By Victor Simoes
While thermometers declared Seattle’s warmest day of 2023 so far, Black Star Farmers (BSF), a collective seeking to connect and organize volunteers, mutual-aid, and grassroots groups in Seattle, gathered to guerrilla garden and share strategies forward.
During the monthly community stewarding promoted by BSF every second Sunday of the month in Cal Anderson Park, volunteers learn about the political context of the collective and its activities. They discuss the concept of solidarity and how other grassroots groups are implementing this in Seattle.
BSF is a small collective of protestors who came together during the George Floyd uprisings in May 2020, where they started their first urban guerrilla garden in Cal Anderson Park. Over the last two and a half years, the group has continued stewarding that space and three other garden sites, at MLK FAME Community Center in the Madison Valley community, UW Arboretum, and Che Fico Greenhouse in the Mount Baker Neighborhood.
Guerrilla gardening is an occupation activism where gardeners plant flowers, food, and crops in neglected public or private spaces without legal rights to do so.
Guerrilla gardening is an occupation activism where gardeners plant flowers, food, and crops in neglected public or private spaces without legal rights to do so. Guerrilla gardeners’ motivations vary and often overlap. Many aim to improve the quality of life of a neighborhood, and others plant seeds as an act of protest against land-use practices and policies. BSF emphasizes guerrilla gardening as a strategy to achieve radical reclamation of land and food sovereignty for all peoples.
Despite opposition from the city government because of the political nature of the activity, BSF emphasizes community support with watering and stewarding was crucial to keep the garden running.
At the start of that Sunday’s program, a member of BSF, Derrick McDonald, explained that the group is trying to bring back native plants to their guerrilla garden at Cal Anderson Park and, by doing so, decolonize the practice by implementing other gardening styles into the space.
“English and American gardening philosophy failed to honor the place for its geographic identity,” Mcdonald said. “These traditions reflect the idea that humans are distinct from nature.”
Mcdonald explained that American garden design is very nationalistic and often incorporates sports to exercise that nationalism. Country officials implemented mythologies and values through statues and monuments in public spaces to portray what the government wants to espouse and strengthen. These American imperialist values are imbued and communicated through these public spaces and function to teach the community about themselves.
“The problem is that we don’t want to be imperialists; we don’t like the fascist order,” Mcdonald said. “We don’t want any of the values the state imposes through these shared spaces. That is why we created this protest garden.”
The programming continued with work parties. Half of the volunteers weeded, and removed unwanted plants from the garden to give space for the other plants to grow. The other group worked on creating seed bombs, an ancestral Japanese technique that promotes the cultivation of plants by throwing balls composed of clay, fertilizers and seeds. The crops that grow in the garden in the occupation gardens are often donated to partner organizations in the Seattle area.
After a community lunch offered by BSF, community volunteers learned about two solidarity movements in Seattle. Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol) is a group that organizes direct and peaceful confrontations in solidarity with workers who suffer from unjust treatment by their employers and landlords. The other, Stop the Sweeps, is a network that mobilizes to challenge state actions against people experiencing homelessness. Their work comes at a crucial time when the City of Seattle ramps up its sweeps, conducting 943 sweeps in 2022 alone.
The crops that grow in the garden in the occupation gardens are often donated to partner organizations in the Seattle area.
The partnerships with community organizations in the Second Sunday project are part of a more significant effort to connect and organize community members while hosting the monthly community stewarding events every second Sunday of 2023 from April until November.
“We aim to deepen our relationship with our organizations and expose each other’s work to a broader community of supporters,” said Stephanie Webb, an organizer with BSF. “Ultimately, we want to facilitate deeper involvement for our community in the imperative job of sharpening knowledge and getting organized.”
After a share back of the day with different perspectives from various volunteers and people passing by the garden and joining the activities spontaneously, the program finished with the community coming together to pay a special homage to the volunteer mothers in celebration of Mother’s Day.
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