Plants with purpose at Blodgett Urban Gardens
Volunteers in Third Ward reap a bountiful harvest helping feed the community with homegrown food
Sheri Smith is on a mission. It’s Saturday, which means it’s farm stand day at Blodgett Urban Gardens, the Texas Southern University community garden she leads in Third Ward.
Smith, who teaches urban planning and environmental policy at TSU, is wearing an oversize red Rawlings T-shirt; her eyes are darting left and right between her beige sun hat and face mask, surveilling the activity in the garden and the handful of volunteers tending their beds.
A man comes to a full stop on Blodgett Street and yells out from his car window: “Do you have tomatoes today?” Smith gestures at a nearby worker to answer him. There won’t be tomatoes for another couple months, but there are plenty of other goods to choose from at the stand: baskets of okra, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers and various herbs.
Founded in 2014, Blodgett Urban Gardens aims to tackle food insecurity in the community by increasing access to fresh produce. Every Saturday, the team sells fruit and vegetables to locals through a pay-what-you-can model.
“There is too much prosperity and progress in Houston for there to be a neighborhood where kids go to bed hungry every night,” says board member Kirk Jackson, who is manning the stand at the entrance of the garden, wearing a white Blodgett Urban Gardens T-shirt with the tagline “grown in the community for the community.”
An urban planner by trade, he is a community engagement specialist at LINK Houston and works as a community health coordinator at the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. But every Saturday, he’s right here.
For Jackson, the foundation of a healthy community is proper nutrition. He says the life expectancy gap between one ZIP code and another in Houston can be about 20 years. The coronavirus pandemic has made Blodgett’s mission all the more urgent.
“The reason why COVID affects Black and brown communities more is because of preexisting conditions with diabetes, obesity and heart disease,” says Jackson.
He thinks if there’s been one silver lining from the virus, it’s that it has brought more awareness to these issues. Underserved neighborhoods need increased access to fresh produce to lessen health issues and boost overall quality of life.
When the outbreak started, many community gardens closed, but Blodgett remained open. Jackson says the garden couldn’t abandon their patrons when they needed it most. In fact, it’s expanding, with the aim of serving as many people as possible. The garden sits on 2.3 acres and is about two-thirds planted; the team hopes to have it fully cultivated by the end of 2021.
As Jackson chats and engages shoppers, Smith comes over intermittently to add to the stand, handing him bunches of herbs she’s just picked. Pineapple sage. Purple basil that smells so sweet and pungent its scent wafts around the table. Jackson scribbles the names on a sheet of paper. He believes they break even with the pricing model. Someone will buy 10 pounds of food and give them $2; someone else will buy one cucumber and give them $20, he says.
The team picks most produce the day before, on Fridays, but some herbs and greens don’t do well preharvested. This is a big part of Smith’s Saturday mornings: shuttling around the garden to see what’s ready, plucking small samples to display at the stand. If a customer wants more or has a special request, she’ll go back and pick more.
The garden has become essential for the people it serves, but it’s also important to those who work the land, especially at a time when everyone is desperate to be outside.
Deeper in the garden, volunteers Jeff Gold and Chanelle Frazier sprinkle insecticide on soil in response to a recent spotting of fire ants. Gold, a law professor, has been volunteering almost every Saturday for two years. Frazier is new to the team.
Freshly graduated from TSU with a master’s in urban planning and environmental studies, Frazier was having trouble with virtual learning at the beginning of the pandemic. Her adviser, Smith, sensed her frustration through the Zoom meetings and suggested she come to the garden for a change of scenery. At first, they worked through assignments together, allowing Frazier to ask Smith questions she hadn’t been able to pose in online classes. She continued to work in the garden and has been doing so most Saturdays.
“This became my second classroom,” says Frazier.
In the back, Chester Chambers steers a wheelbarrow of manure. He discovered Blod
“There is too much prosperity and progress in Houston for there to be a neighborhood where kids go to bed hungry every night.”
Kirk Jackson, Blodgett Urban Gardens board member
gett about a year ago but hadn’t been able to volunteer regularly until the pandemic. Last October, he left his job as an engineer at Exxon Mobil after he was drawn into the local food scene and founded a plant-based burger company, Bloom Foods. On weekends, he was always busy with pop-ups, but when the coronavirus ended those, he came back to Blodgett.
“It’s allowed me to open up my schedule Saturday mornings,” says Chambers. “I kind of hold them sacred these days.”
Susan Norman, a board member who started volunteering at Blodgett four years ago, says people come here for all kinds of reasons. She can tell some of them have a lot on their minds; immersing themselves in gardening on Saturdays is a way to work through what went on that week. Others are social butterflies who like the company of fellow volunteers.
“It’s a place of harmony, it feeds your soul,” she says. “It’s not just vegetables.”
Norman grew so fond of Blodgett over the years that she became a Master Gardener. As she clips bamboo shoots to turn into trellises for the upcoming season, she says this is the “ugly time” for the garden. If this picturesque landscape is ugly, the “pretty time” must be quite something. In November, Norman says, there are big, beautiful heads of cabbage sprouting from the ground, as well as greens, broccoli, cauliflower and beets.
Even in the summer, the garden was turning heads. Angela Moore, a Riverside Terrace resident, happened to be driving by when she noticed the garden and the small group of people outside. She decided to stop and check it out.
Moore has been trying to eat healthier lately and was contemplating turning her backyard into an edible garden; she read somewhere that the best food she can eat is food that was grown from her own land. Jackson tells her it’s easier than people think, especially with productive, unfussy plants like herbs and peppers.
A half hour after her arrival, Moore is still there, now sitting on a chair chatting, like she suddenly became part of the family in that short period of time.
She loves that there are gardens like this springing up in Houston, she says. That’s what the community needs.
Then she gestures at the pristine white pants she’s wearing and adds, “Next time I come I’ll have to come appropriately dressed and get to work.”