The common unity behind winter planning, spring planting, summer tending, fall harvesting, canning, and composting brings people together. Isolation is broken. Our best human qualities emerge. Excess food is divided up among neighbors. Food pantries for people in institutions and homeless shelters are re-stocked.
Young people learn to produce and give back.
Laura Washington, another Gardening Angel, will be 70 in November, right around the time when the last of this year's harvest comes in. She and her late husband, Eddie, came to Detroit in 1966 from the Mississippi Delta bioregion, giving up their occupations as sharecroppers to make a living as factory workers. They did not, however, give up their rural way of life. The family garden started by Mrs. Washington is part of a community garden complex growing on land where four houses once stood. Gardening brings her family closer together.