919-619-9862
www.bountifulbackyards.com
“Beautiful Gardens Working at Your Grassroots”
Bountiful Backyards is an edible landscaping collective with a radical vision for the future. It starts with the attainable goal of transforming the relationships that people have with food and their communities. From kitchen gardens and composting to neighborhood scale mini-orchards bursting with useful plants, the collective works with all demographics and strives to impart as much learning and knowledge as possible to their growing client base.
“There is simply nothing more satisfying than providing your own fresh fruits and vegetables from the backyard,” said Co-Op member Cynthia Main. “A lot of what we do is set up the infrastructure for a productive landscape. After that, its easy to demystify people and show them how easy it is to expand and maintain it yourself.”
Throughout the growing season, Bountiful Backyards holds open workshops on a variety of topics. Cultivating mushrooms, building worm bins, improving soil fertility, and wild plant walks in the Durham community all provide people with a springboard to positive actions they can take in the home environment and their communities.
“Not only has the capitalism irrevocably failed, its a way of life that is declining and collapsing at an unprecedented rate with the onset of Peak Oil,” said Keith Shaljian, a collective co-founder. “The stakes are too high for this to lead to resigned passivity. Anyone in reasonable shape can grow some of their own food and in turn share those strategies, failures and skills with their friends and neighbors. As a working collective, we try to take the dominant paradigm’s way of doing things and turn it on its head: Some people have more time than money, others have more money than time. We work with everybody to begin achieving liberation through abundance. With radical hope it is quite possible for us to bring about a paradigm shift in our lifetimes.”
