From Plants to Polls, from vegetables to voter registration Brownsville Community Garden feeds the need

By Nayaba Arinde
Editor at Large
Even collard greens can’t escape Donald Trump and the presidential election.
Tammy Hall is a Brownsville-based urban farmer. A self-professed storyteller, she has helped transform an abandoned lot now known as Amboy Community Garden – into a space that grows free food for community members who just drop by with a bag or two for food for their kitchen table.

From vegetables to flowers and leaves for healing and comforting teas.
But there is more. While addressing hunger is both a political and social issue, Ms. Hall is determined to both feed the need and inform her community. Alongside workshops and events, her upcoming voter registration drive is part of her extended program.
“To me, that’s the beautiful thing about community gardens, Ms. Hall told Our Time Press. “They are the city’s best-kept secret. You just put the love in there.

Basically, there is no membership fee really. But you put love in there, and people just come to your aid. We collaborate with National Grid, the Department of Probation, and Brooklyn Health Center, and organizations like this have come and collaborated with us and have given us walking paths, beds, picnic tables, chairs, and brand-new plants for the fall and workshops.”

Last Saturday afternoon Tammy Hall was walking down Nostrand Avenue by Sista’s Place with a bag full of homegrown flowers to make tea, when she spoke to Our Time Press that she had just come from the community garden.

“I am a professional storyteller,” she said. “So, I should tell you the story about how we got here. Amboy Community Garden was an abandoned space about 5 years ago. It had been a community garden under the jurisdiction of Project Eats–an organization that was holding down some community properties.” Walking past there one day with her grandbaby and friend, she noticed the huge unused stretch of land taking up from Amboy and the whole block of Blake on the corner and encompassing Herzl Street.

“There was a gazebo, there were all kinds of abandoned and overgrown beds, tons of wildflowers and trees.” Realizing that this was a community garden that was chained up, she asked some people sitting close by, who answered that the reason why they weren’t using the garden was because “‘We can’t get in there. So I said, ‘Well, this is a community garden, because the Greenthumb signs were on the fence, so you have a right to this. They said, ‘Well we’ve been trying.’”

So she and her circle “just started calling, calling, calling Greenthumb,” and Community Engagement Coordinators Gregory Anderson and Eric Thomann to find out how to get into the garden.

Ms. Hall recalled Assistant Director of Community Engagement Alex Munoz “contacted me and said ‘If you can get about 20 people together, I’ll come out there and see what you guys are talking about.’ So, we called everybody we knew, Cousin Kiki, Uncle Bubba–everybody we could find from wherever we could find, and he came and he saw 30 people standing there saying ‘What you’re going to do for us/‘ and he said ‘File for the license, and we’ll see.’”

So, in 2019, the group held meetings, formed committees and elections for a firm governing structure with a license registration, mission statement, and by-laws, created a mission statement, and filed all the paperwork, got it in during a rainstorm at night.

“There was another abandoned garden around the corner called Brownsville Farms, and it was held by the same organization,” and Ms. Hall said she went home, filed the paperwork, and acquired that plot too.
“We have both gardens and they are both renovated, fully licensed, fully operating and in good standing, and growing tons of food.”
What do they grow?
“Name something that we don’t have would be easier to answer. We have kale, collards, peppers, onions, scallions, 2 fig trees, two pear trees, two fig trees, two cherry trees, an apple tree, and four mulberry trees, and so we grow a lot of food. We have a lot, and we have been gifted with things because of our work. We’ve been gifted 29 brand new beds, the New York Restoration Project jumped in–found a proposal I wrote, and we got 14 community beds so anyone can walk off the street and come and pick food.

You name it, we’ve got it; watermelon, cantaloupe, cucumber!”
All free, healthy fruits for the community.
Contractors must include green spaces as they change skylines and demographics, hence the small corner of middle-of-the-block urban farms.
NYC Parks oversees the Amboy Community Garden, which is supported by GreenThumb, the nation’s largest urban gardening program.

Established in 1978 under NYC Parks, GreenThumb is “proud to be the nation’s largest urban gardening program, sustaining over 550 community gardens and supporting thousands of volunteer gardeners throughout New York City.”
According to the New York City Parks Department, “The majority of community gardens were abandoned lots transformed by volunteers into green spaces for relaxation, socializing, and growing food, or a combination.”

“The city wants these green spaces to be used, but if they’re not used the city will take them and once they take them we will never get them back. So they’re checking to see if the community is really using it.

“Is it active? Are there people in there? Are things happening? So they want you to have a social media presence. So we have Instagram and Facebook, and we just submit event forms and have events. They have to see that people are doing things in the garden, but they come and check. We post how people can become members of the garden so we have the information.”

Tammy Hall, Garden Manager has a whole team working with her including; Ronnie Burrage, Manager of Events and Education, Mike Lewis, Manager of Community Relations, Barbara Bowman, Manager of Operations, Chanda Burrage, Secretary/Treasurer, Iesha Woods and Trisha Jerrick Assistants to Management.

As they plan to host a drive in the next two weeks, Ms. Hall told Our Time Press, “We just make sure people who are not registered to vote–are, so I’ve asked one of my members if they would host a registration drive, so we can try and get the young people, 18 and over, making sure they’re registered to vote.”

For more information, log onto their accounts on Instagram: Amboy Community Garden
Facebook: Amboy Street Community Garden
Or contact: tamtamtells@gmail.com