Jameson Price and Laney Sullivan, founders of the Fonticello Food Forest
On a Wednesday afternoon, the Fonticello Food Forest in South Side’s Carter Jones Park is alive and tinged with a festive air. A half-dozen volunteers push wheelbarrows full of chocolatey loam toward empty raised garden beds. There are tables lined with boxes and coolers full of food, free for the taking, donated by the online farmers market Seasonal Roots and by Hatch Helps, a donation-based program that prepares 1-quart frozen meals for area nonprofits. Over two hours from 5 to 7 p.m., a few people stop by to fill up grocery bags to take home, but for the most part it’s impossible to tell who’s there to help and who’s there for help. And that, says Fonticello Food Forest co-founder Laney Sullivan, is the whole point.
Inspired by their years of work with mutual aid organizations such as Richmond Food Not Bombs, Sullivan and Jameson Price, the musical duo known onstage as Høly River (formerly Lobo Marino), followed the process for claiming the land as a community garden after learning about its availability at a Richmond 300 meeting. Now the space is the site of the weekly Free Farmstand Wednesdays food redistribution program that works in partnership with Food Not Bombs and RVA Community Fridges.
The food is for anyone who wants it, Sullivan says. “Of course it’s for people who need it, but we don’t want to stigmatize it. It’s not the haves giving to the have-nots. We’re all a human family in this system that’s broken, and the more abundance we can create for each other, the better off we’ll all be.”
This particular day also happens to be Sullivan’s birthday, and there’s energy to spare from a group of kids being led by local artist Lily Lamberta in an impromptu “Circus of the Sun,” a parade and performance the gathered children made up on the spot to honor that life-giving star.
The Food Forest is an oasis for neighborhood youth, with a secret fort hidden among the brambles and an open log circle for congregating and performing. Giant puppets and flags dance against a cotton candy-cloud sky as children’s voices ring out.
On a nearby picnic table, there’s an assortment of seedlings, in Dixie and Solo cups, set up for a seed swap. RVA Community Fridges founder Taylor Scott is here combing through the seedlings and awaiting the boxes of food she’ll take back and redistribute among her organization’s three free refrigerator sites in Richmond and Petersburg. Scott has set the ambitious goal of opening one fridge site per month in 2021, and connecting with the Food Forest gets her one step closer to meeting that goal.
Fresh produce at the Fonticello Food Forest
Though a community garden in spirit, the Fonticello Food Forest is more than raised beds and redistribution. It’s a doorway to thinking about food differently, with a design based on permaculture including native plants, fruit trees and other perennials.
“People only consider certain plants as food — tomatoes and cucumbers and things like that,” Sullivan says, “but there’s an abundance of native plants that are edible: violets and dandelions, chickweed, all kinds of things that are in abundance all around us that we can eat.” As she talks, Sullivan reaches up and plucks a cluster of buds off a tree. It’s black locust, she explains, native, edible, with a heavenly floral character — a culinary wonder growing wild for all to enjoy.
As for the garden itself, those raised beds will be planted with an assortment of herbs and vegetables. Volunteer Vanessa Kennedy has been working on the garden beds for a few weeks. For her, it’s about creating something meaningful for her neighborhood; it’s her seventh year living a half a block from the park. “I want to be a part of this project because it’s so worthwhile,” she says. “We need to be able to feel what it is that we’re doing and to make our people understand where the food comes from and that eating food that grows from the earth is better for you than a bunch of junk. If we can get the word out by doing this project and having the kids involved, it’s worth it.”
Co-founder Price notes that creating spaces like the Food Forest is a process that’s open to all city residents. “If people, through their neighborhood associations and through their parks department, occupy these parcels and use them as community gardens, we’re creating long-term green space,” he says.
Sullivan and Price emphatically agree that the Fonticello Food Forest is part of a larger ecosystem, one that relies on mutual aid work being done throughout the city, and one that they hope to see become increasingly community-powered.
For anyone motivated to participate, Price says, look for your closest community garden, and lend a hand. “We didn’t start here,” he says. “We had been working with the earth and with community-led and city-partnered organizations before this. This is the manifestation of us learning from those experiences to make our community better.”
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