Many mornings Pak Suan is in the garden by 7 AM, alone. That’s not long after he finishes the graveyard shift at Rivers Casino, where he works as a custodian. He spends an hour or so harvesting, or watering the plants in either the main hoop house or the smaller one he built himself near the back of the lot. He pieced it together with leftover sheets of opaque plastic and $300 worth of PVC piping, which arcs over his family’s plot.
The farm sits on a city-owned lot just to the west of the river and Ronan Park. It’s difficult to see from Lawrence, because the front quarter acre is occupied by another organization: the Peterson Garden Project, a three-year-old community gardening initiative, inspired by the victory garden movement of World War II, that aims to introduce a very different demographic—local urbanites—to the practice of growing their own food.
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By contrast, the 40-foot-long plots tended by the Burmese and Bhutanese are teeming with growth, spilling over the borders of their beds, climbing makeshift trellises built from disarticulated shipping pallets, box springs, and webs of plastic strapping. Dark, mushroom-compost-enriched soil bulges against the plots’ borders, which are made up of discarded doors, shutters, dresser panels, tree stumps, and pieces of fiberboard. Unsupported tomato plants tangle with cucumbers, squash, and beds of tender greens started from produce purchased from Uptown Vietnamese groceries. One farmer supports opo squash plants with a skeletonized picnic table umbrella, while another grows tatsoi in a blue plastic baby pool. Fat orange pumpkins squat atop rickety wooden cages, while some naturally occurring plants that most Western gardeners yank at first sight are left to flourish among the mustard greens, chard, amaranth, and mizuna, because they’re just as tasty, and even more nutritious.
“That’s because they’re all professionals,” says Linda Seyler, the farm’s manager. Seyler is a Peace Corps vet (Thailand, ’84-’86), with two degrees in agricultural science—but four years ago she wasn’t doing much with them, working in part as a grant writer for the Coalition for Limited English Speaking Elderly (CLESE). Then she saw an announcement for the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Project, a funding program administered though the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. The project aims to help refugees develop sources of income and promote healthy eating by training them in current agricultural practices. Seyler worked up a proposal in cooperation with the Heartland Alliance, and in the process got to know a lot of people in the city’s urban-agriculture scene, including LaManda Joy, founder of the Peterson Garden Project.
“I’ve learned so much from them,” Seyler says, “from watching what they do.”
The family has had its own plot on the Albany Park farm for the last two years. “My parents and my grandparents—they all worked on a farm,” he says. “Anywhere in the country where we lived, the main occupation of the people was farming.” He’s growing a plant he got from a refugee in Kansas City that looks similar to Pak Suan’s kyan ka. He says the family grows enough produce between the spring and fall that they don’t need to shop at a grocery.
He, Seyler, Pokhrel, and others help tend the long, orderly rows of communal crops surrounding the hoop house, separate from the refugees’ family plots, including tomatoes, sweet peppers, eggplants, Genovese basil, squash, and Swiss chard. The Bhutanese call the latter “American saag,” because they’d never seen it before coming here. But they were happy to start growing it and the basil—which they’d never used, either—when they saw the demand for it at their weekly markets, which run every Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning just inside the Sacramento gate.
