Chicago: The City That Loves to Grow
According to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, one in four children is experiencing food insecurity in Chicago this year. (This is up 25% from pre-pandemic levels.) It’s viewable in real-time; if you drive past any food pantry before opening, there are lines around the block. The Depository provided 77.3 million meals, assisted 1.5 million households, and submitted 13,000 public benefits applications for our neighbors in 2021.
Google “community gardening” or “urban farming in Chicago,” and you’re sure to turn up hundreds of results about more than 600 locations where you can find a tiny plot of land to call your own. The city’s motto, “Urbis in Horto,” means “city in a garden,” and the origin of the city’s name (though contentiously debated about which native tribe it belongs to and which allium it refers to) roughly translates to a word (“chicagoua”) for a native onion or garlic plant.
As the “City that Works ” and, less recently, “Hog Butcher to the World,” we’re a city that loves to grow. Community gardening and urban farming are essential tools of our collective food future. There are a growing number of community garden spaces in Chicago teaching people how to grow their plants and using these spaces to reconnect residents with the land surrounding them as they help feed neighbors. Chicagoans are helping their neighbors to grow their own food and participating in food rescue and redistribution efforts to create more equitable food access across the city.
According to Ken Kastman, one of the five co-leaders at Edible Evanston, the Hillside Pantry serves about 2,000 families a month in their community. Edible Evanston and the broader collective, Evanston Grows, address food insecurity through community gardening, increasing access to locally-grown produce, and building community connections. Kastman says these organizations work together with about 20 other social service, food, and community organizations in a web of support for fighting hunger in the suburbs.
Community gardens are much more than patches of land for residents to grow their food; they restore native plants, educate youth on ecology, and serve as a free food resource for anyone who needs it.
One such garden is on the grounds at Waters Elementary School in Lincoln Square. Started in 1991 by a group of parents and the local School Council, the Waters Garden is a testament to the power of community in creating natural, accessible spaces to plant, hang out, and grow and gather food. As a visitor enters this garden on Sunnyside between Campbell and Maplewood, near Western Avenue, all signs of the city vanish.
The garden envelops visitors in lush green, with dappled shade and various garden plots from students, neighbors, and garden volunteers. I visited the garden to speak with Pete Leki, the former Director of the Ecology program at Waters and one of the leaders of the garden space. Leki tells me that this land used to be part of the Chicago River, that the north branch used to snake through here, right where we’re standing. He points out four bur oak trees, which predate the city itself. Leki, who’s been involved with the garden since the beginning, is incredibly knowledgeable about the ecology and intentionality of this place.
He walks me past beehives, a grape arbor, clots of berry bushes pointing out ecological features throughout the space. There’s a lower section of the garden, right off the sports field, installed by the school, filled with native plants, that allows the rain to drain and filter through to the garden on the southern edge of the land. Leki pointed out the neighbor community garden plots scattered just past this section of the garden, and then the student plots just beyond.
When it originally started, Leki says this neighborhood was less gentrified, and there was a greater need for fruits and vegetables to help students supplement the food theybrought from home or got through the school lunch program. While the needs of students seem to have lessened, they still walk through and eat berries and fruit. “There aren’t any berries here when school is in session,” Leki smiles.
This garden has been part of a delicate neighborhood ecosystem of helping to feed not only students and faculty but also neighbors and residents in need at nearby shelters. Leki notes that the school doesn’t help sustain the garden during the summer months. Leki and other garden leaders organize a large team of volunteers who tend to the space each Saturday and Wednesday during the summer. Volunteers can take produce home with them following their shifts.
For as valuable as urban agriculture and community gardening is, resources are limited, and permitting creates roadblocks for new projects. These challenges drive some urban gardeners to move out of the city into more rural areas to pursue farming. One such urban gardener-turned-rural farmer is Pamela Campbell of Hen and Hive Provisions. Growing up near Grand Rapids, MI, she ran an urban garden in her backyard in the Bay Area before returning to western Michigan.
She runs a small, biodynamic farm and apiary growing medicinal plants, food, and native perennials organically while keeping multi-purpose herds of Nigora goats and Jacob sheep for fiber, fertilizer, and companionship. “I used to keep chickens in my yard in Oakland,” she laughs.
Campbell grappled with the difficulties of establishing farming and gardening spaces in urban areas and pushed against the rapid gentrification as well as neighbors who wanted to avoid seeing a bunch of ‘weeds’ in their manicured neighborhoods.
Ultimately, she opted for a space closer to where she grew up. Campbell is among a growing movement of urbanites who bring themselves closer to nature by establishing small farms and businesses that utilize locally grown products and speak more to their values than conventional growing systems. She believes in the power of slowing down and appreciating the natural world.
Campbell explained, “We’re just moving so quickly [as a society]. And I’m like, ‘Back it up, people! Reverse reverse.’ I just feel like there’s so much value in connecting with the land. People have just lost their connection with the earth. There is value in connecting with plants and growing your own food. If people can grow their food, it is just magical.”
