From Rubble to Harvest

In 2014, volunteers with the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative gathered on a stretch of abandoned lots in Detroit's North End. The properties were littered with broken concrete, rusted metal, and sun-bleached debris — urban bones baking under a July sky. Neighbors had stopped believing anything could grow there. The soil itself seemed cursed. They came with shovels, not bulldozers. They cleared rubble by hand, amended poisoned ground, and pressed seeds into earth everyone else had written off.…