Episode 13: A Garden in Brooklyn - Malik Saric, Brooklyn Grange
In this week’s podcast episode, you’ll hear from Malik Saric, Horticulture Manager at Brooklyn Grange. We dig into our time growing up in NYC, his amazing garden, and how education and the environment can intersect to build more justice into our food system! You can also, as always, tune in through our Substack or Apple Podcasts. Hope you enjoy!
9 months ago, I visited my old friend, Malik Saric, at his Brooklyn apartment in Bushwick. After escaping death a few times, weaving in and out of cars on my bike down Broadway Ave, I entered through the gate of an old ground floor parking lot and into a beautiful oxymoron.
Over the last two years, Malik has reimagined his empty parking lot into an ecosystem. As you look around to take it in, everything seems out of place but also perfectly meant to be…
Old tables and dressers scatter towards a kitchen sink filled with soil, a new home for Morning glories. A hand-built raised bed, initially filled with mushroom compost, now burgeons with mushrooms bursting through the cracks during Summer. Vegetables like spinach, kale, green beans, peppers, tomatoes, (everything started from seeds indoors or directly in the garden) harmonize with herbs, flowers and more….
Malik glows as he talks about how every piece of this ecosystem has been ‘refurbished or recycled or found on the street’. Someone was throwing out the sink before he turned it into a flower pot, old Nike sneakers are home to hanging flowers, big blue bins ground tropical plants I’ve never seen before.
I remember visiting this space last year - I also remember the pickled peppers he gave me … and the interaction with God that they led to (they were hot peppers). I remember the tomato off the vine and dark green bell pepper that went down a lot easier than the chile. :)
But I’ll mostly remember this day as one of the moments that inspired me on my own sustainability journey. A few months after our visit, I went to volunteer on an organic farm in Chilé for a month and have recently even built a raised bed of my own in Brooklyn. With any luck, some tomatoes will grow from there this Summer (which Malik helped me plant, of course).
City Kids
People don’t expect to be walking through the streets of New York City and see such an explosion of green and color, especially built into someone’s home…
Malik and I both grew up in Manhattan, but we come from different histories… his Mother grew up on a farm, and his maternal grandfather raised horses, ducks, show dogs, and 10,000 chickens… sounds like a good time. His Dad is from Bosnia, and his paternal grandfather was an award-winning beekeeper… they decided to move to the city to raise Malik.
While from different histories, we both agree that as city kids, our relationship with the earth is weird. We grew up on concrete, much like the empty parking lot at Malik’s place. New York is a great city, partly because it has so many beautiful parks, but it’s still easy, especially if you grow up here, to feel distant and disconnected from the natural environment around you.
That’s why I was so inspired by Malik’s re-imagining of the city space around him. It’s not just about the garden looking pretty, either. He believes we can ‘bring food closer to the people who are consuming it, especially in the city…Right now, healthy food is not affordable for everyone. Which is interesting, because growing food is actually very cheap.’ There’s a lot to learn from the example Malik is setting.
Edible Schoolyard
Thinking back on our lives growing up in the city, Malik started to ask himself how we could get more kids, rural and urban, excited about the environment and ecology. He spent two years doing Teach for America in Richmond, CA - building a passion for education.
We all experience formative moments along our self-discovery journeys… one of Malik’s was going to Chez Panisse and learning about Alice Waters’ contribution to the Edible Schoolyard project and the Slow Food Movement.
I had never heard of the Edible Schoolyard Project before, but please go check them out. The foundation of their work is to center education around organic school gardens, transforming learning into a hands-on experience that connects kids with ‘food, nature and each other,’ according to the organization’s mission statement.
This intersection of education and environment is where Malik’s passion has taken root. He believes that Holistic Learning should include movement, especially ‘for kids who are kinesthetic learners. Working in gardens, working with food, using their whole bodies… ties theoretical knowledge into experiential learning and draws applications into their own lives.’
For Malik, ‘The Kids need to eat what they’re working with…’ In his experience, if kids can learn what veges picked straight off the vine taste like, they also learn that growing your own food (and preparing it) can be really fun! Especially when growing food is a community activity - like eating with friends or feeding your family.
Grow Your City
Last week, we heard from Peter Kirketofte, in Fredericia, Denmark, about his ‘Grow Your City’ program. I think Malik’s story is a great follow up - he is quite literally growing the city around us and setting an inspirational example for people like me who wanted to dive into a new relationship with the earth but didn’t know where to start… as Malik and Robin Wall Kimmerer suggest: start a garden!
Growing your city can be a small act of organizing against the larger, and broken, food system. If your own food comes from your backyard or from someone you know close by, this disconnects communities from the larger supply chain owned by huge monopolistic food producers and allows a group to operate outside the typical economic, social and political systems in place.
We can each grow our own impact on our city - and this movement is completely inclusive. For decades, especially in NYC, we’ve experienced that community gardens can be empowering for immigrant communities - allowing them to center their culture in a new place, sharing food and time together in a space that they design.
Whether you’re an individual or a community, from NYC or Bosnia or anywhere in between, take a listen to the interview with Malik and if you’re thinking about building a garden, let us know… Malik and I will also be working this Summer on pulling together on a guide for resources on gardening.
Malik now works with the Brooklyn Grange - the organization that he speaks to in our conversation together - started as a project to refurbish huge industrial rooftops into rooftop gardens. Their goal is to providing high quality food to communities + helping divert rainwater runoff, which can flood sewers and his a huge issue in NYC + offering educational opportunities for local schools.
Please reach out if you’d like to get in touch with Malik!
Recommended Reading:
Barbara Kingsolver -
‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ - year of only eating their own food or food from someone who they knew grew it
Robin Wall Kimmerer -
Looking Forward
Believe it or not, this is Brym’s 13th case study and podcast episode!!! If you’ve missed any or just want to take a look back through the journey, you can find the case studies and podcasts all on our website.
Season 1, which started January 4th, is close to wrapping up to take a break for the most of July and August. We need to wrap our heads around what we’ve learned and take time to give thanks for all the amazing people who have been involved… there are some exciting evolutions developing that I can’t wait to share with everyone.
Please look out for a short note from us next week, giving an update on our progress so far, and then our last Study and podcast of Season 1 will come out on July 7!! Thank you so much again for taking the time to dive in with us… and thank you for your support of this new initiative all year. See you soon!
