Just three months ago, this land was not utilized by people. It had weeds so high you couldn't walk through it. And today it's a thriving, abundant garden where black Indigenous and people of color can come together and grow community and grow food and grow medicine. The community garden started in my dreams a few years ago and I was finally able to realize that a couple of months ago when we broke ground on this property. The Bipod Community Garden is a small garden that I put in. It's a place for the Bipod community in my area to come and be able to garden. Most of the beds are communal beds so we're growing a lot of vegetables and herbs and folks can come in. They can help tend, they can harvest, they can make medicine and then we have a few beds that are individually stewarded. So folks who want to have kind of the whole experience of like planting the seed, planting the garden, tenting it, they have the opportunity to do that here with a bed as well. We have a community herb drying shed. It houses our tool lending library, a lending library of books related to herbalism and a library of medicine making supplies. So if folks come to the garden and they don't have any tools or you know anything to make medicine with, everything is in the shed for them. It's also a place where folks can dry herbs and so if they grow something in the garden they grow a bunch of mint and they're like oh I would love to have this over the winter so I could have tea. They can harvest them in here and then they can just take it in and put it on the drying racks. It'll dry beautifully for them and then they can take it home and have tea for the winter. The garden is the Jane Miner Bipod Community Medicine Garden and it's named after amazing herbalist and healer Jane Miner who was enslaved in Virginia and in 1825 fever epidemic swept through Virginia and she was so skilled that she not only healed other black folks but her enslaved her and listed her to also heal white folks as well and because she was you know so adept at that and so many people got better where everywhere else folks were dying they granted her her freedom. She didn't stop there so she kept working as an herbalist and healer and saved up her money and was able to purchase the freedom of 16 other enslaved folks. The inspiration to create the garden was to be able to have a space where Bipod folks could access the land that is a really big challenge for a lot of folks nationwide but even in my community where there isn't a lot of free land access I also wanted to create this space to be a safe spot for Bipod folks so I wanted just to have like a sanctuary an outdoor sanctuary where people can really feel like they're themselves and feel safe and be able to connect with Earth. The garden is just such an amazing place of connection it's a place where folks can really reclaim their connection to the Earth. Lots of folks have been disconnected from the land just having a space where you can put your hands in the Earth and get to understand the cycles of the plants and the seasons and how the light changes as we move through the year that all just kind of like helps to connect you to the land to the seasons and I think to yourself like your own innate rhythms that we've been disconnected from. It's also a beautiful place of community connection so folks are coming out to garden together and then they you know make medicine together or go for a swim together and it just really builds these beautiful friendships but just a way to kind of tap into something that's bigger than yourself Earth is the source of of everything that's it's our life it's our food it's our medicine it's our clothing it's our housing and so just being able to touch that is is really magical and I think brings people home to themselves. One thing that a lot of folks have mentioned like this is just their happy space this is a place where they can feel totally themselves and feel safe because it is a sanctuary it's a place that was created by folks of color for folks of color and that we're navigating through a lot of white dominated spaces in our day-to-day life and so it is just nice to be able to come to a space where it's just your community it just helps us to breathe a little bit people also are you know growing vegetables so they're getting good food to eat they're going plants for medicine so they're also being able to harvest and make medicine. 2020 has been such an intense year and there's been so much trauma and pain that we've all experienced and folks have really been able to come here and so just let go of that for a moment and that's such a gift. There is no community guarded without community absolutely not. When I came here and I was like oh I have a yard I could have a garden and I was like oh great I could grow this and I could grow that and then it's just like wait that just feels like something's missing like if I have this opportunity I want like the community to have this opportunity and because I opened up the space for other people that also opened up the community to want to support it so it's been like this really beautiful coming together. In just three months it went from like six foot high overgrown brush to all of these amazing beds and really without a lot of work we used the tarp which was great so we didn't have to bring in machinery to cut things down or till a bunch of times after the tarp came up the neighbor came in with a tractor and they tilled just once and then I had a work party. 15 folks came out and we got all the beds made in a few hours we planted the beds over the next couple of weeks and then we've just been kind of weeding and mulching. It's also I think really helpful for folks to see the scale of this. It's like to see like you know I could totally do this in my yard as well like I don't have to have like a bunch of acres I don't have to even live in the country you can turn any plot of earth into like a beautiful abundant garden. It's just all right there like it's such a huge potential I feel like you know we can't continue to rely on big agriculture and monocropping and like the degenerative ways of which food is grown and I feel like there's so much potential and land that can be turned into flourishing gardens for community. Don't be intimidated it's something that you can do just in a yard you can do it literally in just one bed if you lived in a city even if you have a porch you could just have a community garden of potted plants. There's no limit to where you could do this you could absolutely do this anywhere and I think it's about community though so make sure like you connect with your community see what's needed see what's wanted see how a garden could serve folks and then just do it.