For Wilshire Baptist Church
Before Christmas I wrote about my annual tradition of taking George Gagliardi to get a Christmas tree. Well, the other end of that tradition is the post-holiday tree removal. George’s apartment community doesn’t allow on-site tree disposal, so I come after he removes the ornaments and carry the tree away. For some years I took the tree to Flag Pole Hill for recycling until the park department quit doing that. I’ve done the same in Garland and I’ve even just taken it home for our weekly brush collection. This year we did something new and got an education in the process.
LeAnn read that Bonton Farms was accepting Christmas trees for recycling, so that’s where we took George’s tree. We’d heard through missions conversations at Wilshire about the farm and the work they are doing in the Bonton community, but we had no idea the extent of what is happening there until we saw it for ourselves.
To quote from the farm’s web site, “Bonton is a South Dallas community where 85% of the men have been to prison, poverty is rampant and jobs are scarce. Bonton is also a ‘food desert,’ where access to healthy foods is non-existent. Bonton Farms is on a mission to change that.” Exacerbating the food desert situation is the fact that “63% of residents lack personal transportation and the nearest true grocery store is a three-hour round-trip bus ride away.”
Even if you do have personal transportation, you don’t just pass Bonton Farms on your way somewhere else and decide to pull in and check it out. The farm is located off the beaten path on Bexar Street, which dead ends just outside the levees protecting the community from the flood-prone Trinity River. To get there, you have to go find it, and when you do . . . oh my!
After unloading George’s Christmas tree where we saw others piled up, we wandered through the large gardens with wide, beautiful rows of green leafy vegetables and the like. We walked past the barnyard full of big healthy chickens and wide-eyed goats, we peeked in the coffee shop and visited the farmers market where they sell produce from the farm as well as fresh fruit, meats and other food from other providers. We went into the café and ordered a turkey wrap and a fried catfish po’boy, and enjoyed our lunch on a large outdoor patio where the sun was warm and the breeze was gentle. The fragrant remnants of a fire smoldered in a fire box nearby, while across the way, a group of men talked business over lunch. I heard mention of hens and “daily harvest,” so maybe they were considering a similar venture.
The farm is nestled between the levees and a thriving community of attractive arts-and-crafts style apartments and community centers. When we left the farm, we drove through the neighborhood and came upon a group of boys laughing and shouting from the seats of what looked like new Christmas bicycles. One of the boys looked too big for his bike, and the reality is that all of these boys will outgrow those bikes in a few years. Perhaps with a good start in the Bonton community next to the farm, they’ll outgrow the dead-end life that plagues much of the adjacent community.
Visiting Bonton Farms is an eye-opening experience, but so is the drive in and out. Looking at a map, Bonton Farms is about the same distance from downtown Dallas on the south as is Highland Park Village on the north, but while the five miles between Highland Park and downtown is full of glitter and gold, the land between downtown and Bonton Farms is mostly gray and dull. We took a 16-mile, inner-city route back to Garland, and for a third of that we drove through block after block of vacant lots, tumble-down houses, windowless corner markets and liquor stores. New sidewalks and streetscaping on Bexar Street indicate public investment is being made, but there isn’t much in the way of private investment yet. There are a few new townhouses and apartments, but we didn’t see a real full-service grocery store until we got back to Fair Park.
It’s been that way in Bonton and other southside neighborhoods for decades, and the reasons are too complicated to explain in a few sentences. There has been plenty of reporting in the local media in recent months about bank red lining, food deserts and all of that. The good news to share here is that Bonton Farms and other projects are working to bring relief, hope and change to the region.
It will take more than people from the north bringing in their old Christmas trees and then sticking around for lunch to break the pattern of decades of neglect and avoidance. Still, the folks at Bonton Farms are showing that it can be done successfully on a small scale. As it says on a tall post planted out in the garden, “Do you believe in miracles? You should . . . you’re standing on one.”
And what about those Christmas trees that the farm eagerly accepts? The smallest branches become food for the goats, the larger limbs are turned into mulch for the garden or kindling for the fires, and the trunks are carved into walking canes for veterans.