West Side Community Garden Project Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Tom Toliver has seen people with children who are hungry, searching for food in dumpsters in the alleys of Charleston. And he isn’t the only one. At the Union Mission where Toliver has been donating fresh vegetables, the president and CEO Rex Whiteman says hunger is on the rise throughout the state, and in Appalachia.

“Yes, we see people that are hungry, people that have not eaten for several days, and will come in our doors saying, ‘can you help me?’. And that is overwhelming, in a society and in a world of abundance, that we have people that are literally starving to death. With the mines closing down, and many of them closing in recent months, that’s just created a new wave of hunger and new people that are in the pipeline, asking for help,” Whiteman said.

And these new people mean that new food is needed all the time. Healthy food, like the type of produce Toliver has been growing in his garden. And this week, staff at the YMCA were inspired by Toliver’s vision and brought 22 kids from summer camp to help him harvest vegetables and deliver them to the Union Mission.

Before the YMCA youths arrived to help, one of Toliver’s gardens was about to become overwhelmed by harlequin stink bugs.

“We’re drowning the bugs, and we’re harvesting all the beans and the plants that are ready to be harvested,” said 11-year-old Hannah McCune. She was dressed in a brightly painted hanker-chief, green socks, and pink tennis shoes. She was also wearing garden gloves for what is sometimes a dirty job—finding and killing stink bugs.

It’s not a pretty job, but it’s a necessary one because the volunteer gardeners are committed to using no pesticides on the food they grow. It takes a lot of time to pick out the orange and black bugs by hand.

Stephanie Hysmith is the master gardener supervising the volunteers. She’s had experience with harlequin stink bugs and squash bugs, which can devastate vegetable gardens if ignored. “Last year I started with my zucchini going out and looking under the leaves. And I discovered [squash bug] eggs that were underneath the leaves.”

Hysmith is one of the volunteers most involved with Toliver’s gardens this year. On Tuesday, she taught the children from the YMCA summer camp about the various plants that grow throughout the garden.

One of the children asked her, “what do you do to the plants in the winter?”

“Well in the wintertime the plants go dormant. These are called annuals because they bloom once and then they die. You can save the seed from the fruit, and grow the same plant next year,” Hysmith explained.

Excitement erupted nearby when a blue tailed skink emerged from one of the raised beds and dove back beneath the beans.

In one morning, they harvest about 25 pounds of chard, collards, cucumbers, green beans and zucchini, which they deliver to the Union Mission the next day.

There, they learned about the somber realities of hunger in West Virginia.

And Tom Toliver was visibly moved from the response he’s received in the last week. His project has gotten a number of calls from people, wanting to support his community gardens.

“My big thought, my big vision, is to rub out hunger, totally, through community gardening. And that’s my strategy—is to start in Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia, America—encouraging people to live off the land. And you have seen yourself how easy it’s been to grow food,” Toliver said.

The vegetables that the YMCA kids harvested will be served or given away to families in need who come to Union Mission hungry. Some of these people will not have eaten for days.

The first part of this story about Tom Toliver’s West Side Gardens can be found here.

The first of Tom Toliver’s gardens is in what looks like an unlikely place—there’s a lumber mill across the street, a busy road without sidewalks, and the garden itself is nudged in between a pawn shop and a DeWalt tool center. Along 6^th street, a mom and her two kids walk by carrying groceries from the nearby Family Dollar. Toliver also lives down the street. He believes that putting gardens in urban areas, like Charleston’s West Side, helps reduce crime and revitalize the neighborhood.

“When you bring in the good, the bad will eventually creep out because they cannot survive together. That’s another advantage of a community garden,” says Toliver.

For about twenty years, Toliver has been a mentor for children whose parents are in prison. Five years ago, he had one of the children over for dinner, and they were serving green beans as one of their sides.

“So my wife said, ‘you know where this food comes from?’ And they said, ‘Kroger.’ They had no idea or concept how food grew.”

Das Menon and Tom Toliver. Green-beans are growing on the trestle.

That’s what planted the seed in Tom’s mind to create gardens throughout his neighborhood in Charleston’s West Side. Toliver doesn’t sell any of the food he grows— in fact, he gives most of it to neighbors or to nearby shelters. So when Sarah Halstead, with the West Virginia State University Economic Development Center, heard about Toliver’s project, she connected him with volunteers from around Charleston who began helping him this season.

One of those volunteers is Stephanie Hysmith. Hysmith is a Master Gardener, which means participated in a series of workshops offered by West Virginia University Extension Service.

And Das Menon, an industrial designer, was also excited to help Toliver with his gardens when he found out about the project earlier this year.

“I grew up in India. I’m at the later part of my life, and I want to do something good for people. You want to feel like you have done something that will help people, and that will carry on for the next generation,” says Menon.

This year, Menon is putting design skills to work and is helping the group create a gazebo for Toliver’s second garden, just down the street on 6^th and Orchard. This garden is a partnership between the West Side Community Gardens and Sustainable Agriculture Entrepreneurs, also known as SAGE. Here, vegetables are not separated by rectangular beds. This is an organically imagined garden with plots arranged in a kind of swirling, starburst design—with sunflowers and other bee-enticing flowers at the center.

One of the neighbors, Sharon Bills enters the garden, walking her dog up the grassy hill. “We walk the dog up here and come check it out. And we all say that it was so neatly done, the way that it waters itself and everything,” Bills explains, pointing to the sunflowers which are in full bloom.

Toliver says their project would like to eventually allow neighbors like Sharon to have their own garden plots so they will be invested in helping raise food for themselves and for people in need. “My philosophy is: begin to help people to grow their own food, eat healthy, it will cause a healthy community,” Toliver explains.

“Nothing hurts me any more than to go into countries, even in America, and see kids eating out of garbage cans, when it’s so simple to grow food. It’s so simple.”

A follow up story about Tom Toliver’s gardens and a group of 22 YMCA children who recently volunteered to help him bring vegetables to a local shelter, can be found here.

This story from West Virginia Public Radio is featured in The Charleston Gazette. Click here to view the article.

Tag: West Side Community Garden Project

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