I’m walking across an old baseball diamond at Tassafaronga Park in Oakland with four very qualified agriculture experts. We’re approaching a new vegetable garden that they helped create.
“First we picked our seeds, and then we got to get our hands all dirty with the soil,” says eight-year old gardener Jordan Sanders. He’s a member of Acta Non Verba, an urban farming program for local, low-income youth.
Sanders and his friends are the ambassadors, but the program was founded by Kelly Carlisle, back in 2010. At the time, stories about Oakland’s school dropout rates and increases in crime left the Berkeley resident feeling defeated.
“I felt like it would be irresponsible for me as a mom to turn a blind eye to what's happening just one city over from where we live,” says Carlisle.
Growing something she says, helped her cope.
“At 30 years old, when I started growing, it gave me a sense of power to have a tomato start that’s maybe three inches tall grow into a six-foot vine.”
Soon after, she started a camp, and now she teaches kids how to plan and plant the produce grown on the quarter-acre plot. She teaches them how to harvest and sell it. She even shows them how to prepare and cook it. One of this season’s crops is bright red strawberries.
“You could try one!” says Sanders.
Before I get a chance, the group steers me to the left.
“Here's a small little sunflower right here. There's some seeds a little bit. It's not really big. It's dead too,” says eight-year-old Christian McCorkle.
As Acta Non Verba’s resident sunflower expert, seven-year-old Ravyn Martin gives me a warning.
“You have to be careful, there's bugs on the sunflower seeds,” she says.
I ask the kids if the bugs scare them and Sanders replies, “Yeah we just rip them off!”
Kelly Carlisle understands. It took her a while to get used to nature in action, too. Her first time seeing fruit growing on a tree wasn’t until 2009.
“I thought someone was, you know, playing a trick on me,” she laughs. “You know, like if you don't want the lemons why would you want to put them in a tree? That's ridiculous.”
But she and the kids here have learned. Sanders and McCorkle are telling me about something they just learned to make from their garden.
“One of the things we made from the garden was strawberry jelly,” says Sanders.
Transforming the kids’ urban experience is gratifying for Carlisle. She says it’s a real eye-opener for many.
“Sometimes we get kids that are just like, ‘That’s a real broccoli?!’ And, ‘I can eat that?’ And sometimes we get kids that are like, ‘I won’t eat anything here. It comes from the store, right, so I’ll wait until it’s there,’” she says.
That’s just what a lot of the kids are used to. But if they take the time, they learn all about the magic that goes on in a garden. The kids show me to the garden’s beehive. It’s one of Jordan Sander’s favorite spots.
“You can smell the honey from right here, it smells really good. One sniff and you can imagine what it would be like. Listen…”
I take a tiny step forward and hear the soft but steady hum coming from the wooden box. Carlisle stops us before we get any closer. It’s that same maternal care for the kids in Oakland that she says led her to start Acta Non Verba. She has lots of plans for the garden. On top of fundraising for the next growing season, she’s trying to build stronger ties with the Elmhurst district. One day she hopes to provide produce for the entire community.
“If 10 families wanted to make a meal at the same time, I wouldn't have enough produce to give them,” she says.
As the sunlight starts to fade, the ag experts show me out. They’re telling me about a flower I’ve never heard of.
“One time we got to eat edible flowers, and it was red, and we got to eat them,” says eight-year-old Edie Zavala.
There’s always something new to discover in the garden.
