Today I had the great pleasure of making the acquaintence of Fred Bahnson, the garden manager of Anathoth Community Garden in Cedar Grove, NC. We talked for a couple of hours; and I suspect we will be talking for quite a few more. Before I left, I had my first taste of Austrian winter peas, only just the stems and leaves. Sweet as sugar. It fixes nitrogen and creates a green mulch.

It was a symbiotic get-together in more ways than I have counted.

I want to introduce this new friend to Feral Scholar by way of an article he wrote for Orion about the garden.

The story of Anathoth Community Garden really begins with a murder. On a June afternoon in 2004, Bill King was closing up his shop on the corner of Mill Creek and Carr Store roads when someone walked through the door and shot him in the back of the head. Before Bill and his wife, Emma, bought the place, the little bait and tackle grocery was a haven for local crack dealers. The first thing Bill and Emma did when they arrived was to ask the dealers to leave. Parents began bringing their children to the store for ice cream; neighborhood kids rode their bikes down for a soda. When people couldn’t pay, Bill would let them take food on credit. Whatever sense of safety this little farming community of Cedar Grove, North Carolina, had enjoyed before that afternoon in June, one trigger-pull had shattered. The people of Cedar Grove were angry and afraid…

FULL ARTICLE