Lucie Monk Carter
A garden party at Matthew Mullenix's Riverbend home had a highly local source of ingredients: the neighbors.
The neighbors bring squash. They bring jalapeño and mint. It’s early June in Baton Rouge … they bring ice too. At half past five on a Friday evening, the makings of a garden party are accumulating on Matthew Mullenix’s patio. With few exceptions, these provisions have their roots, literally, in the surrounding Riverbend neighborhood.
Riverbend unfurls from the intersection of Brightside and River roads—the sort of fertile tract dreamt of by wandering pioneers and mob-rushed by today’s potential homeowners. It’s land to dig into, evidenced by the many hobby gardens kept by well-to-do residents. A single road takes a driver in and out of the subdivision. “You can’t get from one place to another through Riverbend,” said Mullenix, a communications professional, of his neighborhood’s low-by-design traffic. “You have to be going there.”
A year ago, Mullenix took a look around the neighborhood where he’d resided for almost fifteen years. Cheerful and green, his neighbors’ gardens waved high over their wooden fences. His neighbors did not. No kooks hoarding kids’ baseballs, mind you, just people going about their business.
That didn’t feel like a neighborhood to Mullenix, an admirer of Wendell Berry. “Wendell Berry’s an eighty-year-old Kentucky farmer and writer,” he explained. “He writes fiction and nonfiction, essays and poetry, all about the same theme: good use of the land and community and fellowship. Self-sufficiency. It’s a nexus of all those things. Which is really just to say it’s the kind of world he grew up in.”
Certainly, no apps were available in Wendell Berry’s Depression-era childhood, yet that’s the most promising avenue Mullenix has found for re-forging his neighborhood in Wendell’s vision and launching the Riverbend Growers. “You have to reach people where they are,” he said. Online, through channels like the neighborhood-oriented Nextdoor and social media, Mullenix shepherded Riverbend residents toward his new platform with an enticing message: Did they want some free, fresh food?
“[Berry’s] philosophy is basically that we’ve been divided and conquered by an economy that has benefited from splitting us up and making us all go to WalMart when we could just share,” said Mullenix, “and all drive when we could walk. Making us all do things that we have to pay for. So what would you do if you had a resource—say a community of five hundred homes with all the things that people have—how would you share and do it in a practical way?”
Lucie Monk Carter
A Riverbend resident of fifteen years, Matthew Mullenix still felt he didn't know his neighbors.
Mullenix found an Australian-made web app called RipeNear.Me, which reveals to users the plethora of produce nearby. Simply type in a location and scan the resulting map for the whereabouts of blackberries, figs, tangelos, and other goods ready for pickup. Mullenix has encouraged his neighbors with abundant gardens to share their stock through the app. “[Backyard gardens] are not really principally about eating, at least at the hobby level,” said Mullenix. “The food production and the waste is a byproduct of the mere fact of doing it—and taking pictures of it. But what if you were to treat it like actual food? You would want to make sure people ate it.”
So what would you do if you had a resource—say a community of five hundred homes with all the things that people have—how would you share and do it in a practical way?”
“I noticed one day [on Nextdoor] that Matt had said he was interested in a growers exchange,” said Cary Tuminello, a retired IT professional. “He asked if anyone in the neighborhood had a vegetable garden. Well, I have a huge vegetable garden.”
For Tuminello, the new outlet is a relief. “I just like growing stuff and giving it away. I’m more of a provider. The really hot peppers, I can’t eat. But I love growing them.”
Mullenix still ferries the gap between “strangers with candy” and “neighbors with leftovers.” “A website is not enough,” he said. “Knowing that the house a street over has lettuce is not enough. They have to go and meet them, and people are shy about that. So I said, ‘I’m gonna go. You tell me what you want. I’ll go to the neighbor and get it, then I’ll bring it to you.’ Then everyone’s hands pop up. I want that! I want that!”
With his current devotees, Mullenix is planning face-to-face events to encourage the rest. The June mixer on his patio arrived a year after he first began rallying Riverbend. Some attendees, like Tuminello, contributed their plump summer produce to the spread; distributor (and Riverbend resident) Walter Schmidt’s Kicking Mule Rum kept the guests quenched in mojitos. At the grill stood Chef Suzanne Duplantis, an outsider in neighborhood terms but a welcome presence as she worked the donated foodstuffs into lessons on limiting food waste. (Most triumphantly, she stuffed one gardener’s unacknowledged root beer plant with shrimp provided by commercial fisherman—and yes, Riverbend resident—Captain George Barisich.)
Mullenix believes his mission in Riverbend could work in any neighborhood with enough backyard gardens and surplus, even if some houses don’t produce. “You participate by coming over and taking goods. That’s what you do. If I didn’t have you, I wouldn’t be growing, and the whole thing would fall apart.”
For more than a few arrivals, the party proposed a Riverbend they had not yet seen. Did you know we lived here? said the look of astonishment flitting from face to face. Making small talk in the corner, Tuminello (who hopes to host the next mixer in autumn) and another guest realized their homes were two doors apart. A yard between is not quite common ground … but in Mullenix’s Riverbend, it’s close.
Find produce in your area at RipeNear.Me.
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