TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: J.D. Green (JDG)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: October 4, 1999
LOCATION: Houston, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Robin Johnson
REEL: 2035 (continuation of Bob Randall interview)

Please note that videos include roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera background noise, unrelated to the interview content.

0:47:23 – 2035
BR: Well sure. I’d be pleased to, David. We are in the Alabama Gardens here on Alabama Street in Houston’s Third Ward. And I’d like you to meet the coordinator of this garden, J.D. Green.
DT: Good to meet you.
JDG: My pleasure meeting you and welcome to Alabama Garden.
DT: Well thank you. I was wondering if you might be able to tell us a little bit about how this garden got started and when that happened?
0:47:46 – 2035
JDG: Sure. We had my very best friend whose name was Virius Smith(?) and in 1985, all this here was nothing but just Johnson grass. And what he did is he came in and (?) space in here approximately about ten feet long and approximately eight feet wide, planted a few tomatoes, a few mustard greens and—to see how it was going to work out. And it came out real good. And then after it came out so well, what he did then is he went to Texas Southern University(?) and he asked them if we would get the place all cleaned up, can we use it for gardening. And they gave him the okay line. So we came in with a group of people at that particular time, 1985 and ’86, to start cleaning up the area.
DT: And these were people from the neighborhood, your friends or…
0:48:36 – 2035
JDG: All of us are friends. Just friends from the neighborhood right here. We come in the afternoon out here and we’d meet up out here and we’d sit and we’d talk and tell tales and everything. And we became like a family here. And after we started the gardening well then it’s became a garden tale. And we began to talk about gardening and growing. And that’s how we actually got started in 19 and 85. And from ’85 to now, you can see what we came from.
DT: Were any of the people here farmers originally? How did you know what to do?
0:49:07 – 2035
JDG: Well Virius Smith was a country boy just like I am, country boy. And we—we grew up growing vegetables. And what he did he just took his common knowledge sense and began to grow and the rest of us came in and—and—and fulfilled the part that we knew what to do. And that’s how we got started here. And—and why we—how we became a community garden was once we started growing here, then the neighbors began to look over and see the greens, the collard greens, the mustard greens, the okra, the tomatoes and they got interested. And then they came over and wanted to know if they could get a little piece of land and start. And we gave it to them. And that’s how we got started. Then later on—later on Texas Southern came by and they started making some beds for us, more beds. And once they start making more beds then we had more peoples that we invite into the community garden.
DT: How many beds do you have now?
0:50:05 – 2035
JDG: Right now we have 50 beds. What we call beds but they are actually plots, what we really call them, 50 plots. And these plots—let me explain something to you about this here. This wasn’t plots. Before we just had strips from here all the way back just nothing but just land and we had gotten rows. Then in 1996, we were introduced to Dr. (?) and (?). When he came in, they came in with an idea that raised beds, make them into plots. You can get more out of it that way. In other words, we were wasting too much land. This way you won’t waste any land. So what he did was he got together and got a group of peoples from Nation Bank, Texas Southern University, Alabama Garden and we all got over here and over 300 peoples came over here from the Nation Bank. They got in here and worked two days and we got all these beds completed, raised.
DT: Did you need a lot of equipment or is this mostly just hand labor…
0:51:08 – 2035
JDG: Most of this—most of this work here is hand work. You know, we had equipment to come in here like a bobcat, little wheel barrels with dirt and we’d roll them to the beds. But 85% of this is all hand work. People just toted bricks and—and rolling wheel barrels with sand in it. But that’s the beginning of the—the raised bed here in Alabama Garden and, as you can see, how far we have came. You know, we have came a long way from 1985 up until 19 and 99.
DT: Why don’t you show us one of these raised bed gardens and how it works.
0:51:41 – 2035
JDG: Okay. Let me just show you this one right here. You might want—this bed right here is a good example. This bed here is 40 inch—40 feet long and 40 inches wide. And what we did—you see we have a soaker hose on the inside. What we did you have to dig a trench 8 inches from that brick to this area then from this side, 8 inches from here to the center and it’s—we dug a trench all the way down about 5 inches to 6 inches, laid the soaker hose in, you covered it back up and then you attached it to the little valve right here. And with this valve what we can do, we can adjust our water. And we will—if we real dry and want more water we can cut it up and get more water. If—if it’s raining or anything then we can just cut it completely off. That’s where the soaker hose come in and that’s what we love about it and that’s what make it so great here in Alabama garden.
DT: So you can control it and I guess it doesn’t evaporate as much if it’s under…
0:52:42 – 2035
JDG: That—that’s exactly. When you’re using a water hose you evaporate so much water, you know, but with the soaker hose, you’re 5 to 6 inches underground. That’s where you’re not evaporating at all. You—your bed is getting full potential of that water see. So that’s where soaker hose came in to be one of the great things in the future for gardening.
DT: And what sort of things are you growing in this garden?
0:53:05 – 2035
JDG: Well right now we’s growing okra. We have a spring garden. In our spring garden, we had okra, squash, carrots, tomato plants. Now what we’re doing is going into our flower garden so we can’t have a lot of spring stuff and come into fall and then we begin plant stuff like collard greens, mustard greens, peas, carrots, even squash and seem we’re going to have a success like our fall garden did with our spring garden.
DT: I see so you have two growing seasons a year here, fall and the spring?
0:53:41 – 2035
JDG: The fall and the spring. Right. But as you can see the okra, you can see how tall it is…
DT: Sure. Looks like it’s 8 feet tall.
JDG: 8 feet tall okra and it’s still producing and we’re going to leave that okra there and let it live out its life. We going to see how long it takes—we think about November 15th, it probably stop bearing. But we—to make sure we just going to let it play out its own self and then we’ll stop, we’ll pull it up and replant.
DT: Do you plant mostly annuals or do you have any perennials that come back year after year?
0:54:12 – 2035
JDG: Oh what we do about every three, four months, you have to pull out and replant again. You know, you have the spring, fall, you know, and, you know, and what we do we rotate. Like if we plant mustard green right here in this area right now now then when we were to plant fall, we don’t want to plant mustard here. We wants to take this and plant something else.
DT: Why’s that?
0:54:33 – 2035
JDG: That’s to give the soil—what you’re doing is not planting the same thing over and over in your soil and then it takes away from your soil. When you plant a different plant in there then you’re putting more back into the soil. So that’s what we’s doing right now. We going to plant different things that we had from the spring in each bed.
DT: And what do you put in the soil? Do you fertilize or…
0:54:54 – 2035
JDG: Right. We fertilize and Michael Crawford(?) is one of our main fertilizers that we use in here.
DT: What was that…
0:55:00 – 2035
JDG: It’s a fertilizer and it’s organic fertilizer and what it does it—it—it maintain your soil and then the second thing it does it keep the coloring to your plants. When your—when your plants start losing color you can take the Michael Crawford and come in and you can sprinkle in, wet it down real good and within a period of about three days, then you’ll see your color coming back into it again.
DT: Do you put must compost on here or…
0:55:25 – 2035
JDG: We—we’ve just made a compost pile here about oh seven or eight months ago. Some of the gardens down here we’re using compost in. The gardens up here so far we haven’t used compost. All this here is just natural (?) from just the soil itself and the fertilize.
DT: Now I see at the end of each of the gardens there’s a stake with somebody’s name on it. Can you tell me about these and who these people are?
0:55:48 – 2035
JDG: Okay. That’s—that’s the Alabama gardeners. What we did is each person have a plot and as you get a plot then we’ll mark your name on a stake and put it right in the front of your bed and that way as you—person like you here now, if you want to walk down, you can just see all different names on the plot and…
DT: What does this say, Charlie?
JDG: That’s Charles.
DT: And then is this JDG, I think I know who that is.
0:56:11 – 2035
JDG: Yeah that’s JDG there.
DT: That would be yours?
0:56:13 – 2035
JDG: That would be me and that would be me right over there again, JDG. And…
DT: Do you rent these or…
0:56:19 – 2035
JDG: No…
DT: All you have to do is just say that you’ll garden it through the spring or the fall and you can have it?
0:56:24 – 2035
JDG: Right, right. What we do here is we came in and—and all the beds was made, everybody picked how many plots they thought they needed. We was only allowed so many plots because we had to save a lot of beds for the children to work with okay. So what we did is everybody got their beds and their plot and this is theirs as long as they want to keep it. If they decide they get tired of gardening well then they can just go ahead and say well I’m tired, you can give this plot to somebody else. And then we can take and give it to one of the other neighbors across the street, another resident in gardening. But the gardens down here—I’d like to bring this to your attention—we have what we call Shape Center right around the corner. Shape center involved with a lot of kids and last year what he did, he had two groups of kids coming over, one in the morning and one in the evening. And he would bring approximately 28 kids in the morning and in the afternoon he would bring approximately 26 to 25, 26 kids over here. And what they done is they would clean the beds and they had instructor from (?) Harvest and they would teach them how to plant. A lady name is Lola which is one of the best and the greatest in this field of work. And she taught them how—how to plant and…
DT: Tell me about Lola if you don’t mind. What’s she like?
0:56:38 – 2035
JDG: Well Lola’s a great person. You—you can’t beat her and you won’t find too many people like her. She have time and she take patient with you and she explain things to you. She’s dedicated to this type of work and she know this type of work. She don’t guess about it. When most of us are asleep or enjoying ourself she’s somewhere reading up on it. So when she talk, we listen, you know. So what she do is she—the kids from Shape Center when they came over, she taught them how to plant and they had a good success. They planted a lot of carrots and collard greens and mustard greens and then they picked them all one day and took them to the Shape Center and they sold them. Just for them to get a little extra cash to go buy more seeds and things for the next year. So it worked out real well for them, you know.
DT: And are they learning something about farming and gardening and…
0:58:33 – 2035
JDG: They’re learning about gardening. We talking about kids from the age of 8 to 14. When you catch a kid between 8 and 14 years old and they get interested in—in gardening that’s interesting because most kids don’t want to go out. They don’t like to get their hands dirty or their fingers. Little girls don’t want the dirt under their nails. But we have a lot of girls over here from Shape and they didn’t mind it at all. Once they got to planting in the dirt, they began to like it. So…
DT: Can you talk about how these kids changed from the time they first come here and when they’ve been through the program?
0:59:03 – 2035
JDG: When they first came here it was a play thing for them. They came here and they wanted to run up and down the fields and say look, what is this here? What we doing to do here, you know? And they would even get some of the dirt and throw at each others. But Ms. Lola, remember I told you she’s one of the great person but she’s going to be a mean person. So she says, hold it, this is not the way we garden. We don’t go out (?) plan. So she sat them all down and then she explained to them about growing. She said, to grow you have to work. When you work then you will see a productions. So what we going to do, now let’s pull all the grass out of this one bed right here. And when they pulled all the bed out of this one bed then she cultivated. Got a rake and showed them how—how to start and then she gave it to them. Let me see you do it. And they cultivated the bed up and everything. And then she come back. She said, now we going to plant. And she had showed them how to put the little hole in the ground, how to put the seed in, how to cover it up, and then how to wet the bed down. And that was the beginning for the little kids at the Shape Center here at Alabama Community Garden and Planning. And like I said, they had a success behind it, you know.
DT: Does it remind you of when you were young? You said that you grew up in the country?
1:00:10 – 2035
JDG: Yeah. Well it reminds me of myself in some ways but not really. When I was a young boy, I had to do it. We didn’t have a choice. I mean, this was your way of living was growing your own food. Now the kids, they don’t have to do it. Most of them just go in the store and they can buy what they want, you know. But back then, you know, growing food that’s the way we survived, you know.
DT: Where did you grow up?
1:00:33 – 2035
JDG: Yoakum, Texas.
(misc.)
JDG: South of here. Yoakum is south of here.
DT: Okay. What did you grow there when you were growing up?
1:00:42 – 2035
JDG: Same thing we’re growing now. Collard greens, mustard greens. You know, that’s one of our major eatings is collard greens and mustard greens and cucumbers, tomatoes, you know, squash and that’s—it just follow you all through these years. We planted different back then than we do now because we didn’t have plots and things. We just had little piece of ground, you just, you know, you kind of just chopped it up and planted something in there and soaked it and wetted it down and that was it. And when it came up then it wasn’t a pretty bed. It wasn’t square or round. It was just any little piece of land, triangle, any kind of way you can do it because on account of the tree runs. You know, roots in the ground you couldn’t dig so deep so we would just—it never were a pretty bed but it—it produced it for us, you know. So that’s how we came here and we had (?) in mind and we just continue to do it here and—and we love doing it.
DT: Can you talk a little bit about why you enjoy being here?
1:01:34 – 2035
JDG: Well for several reason. The main reason I enjoy being here because I like to see the fruit grow itself. Especially—I like to plant and then watch it grow and then I like to go and pick it because I know exactly what I put in that ground to grow this food and we grow nothing but organic. Okay. The second thing I like about it is it’s enjoyable. I mean, you can come up here, you—you can leave home when—when the wife is fussing you can come up here and get in the garden and you can relax. Start digging around in the garden and—and you get relaxation.
DT: Sure.
JDG: And the third thing I think is the community. Once people start seeing you what you’re doing, they get involved and that’s why we named it Alabama Community Garden because so many of our neighbors, elder ladies and mens came over and got involved. We have peoples right now in this garden, Videll(?) will be 80—bout 86 years old. We have Ms. Walding(?) which is about 68 years old…
End of tape 2035
End of interview with J.D. Green and Bob Randall