Farming Tips and Tricks

Buying a Vacant Lot in Detroit for $100 and Transforming it into a Community Garden

Griffin Gardens is a neighborhood garden whose current mission is to bring beauty, education, and health to the community in which it resides. Griffin Gardens allows people in the community to hang out in a beautiful outdoor space, to try out various fruits, veggies, and herbs, learn about different flowers and plants

City Farmers is a journey of hope down New York City's meanest streets
where inner-city residents have transformed the rubble and rats of
abandoned land burgeoning vegetable and flower gardens.

"City Farmers is about as inspiring as they come, a cornucopia of
hope, fulfillment and diversity." -- LA Weekly, Paul Malchom

In this collective narrative, the gardeners share stories about life
on both sides of the garden fence; from the struggle to remove drug
dealers and gangs, to the success of the gardens providing food for
the community, as well as empowering and educating neighborhood
children.

As the gardeners tend their rows, they remember childhood days on
farms down South, in Italy or Puerto Rico, while others, who've known
only pavement under their feet, find new directions for their futures.
These gardens are sources of pride in communities that previously had
none.

In their quest t find dignified and graceful solution for the
revitalization of their neighborhoods, New York's urban crusaders are
as triumphant as their seedlings - defying the broken landscape with
an unconquerable spirit and an intrepid will to survive.

Propelled by composer Jack DeJohnette's dynamic jazz score, City
Farmers is an intense investigation of the urban experience.

Producer and Director - Meryl Joseph
Composer - Jack DeJohnette
Director of Photography - Anthony Forma
Originally filmed in 16mm color
Running time is 31 minutes

Screenings: Museum of Natural History - NYC, Sierra Club Film Festival
- NYC, American Cinemateque - LA, National Museum for Women in the
Arts - Washington, D.C., Urban World Film Festival - NYC, Okomedia -
Freiburg, Goteborg Festival - Sweden, Amerika Haus - Berlin,
MetroChannel - NYC.

www.mhjstudio.com

Aired on YouTube by Chefs Consortium - www.chefsconsortium.com with
written permission by Meryl Joseph. Thank you.

A Film by Meryl Joseph. Music by Jack DeJohnette.