On a warm but breezy spring morning, Norma Michael grabs the handles of her broadfork tool and stomps onto its horizontal base, plunging its spiked ends into the ground with a force that breaks up the dense soil beneath her feet.
She does this to cultivate the land as she prepares it for the rows of okra she will plant for both herself and her neighbors. The garden sits across the street from the Hinds County home where she has resided all her life.
Norma Michael started a community garden in the Georgetown neighborhood where she has lived all of her life. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad
Walking around the expansive garden, Michael points out the plethora of tomato varieties and rows of peppers she’s growing this season.
“I have a lot of tomatoes that I’m growing this year that are brand new for me–about four or five that I’ve never grown before,” she said.
‘The Lord Said To Do It’
Five years ago, as the world was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, Norma Michael was sitting outside in a neighbors driveway in West Jackson’s Georgetown neighborhood. Between sips of coffee and neighborly conversation, Michael got a message from God, she said, to start a community garden.
She thought to herself, “Lord, you know I don’t know anything about gardening.” But she peered around the neighborhood, pondering where to start this new project, and she ultimately settled on a plot of land directly across the street from her home, the same house her father had built in 1949.
Jackson, Miss., native Norma Michael stands on a broadfork tool to aerate soil. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad, Mississippi Free Press
Just across the street stood a decaying, abandoned home that was covered in overgrown weeds and fallen tree limbs. While the garden would serve as an opportunity for Michael to feed herself and her neighbors, it also allowed her to reimagine a space that was once an eyesore in the community and turn it into an asset.
She made calls to a contact working for the county who helped her figure out how to acquire the blighted property, which the State of Mississippi owned. “I had never planted anything. But (I thought), ‘I’m going to obey because the Lord said to do it,’” she told the Mississippi Free Press.
In the beginning, an old friend who was more experienced in gardening agreed to mentor her while pursuing these efforts. He inspired her to plant flowers at the entrance of the garden, which attracts not only neighbors but the insects necessary to pollinate her plants.
Melon plants peek up from inside yellow containers at the Sharing is Caring Neighborhood Block Garden in Jackson, Miss. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad, Mississippi Free Press
Michael enlisted the help of her immediate network to fund the launch of the project. She started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the soil and materials. Former co-workers with whom she had remained in touch donated to the cause, as did her neighbors.
“It didn’t matter (how much they donated), $5, $10. So I started purchasing things,” she said, adding that after officially establishing the gardening initiative as a nonprofit organization in the fall of 2022, she received a series of anonymous donations to bolster her efforts.
Piece by piece, Michael’s garden started to bloom.
But what she began to sow in the Georgetown community reflected a larger national movement toward gardening as people across the country searched for ways to relieve stress during the uncertainty of the global pandemic.
Pandemic Inspired Gardening Boom
As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged communities, cities around the country went into lockdown. Students learned virtually as schools closed, and many people transitioned to working from home. While the virus took a physical toll, the mandated lockdowns also deeply affected people’s mental health.
Many people sought ways to ease the stress and anxiety. While some people used YouTube to feed burgeoning interests like baking their own bread, others recorded and posted dance tutorials on TikTok.
Norma Michael still maintains the community garden she started during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to feed her Georgetown neighbors in Jackson, Miss. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad, Mississippi Free Press
Although Michael had originally started her garden under the tutelage of a more experienced mentor, his interest in the project eventually waned. So, like a huge swath of people with more time on their hands who were eager for self-sufficiency in the uncertain period, Michael ventured online to learn more about gardening.
‘Freedom in Garden Spaces’
Researchers at the University of California, Davis, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR) surveyed gardeners for a study on the phenomenon in 2022. Nearly 3,700 people in Australia, Germany and the United States responded. Gardeners described not only “a sense of control and security that came from food production, but they also expressed heightened experiences of joy, beauty and freedom in garden spaces,” Emily C. Dooley reported on March 17, 2022.
In addition to the mood boost, gardening also increases physical activity and sun exposure for much-needed vitamin D. “Gardening can pull you outside and into nature, and there’s a body of research showing that being outdoors can improve your sense of well-being and mental state,” Dr. Caroline Compretta, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said on May 1, 2020.
“There’s also a sense of productivity and accomplishment in knowing that you grew something you’re about to eat. You have a real, tangible result from your work,” she explained.
Beyond stress relief and physical health benefits, many Black Americans sought to deepen their knowledge of gardening as a way to honor their cultural lineage.
‘Reawakening Those Skills’
Kiesha and Scott Easley have been homesteading since the 1990s when they were first married. The pair operate their own YouTube channels where they share their journeys as gardeners and beekeepers on their land in South Carolina.
Scott Easley started posting videos on the site around 2010, but the couple saw a significant uptick in viewers during the height of the pandemic. They believe people were seeking guidance on how to be more self-sufficient in such an unprecedented time.
“It wasn’t that I was talking about anything different than what I had been talking about,” Scott Easley told the Mississippi Free Press on June 10. “I think people just started realizing the situation that we were in and they started seeking people like me and my content out.”
The pandemic also offered many people the opportunity to return to a cultural practice that their relatives had instilled in them decades ago, Kiesha Easley, who has familial roots in Louise, Mississippi, told the Mississippi Free Press. “We have a history of being able to grow things and provide for ourselves,” she said. “It was just a matter of reawakening those skills. Everybody knew somebody who had a garden growing up.”
For over at least a decade, Kiesha and Scott Easley, pictured, have shared their journeys as homesteaders, gardeners and beekeepers with their followers on YouTube. Photo courtesy Kiesha and Scott Easley
Jackson native Claudia Robinson, who volunteers at the Sharing in Caring Neighborhood Block Garden, shares a similar story. She sees her new-found interest of gardening as an ancestral inheritance. “It’s a way of me getting back in touch with my own family history,” she told the Mississippi Free Press.
As Norma Michael toiled her land and prepared to sow new seeds, Robinson sat feet away, breaking up clumps of dirt piled high in a wheelbarrow. “My family—my grandfather and some of my great aunts—have always kept a garden. So for me, it’s kind of a full-circle moment to start growing stuff again and harvesting stuff like my grandmother used to do,” she continued.
Venice Williams, executive director of Alice’s Garden and the Fondy Food Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, told the city’s local NPR affiliate, WUWM, that these agricultural practices were common in Africa. “In every village, in every community, we cultivated food and had an ability to cultivate food in such an incredible way. … We still held on to so much of the beauty and the power and understanding that our ability to grow food was one of those things that could never be taken away from us,” Williams said on Feb. 28, 2024.
‘Knowledge Is Power’
In Georgetown, Norma Michael—once a gardening novice—continues to work in that same vein, passing the knowledge that she has gained on to Claudia Robinson and family members who reach out seeking help. “It’s amazing how I can look at certain things now and know what they are. I can look at certain things and tell if that’s a flower growing or just a weed. It just comes second nature to me now,” she said.
In February she participated in the Roots 2 Fruits event, a weeklong initiative to plant 500 trees across the Midtown community. She’s also on the advisory board for Keep Jackson Beautiful and helps maintain Myrlie’s Garden at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home.
A generosity of spirit is a common thread in all that Michael does. What started as an exploratory project to feed her community during a perilous time grew into a tool to empower others, she said. “To me, part of ‘sharing is caring’ is sharing what you’ve learned. Knowledge is power.”
Recently, Michael was one of several gardeners caught up in a swath of USDA funding cuts for gardening projects across the capital city, Mississippi Today reported on June 12. Although she was disappointed to lose the funding, she is determined to continue her efforts.
Visit sharingiscaringnbg.org, call 601-345-1298 or email sharingiscaringnbg@gmail.com to make a donation or to sign up to volunteer at the Sharing is Caring Neighborhood Block Garden.
Know a Mississippian you believe deserves some public recognition? Nominate them for a potential Person of the Day article at mfp.ms/pod.
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