By Emell Derra Adolphus
Beyond reaping the fruits and vegetables of your labor, planting a garden offers an insight into the ways organisms interact in a community, says Tyson Gersh, president and co-founder of the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative. A garden, Gersh explains, is a small-scale community, and studying food growth, consumption and production can be applied to larger scale communities like Detroit.
"Even a small household garden offers insight into how our global food system works," says Gersh. Food systems, food growth, community structure and sustainability can all be taught from tending to a household garden. "That is different from one crop (your backyard strawberries)," he notes. "That is an important distinction, because part of the value of a garden is seeing how different things interact with one another."
Gersh uses this model to teach young volunteers at MUFI the importance of cultivating the whole plant community instead of honing in on specific crop care.
Gardening can also be used as a model for getting involved in your own community, explains Gersh. It teaches you to identify a problem in the community and formulate how you will contribute to the solution.
The first step, Gersh says, is to not think of getting involved in your community as charity but as a project with a start and finish.
"Social change isn't a project, it is a responsibility. Just as a pet isn't a toy," Gersh says, explaining that in order for a community to sustain its progress there needs to be a constant joint effort that does not end. "The only thing that really matters is seeing something through."
Gersh adds: "There is value in having a garden above and beyond the produce it yields. It holds potential to empower people in that it serves as a physical platform to physically shape the world around them and is literally and figuratively a space in which people can reap what they sow."
