Barb Myers started changing her slice of Akron by proposing a win-win deal with the owners of two vacant lots on her street who she said owe about $20,000 each in back taxes.
If the property owners would let her launch community gardens on the unused land, Myers said, the neighborhood could grow its own vegetables and the property owners could avoid hundreds of dollars in accumulating fees and fines the city charges to mow the lots.
The property owners agreed and now, with grants, donations and work, Myers — a onetime master gardener — helps people grow eggplants, cabbage, peppers and more in eight 6-by-8 raised beds on Kling Street that she calls Island Community Gardens.
On Saturday, Myers shared her experience and her gardening expertise as part of the fourth annual Akron Big Love Festival, which aims to show others how they can remake Akron into the community they want it to be.
Bounce Beyond was the theme for this year’s event and posed several questions to festivalgoers, including: What does it mean to be in a postindustrial, post-modern, Midwestern city? And how do we learn to support and heal Akron with what we have?
“Who else out there had a factory dad?” Akron writer and musician JT Buck asked the crowd.
A couple of hands shot up among the middle-aged festivalgoers gathered at The Well, a community development corporation in a former Presbyterian church that hosted the Big Love event this year.
“West Virginia moonlight walk me home,” Buck began, singing a song he wrote for his own factory worker father and a friend’s factory worker dad who had recently died.
Local shops join in
At a small bar located nearby — between towering stained-glass windows left behind by the church — someone ordered a beer brewed by R. Shea Brewery, based in the Merriman Valley. At the back of the sanctuary, someone from locally owned Mustard Seed Market passed out free bananas while a couple posed for a picture in front of a gigantic art piece made of artificial flowers spelling out “Big Love Akron” with letters about 3 feet high.
“I love Ohio and things from Ohio, so this [festival] is great,” said Joyce Williams, 37, a teacher at Shaw Jewish Community Center.
A bonus, she said, was that her students and anyone else from Akron could get there because Akron Metro Regional Transit Authority offered free rides.
Williams had just had a henna tattoo artist draw an intricate swirling design on the back of her hand and forearm while her mom, Gail Caldwell, 61, who lives in North Hill, listened to JR Buck talk about the clock towers that once helped Akron’s rubber workers make it to work on time.
“I think this represents the young and the up-and-coming in Akron,” she said.
Beth Vild, a festival organizer, said Big Love started organically, without much of a plan. But Big Love organizers traveled to Portland, Ore., to learn about City Repair Project, a nonprofit group of activists educating and inspiring people to build a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society.
Now, Vild said, Big Love organizers have a similar strategy. The festival is one day where Akronites can be inspired by many things in one place, something organizers hope “echoes out in the community.”
Free plants and tips
In the lower level of the festival Saturday, gardener Barb Myers helped Kellie Wolke, 27, of Cuyahoga Falls, figure out how to grow spinach.
Many Northeast Ohio gardeners wait until Memorial Day to start planting, when the danger of frost has passed. But Myers showed pictures of her basement, which is already alive with seedlings she sprouted under lights.
Myers provides the plants free to anyone in Akron who uses community gardens, which have grown from about five to at least 35 over the past five years, driven largely by the nonprofit Let’s Grow Akron.
Akron, Myers said, provides free water to help those gardens grow. Once paperwork is submitted, the city installs a spigot on a nearby fire hydrant so community gardeners can keep their plants hydrated.
“It’s a big trend in Akron,” Myers said. “People want to grow.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.