Let's Grow Stuff

- Greetings from the garden, and welcome back to Let's Grow Stuff .

My name is Ben, and as you know, we love to learn how to garden on this show.

But one of the joys of gardening is also getting to know the gardeners themselves.

Let's meet Yusuf.

[upbeat electronic music] - I'm a culinary genealogist, finding my roots through my DNA and connecting to my ancestors like that.

Yeah, we can't go back in time, but we can do our best to grow and cook the foods that our ancestors did so that we can taste, y'know, my grandmother's cornbread.

Thanks for coming out, folks, I appreciate it.

It's like finding a lost relative or something coming back after a long time.

[relaxing music] If you think about the isthmus, even though that was built up artificially somewhat, it was one of the most beautiful and sacred spaces.

I like to believe that corn grew here.

Y'know, I know that it grew all in y'know, Madison, so I'm sure it was at the Capitol too.

And I think it's important to reclaim those spaces, whatever square footage we can, and y'know, get some of those plants growing where their home is.

– Woman: It's a community garden.

– Yusuf: We worked with the Capitol police and with Rooted and with the city parks department to get a permit so that we could grow a BIPOC garden up there.

[people chatting] We're growing mainly stuff from the African diaspora that we can grow at 43 degrees north.

Collard greens, okra, cabbage, garden eggs, amaranth, or callaloo as it's called in Jamaica.

And these are like a spicy pepper used by Black caterers in the Philadelphia area for years.

This is the Oneida white.

So there's a Haudenosaunee red corn in here and a Bear Island flint corn.

And then we have one section that we left intentionally to dedicate to Tony Robinson, to George Floyd, to folks that couldn't be there to participate.

And it's important to show, I think, in a demonstration like how, like beautiful symmetry can be broken if all the pieces of the puzzle aren't there.

Y'know, Black and Indigenous communities share a lot of the similar histories of forced migration, having our traditional foods stolen from us, and y'know, and also our foodways stolen from us.

Y'know, and especially, it's really culturally rewarding for me to grow food from my ancestors.

[birds chirping] To remember where we came from is essential to know where we're gonna go, not make the same mistakes.

And it's all of our responsibility to pick up y'know, pick up the bricks and do the work.

[birds chirping] - Announcer: Funding for Let's Grow Stuff is provided by American Transmission Company, Ganshert Nursery & Landscapes, Willy Street Co-op, Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programming, and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.