Seeds And Their People - EP. 34: Sankofa Community Farm and the African Diaspora - Go Back and Bring Forward What You Left Behind

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

In late November, 2024, we finally recorded an episode featuring Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden and many of the voices of the farmers there. This podcast in many ways is an extension of their work to "Go Back and Bring Forward What You Left Behind" - which is a take on the meaning of the Twi word "Sankofa". Its corresponding Akan proverb is, “Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri.” In large part, this approach to farming, community building, and cultural preservation with a heavy emphasis on learning the practices and foodways of our ancestors inspired the genesis of Truelove Seeds and this podcast lifting up the voices of people sharing about their ancestral foods. So please enjoy this episode where you hear reflections from many of the farmers from Sankofa, including:  Chris Bolden Newsome, Laquanda Dobson, Lailah Lindsey Glass, Maria Jose Garcia, Ty Holmberg, Keyone Carter, and Hajja Glover.  FOOD PLANTS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Collard Greens Siling Labuyo Pepper Sehsapsing Corn Okra Castor Beans Roselle Hill Rice (Trinidad) LINKS: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden THIS EPISODE SUPPORTED BY: YOU! Please become a Patron for $1 or more a month at Patreon.com/trueloveseeds The No-Till Market Growers Podcast Network (which includes our friends at the Seed Farmer Podcast) Scribe Video Center and WPEB, West Philly Community Radio ABOUT: Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Facebook  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden   THANKS TO: Sankofa Community Farm staff! Scribe Video Center

This is Seeds and Their People. This episode was recorded in November of 2024 at Sancofa Community Farm at Barterford. Hey, my goodness. If you're enjoying this show, you may also like the No-Till Market Garden podcast with co-host Mimi Castile, Natalie Lansberry, and yours truly, Alex Ball. We interviewed growers, researchers, and others in sustainable ag community about everything from a soil. first farming practices to farm business management in the wild world of soil biology and health. So head over to your favorite podcast platform today and subscribe to the NoTill Growers Network. Welcome to Seeds and their people. I'm Chris Bolden Newsom, farmer and co-director of Sancofa Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia.

And I'm Owen Taylor, seed keeper and farmer at True Love Seeds. We're a seed company offering ancestral seeds grown by farmers who preserve their beloved tastes of home from their diasporas and beyond through keeping seeds and their stories in community. This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and by our listeners. Thank you so much to our Patreon members at patreon.com slash true love seeds, who subscribed for as little as $1 per month to support this storytelling work. Thanks to our newest supporters, Eric, Stella, and Jamie. This episode features Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden, which is your farm. I love your farm. Before we jump into the stories and meeting everybody, we want to read a little bit about Sankofa to get the kind of basics down so we can jump into storytelling.

So here's a little bit about who we are and what we do. Sankofa farm at Bartram's Garden provides a unique space in Philadelphia for the exploration of African diasporic culture on multiple levels at the historic John Bartram's Garden. The farm has been a source for employment. for residents of Southwest Philadelphia. It has contributed to the literary presence of John Bartram's Association as well through the numerous national and international publications and research projects it has inspired. Sankofa has also been a place of healing for Bartram's Garden staff and community members

who have spent countless hours of meditation, prayer, reflection, and learning in addition to the opportunities to work on the land that are all an integral part of the Sankofa experience. Sankofa is rooted in the principles of food sovereignty, belief in a deeper spiritual power that lights, guides, and strengthens the human family. Sankofa Farm celebrates the power of spiritual connection present in the wisdom practices of African-descended people, especially those of the Atlantic world. Our farm is dedicated to recovering the prayer ways, songs, crops, and rituals that we lost while interpreting these practices for our current day. As the name Sankofa implies, in a Tweed language, ain't nothing wrong with going back to fetch what you left. behind. Sancofa Farm is focused on the African diaspora experience. As a project dedicated to

lifting up the global black experience, Sankofa Farm is unique in the Mid-Atlantic region for its focus on growing traditional crops of the African experience, with the focus on cultivating and teaching about the foods of North American South and the Caribbean. The purpose of our farm is to gather, inspire, and support an intergenerational and multicultural community through the Sankofa experience in order to nourish body, mind, and spirit, respect and care for the land and its ecosystem and create the conditions that allow our community of southwest Philadelphia to move forward together nice so what we're what's happening right now is shelling both castor beans and okra so so people know what they're hearing okay so let's talk

about the name who wants to talk about the name I can start off the name the name the name Sancofa is an abbreviation, I guess, it's a piece from a longer phrase in the tree language. And we specifically chose a word in the tree language, because it's language, one of the more common languages in Ghana. It's in a Khan language family. I guess that's technically a Bantu language family for all the linguistic nerves who are going to correct me. And again, many African-Americans can point to some ancestor that came through Ghana. We don't have the luxury, of course, being the descendant of enslaved people

of being able to trace our heritage back in detail from the records and just from other cultural sort of research. A lot of black folks can say that they have ancestors that came through Ghana. So we chose that language, you know, to express the spirit of who we are. And Sankofa, from the larger phrase, Shewo-Elefinna, what Sankofa yenchi in tree, means that there's nothing wrong.

I always translated into black American English ain't nothing wrong we're going back to fetch what you left or what you left behind. And it's a very important principle, I think, particularly for African Americans in North America, because sometimes we need

we need the empowerment that us giving each other permission to go back, to reach back, gives. And I say this, especially, you know, for black North Americans, why this permission feels sometimes necessary or helpful is that U.S. culture is uniquely, and we're talking about this a little earlier too, about the religious history of the United States, is U.S. culture is uniquely individualistic, and I would say largely forward-focused or, you know, future-focused. Just from the origins of British colonists breaking with their own country in order to create a new country, the whole idea is to destroy the old and move forward. And so we're always moving forward in growth and life and progress means to a large extent, you know, in United States culture. Don't think about the past.

Forge your future ahead. Go it alone if need be. And so that's a huge part of American culture. And we believe that that is, in a lot of ways, antithetical to the preservation of ancestral knowledge and really to identity, especially for people who have been ripped from their homeland. It's a really different experience for people who chose to. break ties with their homeland as the British Americans did and so that's you know I think living here on the land of a colonial family we have you know unique opportunities to be able to talk about that and delve into that experience you know I believe that the Bartrams might at one time

have been loyalists I'm sure they were to the crown and then you know the popular rage was to break with the mother country for several different reasons taxation and all this other stuff right so that's a different experience when you choose to walk away from home as opposed to so when you are ripped from home. Yeah. So we need that permission sometimes. My name is Layla. I'm one of the farmers here.

I'm also like a farm educator, work with the youth in the summertime, and the SWI coordinator. So we've organized workshops and meetings with farmers across Southwest and West Philly. As far as the embodied aspect of Sankofa through the work that we do here, it really is, I think,

on the most basic level, just the simple act of farming, and particularly like what Chris was saying about coming from a black American cultural background, people associate immediately farming and enslavement. And that is a very painful and traumatic past. And so I think that has caused a lot of our people to stray away from the practice of farming, even though it is a very like spiritual and ancestral practice that has been done and learned over many, many generations. And then, like, another level to that is, like, growing crops that come from the continent. Different people here on the farm have their own, you know, personal connection to different crops, and we all are able to kind of, like, bring that here.

And I think that that is a lot of the reaching back and bringing the pass forward. It couldn't be a better segue to the seed stories. I would love to continue diving into the Sankofa concept by following your segue into what, you know, telling stories about the crops that are most important to you here, ancestrally, spiritually, culturally. I am chef Laquanda Dapsin. I am the farm manager and the culinary culture coordinator here at Sankofa. Well, over the years, I got really connected with a lot of seeds and crops.

The crop that I really got very connected to is anything that is a collard green. I really love collard greens like a lot. I love all the different varieties. I like to watch them grow, and I love the different tastes of each collard green that we grow. We grow like five different varieties of collard greens. My two favorite would have to be the green glaze and the Alabama blue. But the champion, they'd be lasting a little bit long.

longer than both of those. So I still got honor for them because that's like the main one that a lot of people eat. I grew up eating collard greens on special events, like birthdays, cookouts. I feel like it was just like not something that like I was eating like a lot all the time. But when I started growing the food, when I started growing collard greens, I was like, you, I want to eat this all the time. And I love cooking collard greens. Like people really love my greens and I like I will bet for that yeah I grew up eating a lot of um collard greens with like meat in them and uh things like that but then when I became vegetarian I was like you I got to figure out how to make some like greens without like

meat in them I'm not going to tell you what I put in my greens but they're really smoky and delicious and one thing that I really love about growing collard greens and cooking collard greens is the connection that I have with my ancestors because back in the day like you couldn't just like clean collard greens one time like you literally had to clean them at least three or four times because they had like sand in them or grit and people always hated to eat like sandy collard greens when I'm cleaning collard greens like it's like a ritual for me because it's like a connection to like going back and even using a hoe to like get the soil ready to put the seedlings in that's also like a connector as well

and I always go back and I think my ancestors was really good at growing collard greens they grew collard greens so well that they were able to sell them and make money like that was one of the first ways that like enslaved people were able to make money alongside of like growing watermelons as well

so like when I'm growing collard greens when I'm cleaning collard greens when I'm cooking collard greens when I'm selling collard greens like it's a big deal for me And I think it's a big deal because my great-great-grandfather was a farmer in Waco, Texas. And that's a way to, like, connect to my grandfather. He was, like, really tall and, like, had broad shoulders.

And he just was a beast from, like, what my mom said. And I think I honor being able to come from, like, a generation of farmers. There's also this connection. I don't know what it is yet, but I also have this connection to, like, Caribbean culture. and I don't know where that comes from but I really, really love seasoning peppers Trinidadian seasoning peppers

those things are like my bread and butter in any dish that I make and I'm always sad when they're gone so I try to like freeze them up until like they start to reproduce again just to still have that good flavor. I also

love teaching the high school kids at our farm about okra. Some of them are not really down with eating it because of the silkyness of it. But one way that I get youth to eat their heritage foods is by stepping into food that they already eat. So if you grew up in Philadelphia, you eat a lot of Chinese food. So kids are eating Chinese food every day. It's like one of the cheapest things you can eat. So I'm basically teaching them how to make like okra stir fry. That's one way that I'm getting them to eat okra. I want to continue

you to switch it up and like get them to eat ochre and like stews and things like that they love it in gumbo as well the youth here they are really good at making gumbo we've had teachouts and they've taught people how to make gumbo they're just like pros at making gumbo and i'm so proud of them for even trying to cook and like to teach out and one thing that we always say at sancoff is that if you can teach somebody else then you're like one step closer to like being a master at something. So we are a production and a teaching farm. And I don't think a lot of farms, like, go through that.

Like, it's just like, oh, get the work done. But we are actually living and breathing and doing this work because we know that everything that we learn, that we'll use it in the future. And it's our duty to make sure that those lessons that we get from the field and from the seeds and from each other should be dispersed out to the world. So I'm so grateful to even be on this podcast to be telling people about St. Cofa Community Farm because we're doing some big ish out here.

And it just feels good to be doing meaningful work. I'm just remembering, I think I met you 17 years ago, before I even met Chris, we did a workshop together in D.C. or Baltimore or something. And you were a youth in a program like this. and I think you were doing maybe a cooking demo portion of it or something. Here you are leading workshops for kids that weren't even born yet at that time. How has your work with cooking education and farming education shifted from that time when I met you to right now? Like what have been the major transformations for you? I think the major transformations is that I ain't really know what I was doing.

Like I knew how to cook. It's always been in me since. I was 12 watching my great aunt cook. But I think what changed is the meaning of, like, resiliency. Like, I know that, like, this is the work that needs to be happening. It's much more culturally relevant. Like, I was making egg plant something. Like, it just, like, wasn't connecting.

Like, I don't know how to explain it. Like, it just wasn't culturally relevant. And I think you reach a certain point as a chef and, like, as an educator and like a creative pathway where you like, yo, like, how is this connecting to me? Like, how is this going to connect to my family, the young people in my life? So I would say 17 years ago, the whole thing was like food systems. Like we were talking about food system and food justice. And I think the difference now is food sovereignty.

Basically, it's levels to like being a farmer. It's levels to being a chef. and the ultimate level is like literally learning about food sovereignty and living and breathing it back in the day it was like food justice everybody deserves clean food clean air yes all of those things but like we need to be the sole owners of like how we are voting with our fork how we are growing our food all of these things for example like when it comes to black eye peas like black out peas they are sometimes not in the stores because people aren't freaking buying them So if people bought them, then we would have more blackout peas in the stores here in Philadelphia.

But now I don't even got to buy black eyed peas because, you know why? I'm actually growing black eyed peas. Like, yeah, like several different kinds. And I get to connect to those foods because, like, I was the one who put that seed in my mouth and prayed on it and, like, put it into some soil and then put that same seed into the ground and watched it grow and nurtured it by weed in it and watering it. So, yeah, I'm just bigger and better than I was 17 years ago. Yeah. Indeed, we both have been privileged to know La Quanda since she was baby Quine. She don't like people calling her that no more.

So y'all better not call her that. I can call her that. But I use a reserve special occasions to do that. But we were all at that time a part of a program that Sancova Farm originated out of, which was the Urban Nutrition Initiative, that was a program of the Netter Center in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

So it was, as she said, a food justice program. One of the early iterations of food justice, as food justice was just, you know, sort of making a name for itself on the East Coast, particularly, and so it focused on a youth program at that time. And it was an awesome formation, beginning type of program that did, nevertheless, you know, focus on food security and on local communities,

but did not have a cultural component in any real way. And so part of the evolution of Sankofa coming out of that is we grew and recognized that our community needed a deeper connection to the food and not just a knowledge of how to move food systems that we actually needed to be a part of the food systems. And, you know, recognizing that black Philadelphians had food cultures that they lost, or that were abandoned for some reason or another and that part of our healing would be to get back into the earth and to start eating those foods again for their own sake because of how they connected us to ancestral lineages that we have lost so yeah so that's what she was talking about the program that she was a part of at that time she was a star you know one of those many stars and we've been blessed to be able to keep connection with and even continue employing other youth from that program we have haja as well too who's going to at some point here, step in, who was also a youth in the program. My name is Maria Jose, also known as MJ.

The seeds that I feel called to would be corn this season. And I think that comes from what San Kofa means to me, being a daughter of an immigrant that, as we mentioned earlier, I didn't resort to the identity of individualism or assimilated myself to the American life. And it was an inherited feeling somehow somewhere in myself that I know I had to acknowledge my motherland, my roots, and where did I come from? What country did my mother come from and honoring that here? And as you mentioned earlier, we all have a piece of that within us of our traditions and the food that we grow.

And for me, I guess it goes to an origin story of corn, and I decided to do that this season. And that's something I want to incorporate slowly into Sanofa because of its importance. And no crispy in from the south that, you know, cornmeal and cornbread is very essential to the culture. And there's just a little glimpse of how interconnected all this is. I mean, I always was raised eating tamales, chuchitos, which are Guatemalan dishes, tortillas. And, you know, just didn't know how important it was until I started learning about Mayan cosmology and the importance of what they refer in to my language. as a shim, what they call corn, and how in the creation story, it was the sustenance of the

people. Corn was what made our people get into farming, sustain ourselves, and be connected to the creation that God gave us, you know, how to care for ourselves. And as I went on with the journey of, you know, reaching my own teachings of my people, that it all started to come together and it all started to show in front of me from, you know, Other Guatemalan farmers, going to Guatemala, whenever I can, reading more about other stories, it was just like, okay, you know, I felt it. I felt it here, especially working on the land, just how, you know, the plants will talk to you and how it just pops up, it will pop up in my dreams too.

So I think that's a lot of, like, the spiritual work that we talk about, especially growing the cessop sing corn this season, which is the corn of the Lena Lenape people, the land that we occupy on so that's all the interconnected part of that we all have a story and cultures that are interconnected but it started with me just knowing that i need to become closer to what my people were growing and for that i look like honoring it with all for cardinal directions and speaking upon the people of this land of of my ancestral land and, you know, the whole, like, Copal burning and everything. Yeah, just doing the Milpa style as well.

Yeah, I grew with beans, grew with squash, and harvested a good amount. And I started giving some to the folks around me. And I guess that speaks on the abundance and the sustenance that I cultivated. Yeah, I don't know. I think Guadamilans probably are very similar to African-Americans, in that we eat corn every day in some form right like we you know growing up like we eat grits every day if it's not grits is corn bread or it's usually both you know and so there's some form of corn and so you tell you can kind of take it for granted without really knowing the deep but i think

one of the powerful things that i heard that stood out to me from what she was saying is that corn is a way to to link so many different peoples like if corn you know the scientists say that corn came from Mesoamerica, you know, Mexico, Guatemala, where her ancestors are from. And how in the world is that also the ancestral food of the Lenny Lenape people? At least a thousand miles away, I'm sure, you know, right, several thousand, you know, I'm not good with math. This grain is a touchstone, almost like a time and space travel unit that can connect you back to ancestry, that can root you to a place where you are now. so to me that's just powerful and think about that all the stories that that corn

which came from where she came from from where people came from all the way up here that corn is kind of traveled with you you know in some way so it is kind of powerful you know and I think that's one of the things that is that is unique not to flex Sankofa's you know you know work but but it's like that's that's that's one of the things that we offer you know is that ability for all people you know so we didn't include that piece multicultural piece in there And it's not because that we are, you know, that we're focused on every culture in the world in that way. But the practices that we're lifting up, we offer to everybody in order to do the same thing in their own cultural experience. I just want to end that.

I guess a part of that was not conforming to the way that corn has been commercialized here in the United States. And I felt like a reflection of myself of not conforming into simulation being here. I didn't want to stop at just like, all right, my mother came here. I'm a U.S. citizen. This is who I am. No, it was more of, like, there's more to the story. And I think that's what, when I found their relationship with corn, that's what it was. Something that is everyday usage actually had more meaning than I thought to a point where, like, I became so biased.

I'm like, I'm not, you know, corn on a cab or stuff like that. And we joke about it all the time, but I'm not, you know, I need it in the way that it was supposed to be next to my lives. And I found myself working alongside, you know, Masa Cooperativea, a little shout out to them. Here, Massa Cooperative in South Philly, we do the practice of growing different types of corn that is not your commercialized corn, and the Niximilization process is where we add cal, which actually has some kind of, I don't want to say limestone. It's like, it's lime, it's lime, okay, so it's limestone, chemical lime, which actually was also the same chemical used to build the ruins, and I think that's just, that's a whole other thing

of how crazy everything is in connected and it breaks down the corn to a point where it comes edible and that's and that's where the farming aspect comes from that we had to know how to cook it how to prepare it so it became the sustenance so you know when you just have this simple ingredient keeping as natural as possible you know things that the earth provides you get this much fuller sustenance such as tortillas um masa to make you know tamales and all other other sorts of delicious, yummy cuisines, you know, and dishes. So, yeah. Again, my name is Leila.

I didn't necessarily grow up eating a lot of what I would now understand as, like, traditional African, but, like, fruits and vegetables and things like okra and, like, different types of greens and beans and all of that. So just working here, I've been able to, like, try new things that have, that I see in a way that is connected to my culture that I wasn't necessarily raised with. but in particular this year I grew a little pepper from the Philippines called sealing labuyo that I actually was gifted with at the true love seed gathering last year in 2023 and my great-grandfather my grandmother's father on my

father's side came from the Philippines in the Navy in the early like 1900s I never met him but I did grow up with my grandmother she passed away when I was about about 16 that is kind of like a part of her story that I never really got to like question or like you know dig into but like she was my complexion a black woman with a Filipino face and for me like that memory that the memory of her face and like the normality of it like not really seeing a lot of other people that looked like her or even had her background but just like that for me being like just who she was yeah I just have very sweet memories of her and she was very close to me

at my heart. And so when I planted the seeds, I remember like crying into the soil and like, I'm sorry. Yeah. Damn. Sees and they people. Yeah. She was really like

the bedrock of my family. And so like growing the peppers. Even though I don't know anything about the Philippines, I've never been there. She never really talked about it. Obviously, she had never been there. Her father died when she was pretty young.

But her name is Maria, and, like, she had his name, and, like, that for me felt like a big part of her, even though she didn't necessarily know a whole lot about it, and neither do I. But for whatever reason, when I grew this pepper that was given to me by this woman who, like, when I told her I was Filipino, like, she didn't even question it. Even though I don't look like someone from the Philippines, but like for me, that was like really affirming and just growing it. I feel very connected to her. And she was really important for me, just like, growing up. That's what I love about seeds. When we show them peas and we just talking. Those pees didn't hurt.

Too much. had it go with once they were growing and had the harvest go and I mean they're hanging right here drying they're so prolific like they're just very abundant there's so many I ate them recently for the first time and they're like really hot and spicy and delicious yeah they're drying right there yeah and that one plant there might be many hundreds of peppers and I have two more plants that are still in the field I need to harvest yeah it was just really sweet like watching them grow I feel like they didn't do much for a while and then they just kind of like all of a sudden we just see like all these little tiny green chilies and um Chris actually had me like do research

on like where it came from and a lot of what I learned actually came from Nikki Oy who gave me the seeds she wrote and like did a whole project on it and so I learned a lot about just like how they came here and how there's been like a lot of substitution of like peppers from like Thailand and other places instead of the ceiling of buyo, even though it is this very, like, traditional pepper. And it was, like, in a lot of people's just, like, front yards because birds would just, like, drop it. And it's really special that she was able to, like, kind of bring that here with her and share it with me. And I ended up actually sharing it with a lot of other folks in Philly because I had so many plants. I started a whole flat of them, and all of it germinated.

And so I was like, I don't know what to do with all these peppers. I think I only put, like, four or five plants in the field. a WhatsApp group of Filipinos in Philly. They usually have like a potluck. One of my friends was going and I sent the plants with her and everybody was really happy and excited to be able to grow. And I've seen like a few people like send pictures of their plants in the in the chat. And it's really touches me that I was able to, you know, give that to people. So I'm Ty Holmberg and I am the co-founder and co-director of the Sankofer Community Farm at Barsham's Garden. And it's been quite a journey.

We've been doing this for 14 years together. One of the things I think a lot about is, like, what we work on also works on us. And I've been seeing how the transformation in the land and the way that we connect to the land over time has changed and evolved and created deeper connections to the people that work on the land and to the community. and to the plants, and I think that that's also been representative with my perspective and how that's shifted over time. Came in as kind of this energetic young white guy who wanted to, like, kind of prove himself to like, I want to start a lot of, you know, a lot of, like, white folks coming out of, like, college, like, I'm going to start a nonprofit, I'm going to be, like, there's, like, a lot of ego

in that, I think, that was driving at some of it. it and also some of it was just seeing the need and the beauty and like connect humans connecting back into the land and the importance of that and then I think through the lessons that we've learned and the the relationships through with Chris in the land and the African diaspora I've seen such an important connection of how food and growing food can be a container to for people and community to really heal together in this crazy situation that we have in the United States and the history and I always kind of talk about another using another Chris saying is just that

the land being the scene of the crime in the United States and that that's also the space where healing can happen and we kind of have to go back there in some ways to be able to heal and I think also just for me as a white person in this space you know at first I think I was kind of ignorant to the depth of what was needing to happen on the land and then I kind of did the thing where the pendulum swung and I was like didn't want to step in anyone toes or hurt anyone's feelings or say anything and then really being encouraged that we don't in this movement we don't need meek white people or like we need people that are going to be strong and know the history and be able to make mistakes and grow from them,

but also having space to prioritize this experience because of where we are in this culture, where we are in this community. And saying all that, I have dabbled and I've done some exploration of my own cultural-connected work, and we ask a question every volunteer day where we say, what is a food that connects to your culture? And you see a lot of the folks coming from

different cultural background, like diverse cultural backgrounds, African, Asian, very able to speak about that. And then you often get to white people and they're just grasping. They're like pizza or like, you know, and I think I was there for a while. But my journey, you know, Swedish and Dutch, both oral history and through my DNA work, have found that those are two parts of my my ancestry. I've kind of dabbled with turnips. I don't love them. There's not like an affinity.

Like maybe I just need to work a little bit more with them. Like making sauerkraut from cabbage was something that I explored. Yeah, like it talked about doing a root like root abacas and other root vegetables. I love beef, you know, those are some of those northern European crops. But nothing's really like, like, I don't know if I just need to spend more time with it or just like, yeah, I am the Root Man on the farm. That's right. I think maple syrup for me is like a regional thing that I do feel connected that has both regional and family things. But getting back to more like ancestral crops, I kind of feel a little bit, if I'm going to be honest, like not ashamed, but like I feel like being 15 years or 20 years into this, I do feel like a duty to be able to go deeper into those ancestral crops and like talk to more people. and like find what you know I need to experiment more and put more time and energy and to actually like you know figure out what I feel connected to and then and

then grow them out and eat them and because otherwise I just I just don't want to be an observer and a participant in this African diasporic like we need people we need we talk about how like white people cut off like when they when they took on whiteness they cut off huge parts of themselves and which is bad for them and bad for the world. And I do feel like getting back into those cultural crops and yeah, connecting to those tribes and those stories, the dance, the language, the clothing. Like, that re-creates the fabric with which our culture has come from with white people. And I think will, in the end, really support an ability for us to be able to come with a story instead

of eating other people's stories. And I have seen this again and again with white folks being able to connect to something that's not just whiteness. And they're hungry for it, but I do think it's one of the reasons why white people are so lost and kind of in pain is because of this, even though they've gained everything, right?

They've gained money, they've gained power, but they've cut off the really important parts of themselves that actually make them humans. so yeah i mean i feel like like i said i'm on the start of my journey i'm going to keep i need i need to be be better at at getting more experiences to making sure that that that seed the seed the vegetable the cultural stories are more a part of my life so thank you yeah thank you what's the plant on this farm whether it's in the orchard or in the field where you've had the most like profound feeling of connection even if it's not ancestral

and why for such a long time i would eat a sun gold every morning a cherry tomato i do feel like beats have been a constant like i kind of like look out for the beats and make sure that they're like taking care of and then like i have a magic my magic eye and know what what beat if it's cresting over the surface which one's going to be i feel like it's like my jump shot like i know it's going to I know it's going to be a good beat when I put it's a feel

it's a feeling it's a root main but I love figs figs for me too like just the orchard like I tend to the orchard

that's part of my responsibility so the pawpaws and figs like I get here early and like check in on them persimmons

yeah but yeah I feel like the beats are I do feel connected to them and I make a mean a mean beat salad with balsamic

redone That was a joke. That was an inside joke. Thanks, Ty. I'm sure your people eight beats. Just FYI. Well, my name is Kahn and Carter. I have come up through the youth program, so I've been working here for about four and a half years now, and I'm a full-time seasonal staff member. It was hard for me to think about what I feel connected to because I've had Okra, and Okra is very good. and now I'm thinking about a gumbo is very good but I've done research on castor bean and I felt like I got more connected to it at the same time although it's not something that I necessarily like would eat because of you know it's properties and stuff like that but there's also like I really really like carrots and I like baked beans but I think the one thing that I can say without a shadow of a doubt although it may not be like culturally with me when i first came here it was figs figs are just they're so good the first time i ever had one was um i'm pretty sure as a youth student mr ty gave me one and it was just delicious and ever since then i've always been

looking out like oh yeah is it are they are they ripe yet have they started like growing because i just always want them and then this season we actually tried fig jam which was like That's my new bread and butter. Like, I need that for my peanut butter and jellies now. I can't wait to make my own fig jam because it was just delicious. And I felt like it just has to be figs. I think that's an important experience

is like the thing that ties us to the land. You know, like the thing that we eat and is so like overwhelmingly good that we're like excited to be a farmer. So I think there's something, definitely do that even if it's not your ancestral food so yeah I mean can you describe the experience of eating a fig it's just like the exterior is it's green and it has like it's soft but it feels a little bit of like it has some texture to it and then when you open it up if it's an

actually ripe one the insides will be red kind of darkish lightish red as you get closer to the center and it's like it looks like cells kind of of so when you first look at it it might be like oh that looks nasty or it looks funky but you can just eat the entire thing the whole thing is edible and it's like really sweet and rich and then those things that look like cells when you chew into them they don't like pop or explode or anything but there is like a little like crunch because those are like the seeds I believe and it's just it's amazing thank you and can you tell us a couple things

you've learned about castor beans because right now we're actually shelling castor beans that's the one of the background sounds the quieter one the loud one is the okra and the quieter one here castor beans so can you tell us a couple things you learned about castor beans I learned that I'm pretty sure castorine is native to East Africa it is the entire plant has this chemical called ryecin in it which is a carbohydrate boni protein which in simpler terms means that when it enters your system which five to ten milligrams worth of it is lethal it connects to your red blood cells and it prevents them from able to

produce protein which in turn kills them after a certain amount of time and that will like you know spread throughout your body and cause a lot of lethal damage which will be like organ failure and stuff like that and then eventually you'll pass but that's just the dangerous part of it do for helpful for you for example the leaves and the oil both have a healing property where you can apply it onto like an achy bone or maybe a wound and it'll actually like help to heal it the the leaf is like you have to heat up the leaf for it to have that property but it's the same um castamine oil can be used in a lot of different ways like to help hair growth which is very common in the black community a lot of black people use it for their hair which i didn't know until recently and then um

Um, the seeds look like ticks. They do. They're very big. And then they're like, that's the, uh, the genus name or what was it? Yeah. Wow. Can we get a round of applause? We are a teaching farm.

We are a teaching farm. Now he will be teaching everybody about castor being because he did his research. I can't we feel his next crop. Right. Kayan wrote a whole, like, just like a whole presentation and presented it to us yesterday about Castorbean, and it was very detailed. And you could tell, he wasn't reading from the paper. You could tell he knew what he was talking about. There is also citations and links on that paper. Hello. My name is Hadja Glover. I am the home garden bid coordinator here at San Kofa Community Farm. And in terms of an ancestral plant that connects to. me I would say it varies but I think this season it's been really nice to watch and see the hibiscus and and how it's been growing and how it's been grown well in the African

diaspora part of the farm it's been really nice to see the leaves and eat the leaves the leaves are so good a lot of people don't know that they're edible and tastes oh my goodness like lemon a little bit and then the taste of, then the texture of it is similar to like okra. So yeah, I think that connects to me and it always is a great sign of like summer and seeing the flowers of them. So yeah, it connects to me for sure. For the home garden bid program, we build and install garden beds. We provide the soy, the seeds and also starter plants.

And each garden bid that we install represent a family member or community. community member that is trying to heal the relationship with the land, who is interested in growing their own fruits and vegetables for their families and also to share with their neighbors. I think that it's been really important doing this work because one of the things that I have noticed when I installed the garden beds is that a lot of people don't know each other on their block. They like, I have never, I don't know my neighbor. I've never spoken to my neighbor. And there's a lot of elders who have been living on the same block for many years and don't

know, you know, who's the youth on their block. So the garden bids have, I think, helped to connect folks. For example, when we install garden bids, we see in the front of the home, that's what we really encourage. We encourage front yard gardens. When we install them, a lot of neighbors come out to see, like, what we do? And they're like, what are you doing? And then we're showing them, like, we're installing his garden bed, and they start asking questions. And then the neighbor, who we install the garden bid for, comes out. And she's like, Oh, introducing herself and they're talking and having like deep conversations about food that they grew up growing back in a day or of recipes that they like to grow with specific

crops that we're planting in their garden bed. I've seen like neighbors finally build those relationships with each other through the installation of these garden beds. And then to also have folks harvest their produce that they grow has been really healing for themselves. And then many folks are just trying to grow food. with all the struggles in Philly with, you know, climate change and with struggles with squirrels and, like, every cat's and mice, everything. They're trying, and I'm just happy. So I think that

that speaks to the community that despite all the challenges that they go through and face, they still manage to try to grow food and share with their neighbors. But there's a lot of elders that we start garden bits for it, and also a lot of younger women, too for sure that we install garden bids for, but a variety of folks that live in Southwest that we cater to. We cater to those closest to Southwest. Thank you, Asha. Yes, yes. Thank you. You were saying earlier how you went from food systems, food justice to food sovereignty, living and breathing this work. And so, like, what are some moments that really exemplify that for you or moments where you're like, yes, we are doing, we're walking the talk. This is powerful.

I would say moments when our elders who come to the farm who we have a connected relationship with, they come by and they just know when we're having garlic and that that's like one of the things that they really want to get from us or they are constantly asking for greens of all different kinds. Really good work that Chris and myself been doing is slowly introducing the community to different varieties. varieties of greens other than collard greens. So it's pretty awesome when they come to our markets and they're like, do you have F.O. Shoko, do you have Kalaloo? Like, you know, it's a different feeling because that just feels like people are actually, there's buy-in and that we can keep on keeping these seeds alive by growing them. Yeah, we have many testimonials like that.

I feel like we highlighted bitter melon so much this season at our farmer's markets that people are actually looking for the bitter melon like we've worked so hard over the past years to get people to even try bitter melon um but we didn't stop we started teaching people about the properties of it connecting to um diabetes and also just cooking it i cooked the bitter melon stew and you know it was crazy sometimes seasoning peppers look like habanero peppers So I had put like five habanarrows in there thinking that it was five seasoning peppers. But, you know, the ancestors always got my back. It was like, yo, add some sugar in there.

So I added sugar and it was a nice balance. And it was so, so good to the point where somebody was like, oh, tell me everything that's in it. I'll never tell you what's everything in it. But I will give you the bases. And it just was beautiful that she bought bitter melon at times. And yeah, it's just really amazing because last summer I feel like we had so like over an abundance of bitter melon. And this season, like people are actually buying it. And next season we'll probably just sell out like we sell out our collard greens.

So those are testimonials that our work is actually making an impact on the community. Throughout my time here as an apprentice, I was lucky to like work kind of in all the different areas of San Kofa because we do so many different things. And so, like, being in the truck with Hajja and, like, going to people's houses and installing garden beds and seeing them get really excited about, like, the plants that we're putting in and, like, asking all these questions about, like, well, when do I water it? Like, they just really want to know, like, how to do this themselves. And that's, you know, that is the whole reason why we're here is, like, to make sure that people are taking this knowledge and being able to do it for themselves. being in the kitchen with chef over the summer and like teaching the kids how to make casidias with like peppers and different things from the farm that they probably would never eat otherwise but cassidia is familiar to them so they're like let me see how this is

and they're actually like trying the foods when she cooks them and comes up with recipes that is like familiar to them and seeing that shift from the first day when they're here and they're like I don't know what any of this is I never been on the farm before and then they're like I want to eat everything here and try it at least one. once. Yeah, that's a really good testimony also because like what Layla just said, like they all are so nervous about eating and they have like a really messed up relationship to food. And the cool thing about what we do is we do rotations of youth learning how to cook. And I always say if the food is nasty, it's because of you. And I say that because like you got to have good energy and you got to

like season in layers and like if you don't have good energy while you're making this food then it's not going to be good and then you'll be upset that people are throwing your food away but we don't waste food here so yes like what leila says always really cool but like at the last meal that we all cook everybody's just like eating it and we had a couple of guest chefs that came and just like killed it i feel like we're going to have to do a season two of this podcast because the summertime right now we're like real chill but the summertime of like what we do is like extraordinary we really go hard and we make sure that our young people know any and everything about what we do here so that's another podcast that should be sancofa and its youth well yeah i can definitely relate to what miss lilla and chef both said with the food thing because when i came here four and a half years ago i did not like onions. I didn't like peppers. Didn't like, I was, I'm far with vegetables. I just didn't like onions and peppers at all and I just wouldn't eat it. And then I started to like eat what

chef would cook and I was like, this is actually really good. Like, it's not that bad. And then after eating it over and over again, I'm like, all right, I think I like onions and peppers. They're not, it's not as bad as I thought they were. With Ms. Layla and riding in the car with Ms. Haja, I'm basically doing that now, so I go offsite with Ms. Haja and install the garden beds. And I feel like that's where I've seen the connections with our work in the community because I've helped to install maybe like five or six of the beds or however many. And they really do ask a lot of questions. And most of the time, I can't answer them, but I'm happy Ms. Haja's there because she's been doing it for way longer than me. So she's always like,

oh you know like you know this is tuscan kale this dyno kale things like that really explaining everything and then even for just me like i installed my first garden bed at my own house like a couple months ago i actually did have my neighbors ask me like oh what's you growing in there and they're like trying to like talk to me and i'm like that's my first time ever talking to most of them so i was like oh you know it's just this and then they're like oh okay that's cool and i was like you know you want to bed like you're in southwest and they're like maybe and I'm like yeah it was nice so now you're the big dog yeah for me impactful the students that come through the program when they present their presentations of learning at the end of their semester and at the senior year

and when they're talking very like emotionally and articulately about how they're the relationship to the land has grown how it's impacted their life I feel like and then to see them come back as staff like you know like why you know what else are we what else are we doing in our in our world than to build community like this because we plant seeds educational seeds too and sometimes they grow and we know that sometimes they won't come up for many years but we just we pray that the lessons that they learn will will sprout with them and germany within them. And sometimes you see that more and other. Some people get it right away and so people need time. I grew up Methodist in a church. And then during college, as with

most liberal arts universities, just started questioning. And it got very, like, very heady. And I, like, lost the deep spiritual work that I had been doing, I think in an effort to, like, reconcile some cerebral work around it. And then to kind of come back to that work. on the land and then I think it really hit home for me Chris this is a it was a very powerful moment probably one of the most powerful moments in the last 15 years working together is Chris had been trying to grow Hill Rice from true love and that that whole story and it hadn't been coming up we didn't know why we had been research like Chris had done some research on how to do it and the mounding methods and everything and then we he asked me to come back and

and we we laid our hands on the soil together and we prayed together and talked to the seed and chris was you know and maybe chris you can come in here too but just told the seed like it's okay to come up now that like i'm not here as a white person in an oppressive role and like it is safe to come up right and in that prayer to that seed was just just having our you know someone who had grown We had grown the program together, who's a brother of mine, to just pray over that. And then, yeah, that whole moment was very, very powerful for many different reasons to then see the seed come up next to the following year. And then we've had year after year row, like rows of rice,

and seeing that being taken care of the people on the farm was really powerful. Yeah. I think they came up that year. I think the seed came up that year. It was, it was, I actually told the seed that Ty is not my master, Ty didn't own me. And that was significant because we learned later on. I don't know about all the details of this story or where one could find it.

Allegedly, that rice has a story here on the land of Bartram's Garden. That rice, you know, basically came from people who are now considered Gulloggi. people who did who were you know who decided to fight for Great Britain and Great Britain rewarded those black people who were still slaves with an island or a few islands that we now call Trinidad and Tobago and let them settle there and so that rice was grown and they allegedly took that rice from here and grew it out there and so we got the seed from Trinidad right so we'd had this sort of cross-Atlantic story and so that's the background for that particular rice but I recall a story that is connection to John Bartram's land is

is that Thomas Jefferson and John Bartram knew each other, is the story that I've heard before. And that Tom Jefferson was working on trying to crossbreed some rice varieties that could grow upland. That is, it didn't have to be flooded, right? Because, you know, a lot of Asian rice has to be flooded. You know, this rice is a dry or hill rice. And so part of that was that a lot of the, you know, his enslaved workers were dying, of course, from, you know, diseases that are associated with working in swamps and working in water all the time.

So apparently the story is that he corresponded with John Bartram, who also, of course, was a plant scientist of sorts and collector of these different varieties. And so that was during the time of slavery. and that was the connection that that rice had to this land, right, that through correspondences with John and John Bartram and Tom Jefferson, that they were working on trying to crossbreed, right? Again, which was in a way to promotion of an extension of slavery, right? And so I think that part of that story was that we had to tell that rice that it's okay to come out now. Yeah, that you would not be supporting my enslavement,

particularly because that rice had traveled all the way to Trinidad and had been free and have been grown by freed people, you know. When we do this work in this country, in this community, multiracially, the only way it works is if there's a spiritual foundation. Because the trauma, the, like everything we have, the only way is to connect. We cannot solve these things as human beings alone, right? and that's come up again and again and even when you're in relationship with someone working together for 15 years and you're on the land like so many things are going to come up there's going to be

times where you think that there's challenges you can't get over and that's you know we turn to the spirit then and we also turn the spirit when things are good we believe that you know that God through our ancestors have guided everyone here who is here. It's not a mistake, the people who's not an accident. It's not just because they applied or they saw something, that there was a real need for this in the lives of individuals and the families that they represent and of the people's whose hearts and minds that they'll continue to touch as a result of their experience here.

So I just want to give gratitude to the Almighty. Give gratitude to our ancestors who we believe are standing. standing and constant watch and prayer for us and with us pushing us on yeah and I and I just would encourage I just would I guess I just would say it is it's okay it's more than okay to go back and find what you lost it's not an insignificant thing it's not a thing that that doesn't matter because we're here now I think that that is a lot of the story of the United States project and I don't think it's done us very well We don't live in the past, but we live where we are in the present with our roots in where we've come from.

So I just would give that gift to everybody who's listening to know that it is more than okay to go back and bring forward what you left behind. Thank you so much to all the farmers, all of you. at Sancofoot Community Farm at Bartram's Garden and thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seas and their people with your loved ones. Please share this episode with someone you love

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and our collective future. God bless you. Yay. Yay. You're a great podcast voices. I'm keeping that on.