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Terrebonne Parish is known as “Good Earth” but some residents plan to make good on the name even more.
A fledgling non-profit organization called Sowing Seeds has teamed up with the MacDonnell Children’s Home to lay groundwork for a community garden, aiming to bring fresh produce at an affordable price to Houma residents, while also teaching gardening techniques to those interested.
Sowing Seeds board member Jonathan Foret said he doesn’t know when the project will begin as it remains in the early planning stages, however he expects the garden to be “rocking and rolling” in three years.
“Gardening makes me happy because it’s something that I learned from my grandparents. They had [gardens] on both sides of my family. My grandparents had huge gardens because back in the day that was important for your livelihood when you had a bunch of kids to feed,” Foret said. “We relied on the vegetates that we grew in gardens and the shrimp and fish in the bayous and the lakes. So it makes me happy to be a part of an organization that is also going to work to teach people how to continue some of those traditions that we’ve always done. I think it’s fun to be able to pass some of those things on to folks that may not have had the opportunity to have had someone teach them that.”
The plan, according to Foret, is for the garden to be planted on the property of the MacDonnell Children’s Home in east Houma near the banks of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The MacDonnell Home, operated by a non-profit organization, MacDonnell Children’s Services, houses children who for various circumstances are in need of a “safe, loving and nurturing environment.”
“It’s beautiful out there. It’s going to be nice once it’s all plowed and growing,” said Foret, who is also on the MacDonnell board of directors.
Children living at the MacDonnell home will be able to partake of the produce, and the organization’s hope they, along with other community members, will take an interest in learning about gardening.
“I think it’s going to respond to the community needs so if people live in an apartment or they live in a house that doesn’t have a large yard I’d like to see this place be a place where they can come grow a row of carrots or pick okra one day or participate in a community environment where people can come in and participate but they can leave with some of the produce,” Foret explained. “There will also be educational programs that say this is how you kill slugs without using pesticides or these are different things that you can do to grow healthy vegetables in composting.”
Matthew Greathouse, a chef at the White Bowl Vietnamese restaurant on Enterprise Drive, is another founding member of the operation. He has his own mini-farm outside of his house near Grand Caillou Road, and is looking forward to adding his expertise to the project.
“It’s very exciting for me,” Greathouse said. “It’s an ideal with the way mainstream American agriculture is. Everything should be grown in a local situation, not major companies growing all the produce that Americans can eat and the worst possi-
ble produce. Raising food that contains nutrition.”
The clay soil at the garden site, Greathouse said, is not ideal for growing the peppers, lettuce, kale and other crops the group envisions. All the work, he and others involved with the project maintain, will be well worth the effort.
“We are going to try to be self-sufficient, composting on site,” Greathouse said.
Sowing Seeds is still in the process of acquiring 501c3 non-profit status from the Internal Revenue Service. It has only held a few meetings, and encourages interested members of the public to help shape the organization’s goals. Visit facebook.com/houmagarden for more information.
“We all have ideas for what we think it’s going to look like,” Foret said. “But it could morph into something where the community says well we’d like this better.”
The garden will include free-growing vegetables in the outdoors, planted in rows, as well as some greenhouses. And there will be another, non-vegetable component., for yielding eggs and fertilizer.
“I want chickens,” Foret said.
‘Gardening makes me happy because it’s something that I learned from my grandparents… my grandparents had huge gardens. Back in the day that was important for your livelihood when you had a bunch of kids to feed.’
Jonathan Foret
Matt Greathouse, Dr. Amy Hebert and Jonathan Foret, founding members of the Sowing Seeds project on the grounds of the MacDonnell Children’s Home in Houma, at the site they will turn into a community garden.
