Joyce Moore has always enjoyed gardening and farming. She loves the exercise it provides and that what she is eating was grown with her two hands. Moore chooses to do her gardening in the inner city, which she considers a prime location for growing a wide variety of crops such as tomatoes, garlic, peppers, squash, zucchini and even cherries.
“This is where we live. There’s just so much you can do here. People need to rethink how they work with nature. This is land. The land is supposed to take care of us and we’re supposed to take care of the land,” said Moore, a resident of the Mapleton Fall Creek area. “And historically, farming is part of Black history.”
Moore is using her love, care and concern for the inner city to help others get back to their roots, literally. She, along with her youngest son Justin, formed Urban Patch, an organization that works to promote and develop sustainable neighborhoods.
Urban Patch’s mission is simple – help make the inner city better. They developed the “past forward” approach, which brings the rich legacy of Indianapolis’ urban farming past “to build strong and resilient neighborhoods today and in the future by using holistic models of social, environmental and economic community development.”
They do this with a variety of projects.
One program is the Indy Redbud Project, a community identity and environmental proposal where Urban Patch will begin taking vacant lots in the Mapleton Fall Creek area and planting a grove of native redbud trees. Over time, they plan to partner with other organizations and homeowners to expand the program along the Monon Trial and Fall Creek Parkway.
The Delaware Project rehabbed an abandoned home in the Meridian Park neighborhood. Urban Patch created a video to show people the value of homeownership and how to take care of a home.
The Leslie Allen Urban Apiary produces honey, other bee products and lavender while providing pollinators an open space.
Urban Patch has also helped form various urban gardens that provide education programs that teach people how to take care of their families’ health, improve their community and be better stewards of their urban environment.
Urban Patch has recently partnered with Fall Creek Gardens (FCG) to not only aid in their urban farming efforts, but to create a community project – a mural.
FCG president, Maggie Goeglein wanted to do a mural along the wall of the Unleavened Bread Café, which is located next to FCG on 30th and Central Avenue.
Urban Patch raised money for the project to come to fruition and FCG commissioned John Moore to come up with a mural design. He created several ideas and the community voted on what they wanted in their neighborhood. Collectively they decided on a sunflower mural.
“In nature, sunflowers purify the land so I choose this theme to represent what’s going on in the area with all the housing refurbishments and other things going on,” said Moore, who’s also Joyce’s son.
A local Sherwin-Williams paint dealer donated the exterior paint and graffiti protectant and members of the community, students from University of Indianapolis and students and teachers from Shortridge Magnet High School helped construct the mural.
“It’s been really fun to watch this transform from an eyesore and a magnet for graffiti to something beautiful,” said Goeglein.
FCG will officially celebrate the completion of the mural Sept. 28 at their annual harvest party. Moore said Urban Patch also plans to help FCG with constructing chicken coops and the Stone Soup Kitchen (based on the fable) that will teach people in the inner city about food, nutrition and home economics through events, demonstrations and workshops.
“We would like to be a resource for people who don’t have enough food. If you can stop, help us do some weeding or something, you can take a bag of produce home at the end,” said Goeglein. “It also reinforces how growing produce can be work. There’s value in organic food production.”
Moore knows that urban gardens are growing in popularity, but said the practice has a rich, unknown history in Indianapolis.
After the Civil War and into the early 20th Century, African-Americans migrated north. As numbers increased and due to segregation, Black neighborhoods began to form. These neighborhoods quickly became overcrowded, underserved and disinvested.
This was certainly true for Indianapolis. In response to what was happening in these areas, in the 1940s, Moore’s father-in-law, Albert Allen Moore, found work as the agricultural director for Flanner House and taught other African-Americans how to farm vacant lots within the city and other self-sustainability efforts.
“They had 200 acres in the inner city. They incorporated veterans in the programs because a lot of veterans didn’t have jobs. They canned 1,400 cans of food a day. People from all over the state came to can there,” said Moore. “They taught cooking, sewing and nutrition classes. They had a day care for free. Then they built the Flanner House homes.”
She said unfortunately this problem still exists in Indianapolis. Today, lack of food isn’t due to war or segregation, but lack of resources in communities that are populated primarily by African-Americans.
“We’re just bringing back programs from the ‘40s,” said Moore who is adding modern twists to previous programs. Urban Patch is currently trying to get their newest project, the Oasis Dollar Store Project off the ground.
“Since we don’t have real food stores in inner city neighborhoods anymore, and since we have all these dollar stores, the Oasis Project is hoping to partner with people who grow food and dollar stores to provide fresh items along with the inventory they do have that’s nutritious,” said Joyce Moore.
The urban farmer is happy communities are beginning to understand what she’s already known – urban gardens change communities in more ways than one.
For more information, call (317) 643-0383 or visit UrbanPatch.org.
