HOW DOES GROWING & GATHERING FOOD SOW CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE?

Why Focus on GROWING, GATHERING and Culture?

Homegrown food often highlights what is unique about a place or the person growing the food.

This includes what gets planted in the soil, the weather, the types of plants grown, and how they are grown and shared. Those who practice seed saving can hold the key to reconnecting with the crops, cuisine, and cultural traditions to a particular community, and ensure that a community can be self-reliant by growing their own food. The practices of keeping seeds represents a vital link in the cycle of sowing, cultivating, harvesting crops, sharing food, and sowing again. Seed saving sustains local knowledge on how to best cultivate certain plants, and safeguards communities from losing plants deeply linked to a community's history and heritage.

The urban agriculture community understands that "growing with a garden" is a fundamental principle and experience.

Growers pay attention to the needs of the plants they are growing and learn over time what conditions work best for certain plants. The results are nourishing food crops, medicines, aromatics and seeds, all influenced by the grower's care, respect and labor throughout the plant's growing cycle. Seed saving and keeping are not just a way of producing new plants, but are part of a continuum of people living with the things they grow.

The practice of harvesting foods that grow in the wild also has deep historical and cultural roots.

Native American tribes across the continent thrived by foraging prior to the arrival of European colonists. In the South, enslaved Africans foraged for subsistence. After the Civil War, anti-foraging laws sought to restrict the foraging rights and practices of newly freed Black people. Throughout history, immigrant groups have brought foraging practices with them to the United States, as a means of self-reliance and maintaining connections to the flavors and habits of their homeland.