May 2022 | The Neighborhood Planting Project

Earlier this spring, people across the eastern half of the US organized neighborhood planting projects in order to widely distribute and plant food-bearing trees. Their motivations are diverse, and we’ll hear from a range of them in this episode, but these tree-planters are often hoping to build a more verdant, autonomous, resilient, common life in the face of growing climate chaos and the frailty of capitalist supply chains. The Nacogdoches Food Forest, one of the early models for the Neighborhood Planting Project, specifically sought, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to create perennial abundance in order to better welcome refugees over the coming decades. For this episode of Partisan Gardens, we spoke to planting project organizers about their experiments with large scale tree distribution in seven different cities. Some of these projects are brand new, others are on their fifth year, but we’ll be excited to continue reporting on their efforts over the coming years.

If you want tips on starting something like this on your own, please visit neighborhoodplantingproject.org to learn more about the various projects like this across the country and email us to ask follow-up questions about starting your own planting project. We have an article in a recent issue of the online newsletter  Territories, called “Rooted in Community: Lessons from Bloomington’s Neighborhood Planting Project” 

You might remember an episode we previously aired called “Carbondale Spring”. It is a profile of Carbondale, Illinois’ food autonomy projects, and it won an award for Best Radio Documentary from the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists. Recently, our friends at another Bloomington-based podcast, In This Climate, visited Carbondale to talk to them about these initiatives. We want to encourage you to check out their episodes about where the Carbondale Spring is two years later. Please visit https://climatepodcast.indiana.edu and give it a listen.