Program.

Soil delivery day for a home gardener in the West End of Louisville. FLP staff Arabella “Citronella” and Taeci “Tractor” had lots of helping hands join in as the whole family and even some neighbors participated in unloading the soil!

 

A home gardener’s set up on Portland Ave in the West End of Louisville.