Perhaps the most important factor influencing African-American gardens in the rural South --- and the hardest to disentangle from other potential factors --- is poverty.  If you were born black in America, you are nearly three times as likely to live in poverty as if you were born white.  Many of the "unique" aspects of African-American gardens are ones I grew up with in my own area, since Appalachia is nearly as poor as the so-called "Black Belt" further south.

Poor people tend to have smaller houses, so it's no surprise that their yards act as an extension of their living space.  Even though most of the families in Westacott's study now have electricity and running water, many continued to use the back porch and/or the area around their well as a center of cooking and washing.  Anyone who has cooked in the South in the summer without air-conditioning can understand why you might want to can, make soap, or even fry up your dinner outside over a fire rather than heating up the whole house.  And if you've been crammed into five hundred square feet with five other human beings, you might choose to shell the peas outside under a shade tree too.

Westacott noted that "piles of temporarily discarded or recently-acquired-for-some-unspecified-use-in-the-future materials are commonplace on most small farms and rural properties."  See, that trash heap by our barn is just a sign of frugal ingenuity!  The author explained that similar piles grace most of the properties he visited, for use in building animal pens and fixing other objects around the farm.  The families he visited even used found art to brighten up their front yards, lining their paths with colored bottles and tacking hubcaps to the fence.

This post is part of our African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South African roots of current African-American gardens Keeping pigs and chickens for self-sufficiency Influences of poverty on African-American gardens African-American gardens are extensive

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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