….This year, the Just Harvest team had the… honor, responsibility, opportunity, duty, privilege (pick one, they all work) of establishing heritage gardens at Menokin. [If you haven’t already heard it, here’s the elevator pitch: The heritage gardens at Menokin are installed as a community education and awareness-building living exhibit. While the garden will produce food to be donated directly back into the surrounding communities, it’s the how and not the what of the food production that matters. For centuries, the contribution of Black, Indigenous peoples of the world and Natives of Turtle Island [now known as North America] have been at best discounted but more commonly erased altogether. Native and Indigenous science has served as the backbone of sustainable growing practices for millennia. TikTok homestead influencers are not serving up new ideas, they are appropriating old ones. These gardens will demonstrate the ingenious and time-honored planting traditions of the Indigenous and enslaved people of the region and attempt to correct the inaccurate historical narratives currently being pedaled today.

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