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

[Music] i'm marilyn griffin and this is griffin gardens welcome [Music] do um walks and um butterflies thank you you gotta come by sometime i mean i actually walk in thank you so a little bit about me i was born and raised in detroit actually next door to the garden i went to henry ford high school and for undergrad i went to florida a m university also known as famu shout out to my rattlers after graduating i moved back home for a period of time to go to grad school at wayne state after i graduated i moved to new york city in order to pursue my career as an educator i lived in new york city for nine years and i taught for eight years in a middle school in the bronx and recently i relocated back home in august of 2019 to trace my family's genealogy as i started to trace my genealogy and spend more time here i started to realize that i wasn't going back to new york that i belonged home with my family and after that um that's when i started to build the garden oh griffin gardens uh started in actually started on april 20th that's when i broke ground and it kind of just started as a means to do something with this land that my dad purchased i think last year he had been keeping it up cutting the grass you know every week and when i moved back home in august i would just look at the land like it's sitting there it's beautiful what can we do with it and i thought what about a garden and um that was when i decided i'm gonna build a garden on this lot and i don't think i had really any idea how far i wanted to go i just wanted to plant flowers and food um for the community so that's kind of like where it started so this is the first part of the garden i would call it my the first phase of the garden this is where um the vegetables and the fruits and flowers are planted and all around the perimeter you'll see all different kinds of flowers that are either native to michigan or they bring in the beneficial [Music] insects and pollinators that will help with not only the food but just the ecosystem in general so the focus was to bring in bees um butterflies and hummingbirds and i have seen all three um so far in the garden these are wildflowers as you can see you see all these bees around right we already know what's happening well you might not actually know that there's an issue with bees again same thing they're losing their their habitat and so there has been this push to plant wildflowers and it's so easy you just literally you know throw the seeds to some soil cover it up and it's it'll be like this and all these beans are just in and out just living their best life see there are eight beds that i tilled in april and besides this bed which is my experimental bed the rest of these have what they call cover crops and cover crops are planted to mediate the soil to break it up to aerate the soil and actually add nutrients to it because this i don't believe that this land has ever been planted on besides grass and so i'm just giving the land some love this year and next year i'll be growing food and different flowers and all these beds this is my sunflower row and you know besides the fact that sunflowers give you sunflower seeds and they're just beautiful this is all over like seven feet tall at this point uh sunflowers are really good um at extracting um different uh like poisons that are in the soil like lead and other things that i can't think of right now they're really good with with taking it from the soil and purifying it so like if there were some sort of biological chemical that was put into like a area you will see like the government plant sunflowers all around because that's what they naturally do so you don't have to always just abandon the land you just have to figure out what plants can actually help kind of you know clean up the air and clean out the soil so that's what the sunflowers are doing and they're also cute yeah so i'm an educator at heart right that's my career that's kind of like how i see things in general so you know you talk about building up a community it starts with with the children you know the adults kind of already are stuck in their ways and they already know what they how they want to move in this world but um i really want to be able to have this as a space for kids too even just looking at like next year i want to start raising monarch butterflies and i've seen the process and i think it would be amazing to have a bunch of kids here kind of seen that process too because they're naturally inquisitive but if they're not exposed to different ideas and understanding how important nature is then they won't be able to get into it right it's like expose them to it and they'll be into it you know just even looking around this area it's because these homes were demolished all this nature is just growing and it's beautiful and it's not only beautiful but there are so many herbs that are out here that are good for our bodies right but we're not taught that we were never taught that as an adult and they weren't taught that so it'll just always be looked at as oh these are weeds this don't look good but how do we kind of reshape the way the youth see the um you know see plants and they see nature so i'm hoping that next year i can bring some kids in for classes or even have them intern with me so i know a lot of like high school seniors they need um community service hours like even having them have certain plots where they grow food and they learn and then you know once you get them that's it in the city of detroit currently there are over 20 000 vacant lots that means there is land that is empty that originally housed businesses or homes that were demolished over time and they are just sitting um and there is a program in the city called detroit land bank association where they have a program that if you live adjacent if you own a home that is adjacent to a vacant lot then you can purchase that lot for drone roll please 100 yes i said it 100 you can buy a plot of land um and you can own it it can be a part of your your family's legacy your wealth um and you can plant things like a garden on it if you will um so my dad um he acquired this lots of the program and we're hoping going forward that we can acquire more of these lots because it's just land here that i can over time add to the garden griffin gardens at this point is constantly evolving when i first began the garden it was just build a garden that would bring beauty to the community and that's still in the mission but it has grown to the point where i want to bring health and awareness and education um to this neighborhood and the community abroad i would say one of the first things i've done is to bring in a yoga instructor that does yoga classes every saturday so not only you know having vegetables and and herbs that will educate the community um on what kind of foods they can eat but also looking at alternative ways to exercise because we've all been kind of accustomed to the gym or jogging or walking but what are some i guess non-traditional um exercises and that's not traditional when it comes to our community because i feel like we don't see that often black folks doing yoga and if we do it's kind of like in like an indoor space bringing it outside so that when we people walk past they can see what's going on so i would say again the mission is constantly evolving um i can i can see so much in the future as far as what i want this to look like but right now it's just a space in a community where people can come they can relax they can learn about vegetables they can get some vegetables they can learn about fruits they can get some fruits if it's available they can come take some classes it's a lot going on but just stay tuned [Music] [Applause] [Music] i just saw what i believe to be a swell tail butterfly and i've seen butterflies in the garden before but this is the biggest butterfly i've ever seen so far in my life so it was really beautiful to see and butterflies have such a spiritual meaning behind it so just being able to walk to the garden and see butterflies was a lot for me