The Greening of Detroit Michigan

Detroit has a lot of green spaces and vacant lots. Many of these are next to schools and areas where children play. Lets not beat around the bush, it is a depressed city with a high crime rate and as it turns out, a lot of heart. Detroit is unusual for the amount of grass and vacant space around even its poorest neighborhoods. There is a remarkable effort taking place right now to turn old condemned spaces into fertile ground, literally. The effort is centered around organic gardening.

From children to adults, from rich to poor, the city of Detroit is training gardeners to grow their own organic foods. The gardens are communal, but the skills can be taken anywhere - in a lot of cases hopefully they will be taken home. Some of the most touching gardens are those built in school yards, with the effort of the children at the school and those at community centers. The children get to experience growing and harvesting organic food and experiment with eating new things. In an area like Detroit, what came to my mind first was that these kids are learning survival skills. They are not stuck in a city like NY where there is no green space. They for the most part have backyards, or at least these community areas, they can grow food. The ability to grow food, become independent of welfare and learn these skills to teach for generations.

There are other plots of land, an acre or two at a time that have been donated by the city, one in particular to the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. I can not even begin to express how impressed I was with the whole operation. On this particular two acres of land they did not yet have running water, so in the days that it did not rain, they carried buckets of water across the street to water the crops. It was really a hopeful project with benefits for everyone involved. Some of the gardens and farms have poultry and egg operations, others have future plans to keep bees.

Projects like these that get everyone involved in their health and security are the way of the future. It was really eye opening for me to see projects of this size off the ground and running. I think a lot about what I think needs to be done, or what would be ideal. Sometimes I run across a group of people that just blow me away with what they are already doing. This project is producing about 80 tons of fresh organic local produce a year! All of which is going back to the residents of Detroit. Some of the children working at the community centers even make a little bit of money off of the sales of the produce at farmers markets, others get grades in school, and others just learn skills that if they put them to use may just change the course of their lives.


I toured many of these farms with 500 other people some on tour buses, some on bikes. The event was much larger than I ever expected. For more information visit www.greeningofdetroit.com