On a warm and breezy Georgia spring day, Susan Pavlin walks through Decatur’s Legacy Park, past brick buildings and down a shaded boardwalk.
She opens a creaking gate that reveals a two-acre garden split into more than two dozen plots, known to the community as Decatur’s Kitchen Garden.
“We have about 30 families growing food for themselves, the rest of their families and sometimes their neighbors, depending on how much extra bounty they have out of the garden,” Pavlin said.
She’s the executive director of the Global Growers Network, a nonprofit that helps refugees and immigrants get access to land so they can grow their own food. The Kitchen Garden is one of a few properties the nonprofit has around DeKalb and Rockdale counties.
“What we found when we first started Global Growers is that once people had been here for three months, six months…they started asking a lot of questions,” Pavlin said. “Like, ‘How can I live in a city of five million people and never see food getting grown anywhere?’”
Refugees to the U.S. typically get 90 days of government assistance to resettle, then they are on their own. Gardening is one way they can recreate home here in metro Atlanta, often growing produce that can’t be found in stores.
As Demetro Stephens, a program manager for Global Growers, walks among the plots, he notes that many are at varying stages of growth. Some had been plowed down to overwinter, while others were bursting with bolted plants with seeds spilling out of the flowers.
“We have mustard greens. Here we have some of our long beans,” he said. “We have squash, sweet potatoes and different varieties of peppers.”
“They also grow roselles … different varieties of hot peppers. Really, really hot peppers,” added Leela Basnet, a garden coordinator who walked beside Stephens. “And stinging nettle. That grows really well here.”
Basnet said that families experiment with what plants fit the Georgia growing seasons. Even within the kitchen garden plots, families growing the same crops use different techniques based on how they learned to garden where they’re from.
“Right now, this grower is growing around the perimeter; you can see the green beans. They are putting the branches up for the trellises,” she said, pointing out a garden plot that looks fenced off with tree branches in the area. Bean vines curled around them.
WABE spoke to Global Growers staff to preserve the privacy of gardeners, who were uncomfortable being interviewed in English.
Merry San, another garden coordinator, said having access to gardening can help people feel like they are part of Atlanta.
“A lot of them are refugees, immigrants, that have previous farming experiences back in their country,” she said.
But here, refugees are often resettled into apartments with nowhere to grow plants.. They have faced language barriers and had trouble getting all the equipment they need to grow food.
Sometimes, they need a way to make money as quickly as possible, but they can’t continue their professions because they have to retrain in the U.S.
Growers is able to use their garden plots to help with that, too.
Pavlin said that in the 13 years of the nonprofit, gardeners have sold more than one million dollars of produce at markets. The total value is greater, however, because people are saving money by growing their own food.
“It’s always hard to say because our growers are growing food for their families, for their friends and for the market,” she said.
Pavlin said the most important aspect of the garden is to have a safe and communal space for people to grow food together.
This remains true as the Trump Administration has changed how refugees and immigrants come to Atlanta. The administration stopped allowing already approved refugees to enter the U.S., canceled funding for resettling refugees and canceled contracts with the nonprofits that handled resettlement.
Now, President Trump is only resettling Afrikaaners, descendants of Dutch settlers of South Africa.
But Pavlin says the garden will always be a resource to those who have landed here in Atlanta, even months and years out from resettlement.
“Every time we can get together, and we can share those experiences and tell our stories,” she said. “That continues to create a safe space for all of us.”
