STANDING OVER AN open acre of lush greenery, Lord Cashus D gestures toward a garden full of fruit trees, flora, and an array of herbal and medicinal plants.
“This is a sanctuary of the living,” said the Gary resident, who started the green space six years ago. “That’s why we created this.”
Mystical Farms, a botanical enclave in Gary’s Midtown neighborhood, is one of several urban gardens addressing the scarcity of nutritious food for Black communities. Gary’s gardeners have crafted these urban oases that blend beauty, community, and healing. Each garden has a unique flavor but shares a common goal of restoring community and independence through improved food access.
But amid this local surge in community-driven agriculture, a distressing national trend persists. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1 in 5 Black Americans, approximately 9 million people, experienced food insecurity in 2022. This widespread issue is mainly due to “food deserts,” low wages, and racial discrimination. In Lake County, the situation is even more bleak. Here, 27% of Black residents lack access to nutritious food for a healthy life.
Fortunately, Gary’s expansive landscape offers a promising solution.
Spanning 52 square miles — larger than the size of San Francisco and Boston — Gary is ripe with undeveloped land. Residents are transforming trash-strewn parks and vacant lots into spaces that cultivate healthy food, promote Black independence, and strengthen ties with nature and the city’s rich history.
Food desert vs. food apartheid
THE USDA CLASSIFIES Gary as a “food desert,” meaning that a substantial number of residents in the area have low incomes and do not have easy access to a supermarket or large grocery store. However, the term has received pushback from farmers of color here in Gary and beyond, who argue “food apartheid” more accurately describes the deliberate exclusion of Black communities and the systemic denial of access to nutritious food.
“We fight food apartheid, which is so different from a food desert,” said Robin Shannon, who runs Shannon Farms and Homestead with her husband in Gary.
“A desert is a naturally occurring event,” added her husband, Nate Shannon, a third-generation farmer. “That’s not what happens in our community. It’s not a geological shift or change. It’s a decision that a group of people or a company makes not to be a part of your community. They take your dollars, keep you subsistent, and that sounds so very much like apartheid.”
These disparities, combined with a history of Black farm loss, have left Black and Brown people with very little connection to, or say over, the food they eat. In response, Black communities have been reclaiming agency and stewarding their own land to provide opportunities these systems denied them.
The Shannons’ business was established to cater to the community’s lack of healthy food options.
The husband-and-wife duo grow the ingredients for their sweet and spicy relish made from jalapeno peppers, and a variety of collards for their community from their backyard garden. They teach others to grow food for themselves in an effort to reach their long-term goal of “food sovereignty” for Black people.
“We don’t have the mom and pop shop like we used to,” Nate said. “So some of your stores in your communities will have what they can get, what’s left over. So once the big boys come in and get theirs, and then the middle guy comes in and gets theirs, you go from an A grade to a B grade to maybe a C or D grade of food. And your shelf life and nutrition value when you get home is less.”
To combat these challenges, Shannon Farms and Homestead hold community events and workshops and share recipes for their ingredients, showing that anyone can grow anything with a seed – anywhere.
“You can grow in anything,” Robin said.
“You can grow your lettuce, your tomatoes,” Nate added.
“Your cucumbers, and your bell peppers!” Robin chimed in.
“All in a laundry basket. And we show people how to do that.”
Liberation and healing through the land
ON A RECENT Tuesday evening as sunset approaches, Libre Booker stands over raised plant beds at Nichols Park. Nearby, the odor from the steel mill wafts through the air, but Booker barely notices it anymore.
As she prunes the weeds and checks on the burgeoning beds of herbs, collards, spinach, and garlic, she explains how gardening is a family affair.
She comes from generations of farmers who used it as a way to gain liberation and independence since slavery. This legacy inspired her to grow and sell produce through her business, Living Green Garden LLC. The philanthropic arm of Booker’s business, Greenwood Miller Project, is named after her great-grandfather whose father was enslaved, but was able to acquire nearly 90 acres of land in 1906.
Through this relationship with land, generations of the Booker family found security through the rich, fertile soil that grew their food. This bond continued when Booker’s mother migrated from the South to Gary in the 1960s.
“My mother … would tell us that she was actually considered kind of like rich kids because they owned their own land,” Booker said. “They had control over what they grew, how they grew it and were self-sufficient.”
Booker founded Living Green Garden in 2020 to help people connect with their roots, gain autonomy like her family did more than a century ago, and provide “free, healthy food” for everyone.
“People need to be free,” she said. “Freedom is in housing, and being self-sufficient in our food resources, and healing is a part of that. If we have that relationship, and we have a place to stay, can’t nobody touch us. We can survive.”
Back at Mystical Farms on Buchanan Street, farmer Chris “Dr. Nature” Lion tends to an edible urban garden full of mints, chamomiles, sage, and other medicinal-use herbs. Lion, a self-taught herbalist, transformed his life from working in a steel mill, breathing unhealthy fumes and covered in soot, to a greener, cleaner existence through gardening and herbalism.
Lion turns to the hyssop and yarrow, known for their naturopathic remedies for respiratory ailments like asthma, which impacts nearly 40,000 people in Lake County due to poor air quality.
“We just lost a good brother recently because he had an asthma attack and died on his porch,” Lion said, who says his friend died at around the age of 40. “And they said it was more than likely directly related to the air quality.”
The self-funded farm teaches volunteers to use local plants to address community health issues. By using sweat equity, said community liaison Carl “Spoon” Weatherspoon, volunteers can work in the garden and harvest tasty medicinal plants that help remediate soil pollutants.
Cashus D, who co-founded Mystical Farms in 2018, said they started the garden to show young Black people they can grow and be autonomous.
“We’re dying as a race young,” he said. “We’re not eating right, because we don’t know about food and nutrition. So our garden brings awareness. It shows the young people down the street that somebody could do this.”
Reconnection with the past
BLACK PEOPLE SHARE a long history with farming and gardening.
“When enslaved people moved from plantation to plantation, once they were brought here, they took seeds with them,” Robin Shannon told Capital B Gary. “Seeds were braided into hair and sewn into the hem of people’s garments to transport them from plantation to plantation so we could feed ourselves.”
The fight for food access, coined “food justice,” and community gardening movements have echoed throughout Black history, notably the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children program in 1969, which ensured poor children had access to healthy food and pressured governments to improve food access. During the Great Migration, Black farmers, driven out by racial violence and blackballed from farmland by the USDA, revived agricultural traditions through urban gardens. By 1970, 80 percent of Black Americans lived in cities.
Over time, Black people have been disconnected from their relationship with land, Booker said, and this disconnection has led to precious history being erased. While Gary is known as a historic industrial steel town, lesser-known pieces of its story are sprinkled with pockets of nature and community resilience.
Near the intersection of 22nd and Broadway, the Brother’s Keeper men’s homeless shelter features a garden that brings Gary’s history back to life. Volunteers from the Gary Food Council tend to the shelter’s gate garden, which is filled with potatoes, onions, leeks, and fruit trees. Corey Hagelberg, from the Calumet Artist Residency, sees replanting indigenous flora like pawpaw trees as a way to reconnect with Gary’s lost history and revive its ancestral roots to address modern-day problems.
“This space means a lot,” Hagelberg said. “It’s a powerful space.”
Across the street, Hagelberg points to the lot that held the city’s first Black-owned supermarket, believed to be the largest Black-operated grocery business in the country in 1936 — another piece of Gary’s forgotten history. Across from the lot, there once stood the headquarters of Richard Hatcher, the first Black mayor elected in any major U.S. city.
“I think, you know, it’s one of those things where history can really teach us lessons about what paths forward,” Hagelberg said.“That type of organizing is a part of creating community resilience.”
Echoing that sentiment, Booker said community projects like urban gardens can spur proactive change to address other issues.
“By first starting with the land, [I hope] that we come together and we finally make the change that we want to happen in our communities.”
Education for tomorrow
LESS THAN A mile east of Gary City Hall, the former Emerson School, now a hulking vacant building, stands deteriorating from fire and neglect. Across the street, one of the city’s leading agricultural spaces thrives: Faith Farms and Orchard, a part of Faith CDC, a church-affiliated farm born out of Progressive Community Church.
Behind the solar-panel topped church, their gated garden grows large rows of strawberries, mints, and orange marigolds. A greenhouse full of greens, tomatoes, and okra, and an orchard of apples, plums, and Asian pear trees stick out from the background. Farther away, the sounds of ducks, 25 goats, and dozens of chickens can be heard.
Near the farm’s 10 beehive boxes, a large container holds the church’s secret weapon: a hydroponic grow pot. Settled in a tight dark room, the grow pot grows greens, tomatoes, and other vegetables in winding vertical columns without soil.
According to Freida Graves, director of Faith’s Food is Medicine program, it grows 2 acres of food that can be harvested every three weeks to feed the hundreds of families that they serve.
“The reason we need these is because Gary still doesn’t have access to enough fresh food,” Graves said. “You want to get to the point where you’re able to supply schools and restaurants. That increases revenue in the community, that increases jobs, then it comes back to build your community up.”
Faith Farms also offers agricultural teaching classes called the Next Urban Agriculture Generation program. The program teaches agriculture curricula, provides hands-on experience working on urban farms, and pathways for college. It has grown to include 65 students in grades 6-12 from across northwest Indiana.
Hannah Musa, a high school senior in the program, has been working on farms since she was 9 years old. She said the program helped her to learn specialized skills, boost her confidence, and discover her career path to becoming a veterinarian.
“When I first started out at the farm, I was so socially awkward and scared to talk to people,” Musa said. “The farm helped me figure out the career that I want to do, which is a veterinarian, and probably study somewhere in the agricultural field because I fell in love with those animals so much. I just love it so much.”