In Forsyth County, community gardens fill the nutrition gap, while serving as ‘third places’

The Rural Hall Community Garden rents 4-foot-by-8-foot beds for $10 a year. However, the fee can be waived for people who can't afford the cost. (Photo: Shaila Prasad)

This story is part of a series on food insecurity and possible solutions in Forsyth County, reported, written and photographed by Wake Forest University journalism students. The series was part of a semester-long class was taught by Newsline Environmental Investigative Reporter and Assistant Editor Lisa Sorg. The final stories will run this week.

One spring morning, Lorraine Mortis greeted a visitor at the Simon’s Green Acres Food Garden in Winston-Salem. She tilted her emerald green bucket hat upward and removed a dirt-covered garden glove to shake their hand. 

“All these beds you see,” Mortis said, stretching her gloved hand across swaths of rectangular plots of dark brown soil, “every one of them is for the community. We are here for the people who need food, and we give it to them. It’s simple, really.”

Twelve miles north, Jackie Fonseca and her teenage son, Bastian Segundo, only recently moved from Tucson, a major city in Arizona, to Rural Hall, population 3,300. It was here that their family first lived in a house with a garden. Although they were excited at the prospect of growing their own food, they didn’t know where to start. That’s until they rented a bed at the local community garden.

There are roughly 90 community and school gardens in Forsyth County, according to the local extension office. Whether in the city or the country, community gardens can ease the burden of food insecurity and serve as “third places.” Neither home nor work, they are “locations where we exchange ideas, have a good time, and build relationships,” according to the nonprofit Brookings Institution.

While many gardens serve as neighborhood hubs for community members to connect and to grow produce, some gardens seek to alleviate an urgent and immediate need for its residents.

Nearly 61,000 local individuals experience food insecurity, where they lack access to affordable, nutritious food. The city is also home to at least 21 food deserts, or areas where over two-thirds of residents live more than a third of a mile from a grocery store or market.

Because of historically discriminatory redlining from the county and racist lending practices from local banks, most food deserts coincide with regions where the majority of residents are people of color.

In 2011, Winston-Salem State University partnered with Simon G. Atkins Community Development Corporation to address the severe food insecurity facing residents of the East and Southeast Wards of Winston-Salem. 

“We’re in the middle of a food desert here. Winston-Salem State University is about a mile that way,” Mortis said, gesturing towards the road that runs parallel to the garden. “And this neighborhood, this area of the southeastern neighborhood, is predominantly Spanish-speaking folks and African Americans.”

Spanning nearly two football fields in length, the garden houses nearly 90 raised beds, a shed, fire pit, performance stage, and fenced-off fruit-tree orchard. All of the food grown in the garden goes toward serving community members in and around the local neighborhood.

Mortis has been volunteering at the garden since 2013, two years after its founding. In addition to holding a weekly farmers’ market on Saturday mornings, it holds many community events, like cooking classes and barbecues. Still, Mortis said, the biggest challenge of running the garden is persuading people to participate. 

How to start a community garden

The Forsyth County Cooperative Extension has information on starting and maintaining a community garden.
Here are some pointers:
1. Organize a meeting of interested people and determine the type of garden: vegetables, flowers, organic, etc.
2. Form a planning committee.
3. Identify people in the community who have skills, experience and resources.
4. Approach a sponsor or donor for seeds, tools, fencing.
5. Choose a site that gets at least six hours of sunlight. Make sure water is available and test the soil for possible pollutants. Find out who owns the land and whether they will lease it and for how long. Ask if insurance is necessary.
6. Prepare and develop the site for planting.
7. Organize the garden. How many plots will you need? Make sure there is space for storing tools. Plant flowers or shrubs along the garden edges
8. Consider creating a special garden for kids.
9. Determine rules for plot assignment, tool-sharing, money disbursement. Put the rules in writing.
10. Help members keep in touch, and not just electronically. Also post a bulletin board in the garden.

“We recently started doing Zumba classes– and I’m trying to get a salsa teacher to come teach a class like that,” Mortis said. “We have a lot of Hispanic families that live right next door, but we typically have lower engagement with them. I get it– why would you want to come to a party you don’t feel invited to?” 

That’s why Mortis and her volunteers hope to grow beyond just reaching people with food. “We want to make this multicultural space; one that reflects the people who live around it. They’re who it’s for, so they should feel represented here.” 

The garden holds volunteer days every third Wednesday and second Saturday of the month. On a recent morning at the garden, Mortis was joined by two other volunteers.

“It’s hard work, especially when it gets to be summer and there’s no shade and it’s 90 degrees,” one volunteer said, wiping sweat from her forehead and shaking her head. “But I come anyway. Because you know that feeling of satisfaction you get after a hard day of physical work? And then to know– this is the good work; it’s making a positive difference in somebody else’s life. It’s worth it,” she said. 

A couple of months ago, Bastian was driving home from school with his mom, when he noticed two people gardening on the side of a busy road. He asked his mom to pull over, and then approached Jane Bodenhamer, co-leader of the Rural Hall Community Garden.

“How do I learn how to do this?” Bastian asked Bodenhamer.

He now has a garden bed with plants that he grows himself and has developed a strong relationship with Bodenhamer and other leaders in the garden.

Fifteen years ago, Bodenhamer and Mark Rutledge helped start the Rural Hall Community Garden, located next to Antioch United Methodist Church.

Rutledge grew up in Germanton, a city around four miles from Rural Hall, helping his grandfather with tobacco farming, which Rutledge never enjoyed. 

Although he didn’t struggle with food insecurity himself, he looks back on his childhood and realizes the signs he might have missed in school, such as one of his classmates who brought the same cheese sandwich for lunch to school every day, or the other who would never buy ice cream.

Rutledge’s wife, Traci, initially pushed him to join the community garden. Rutledge credited the sense of “family” as a reason he kept coming back.

Each 4-foot-by-8-foot raised bed can be rented for the year for $10. Although the co-leaders would prefer payment, they understand that some people can’t afford the fee. Many members of the community do not pay for their beds.

Since its inception, the garden has grown exponentially. It has fostered a community where everyone shares their harvest, which has contributed to a diverse set of members in culture and age: families from Peru and Hungary and gardeners ranging in age from 6 to 94.

The 94-year-old is Bert. She lives across the street from the church, and can see who is tending the garden at all times.

“Bert is our mascot,” Rutledge said. “She works the garden — she’s basically our security system.”

“She can see through those bricks,” Bodenhamer joked.

Bastian spends most of his free time in the garden, learning new skills and trying new plants. Some of the most popular plants in the garden are tomatoes and peppers, because of how widely they can be used, followed by lettuce, sweet potatoes and onions. 

Fonseca, his mother, said she had heard about her grandmother’s family’s daily struggle for food, which is why she wants Bastian to be involved in the garden — not only be able to grow his own vegetables, but also to be a part of the community.

Sometimes Bastian and Fonseca visit the garden during the day just to relax and unwind.

“There’s a lot of knowledge here,” Fonseca said. “It’s not just the space or the tools, but the friendship.”

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