A month ago, I told stories from Florida Theater's stage: stories of family, stories of our backyard farm, stories of where we've been and where we're growing. In the month since then, even as we continue to support others to grow their groceries at home, team Overalls received 95 neighbors & community supports for our Farm (2) Raising, and, together, we built our 2nd "unlimited urban uPick" neighborhood farm. Farm Three is already in the works. It's an exciting moment to be wearing Overalls, so I want to share the backstory with you.
Just below, you'll find the video, or if you'd prefer to read, look just scroll down.
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My name is Nathan Ballentine. Folks know me simply as Man In Overalls.
Last Sunday, I spot Charlotte, our 3-year-old neighbor, outside our kitchen window. She’s headed through the gate to our backyard farm. She stops at the mint, looks back over her shoulder to make sure no one is watching, and snags a piece. Next, she wanders over to pop a few cherry tomatoes. She turns, drops down, grabs something, and then, on a dime, bolts back to find my son, Malcolm on the saucer swing. They lay back together, and she reveals the bell pepper in her hand, which they share back and forth. – Yeah, yeah, I know, I bet your kids won’t eat vegetables either.
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My grandfather was buried in Overalls.
His children placed seed packets in his breast pocket
Before they planted him.
Emphysema earned
Like his calluses,
From a one-mule plow.
I remember my mother,
dropping tears on his cold face,
She tells me “He never wore a suit.”
“Overalls everyday of his life.
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Growing up, my mother changed schools with the seasons. Though they had land, the family traveled as migrant farm workers because the cotton, corn, and peanuts didn’t cover the mortgage.
My mother raised me on stories of wearing cotton sack dresses in Graceville, FL, picking strawberries in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and sectionizing grapefruit down in Bartow. “I grew up poor,” she’d say, “but I never went hungry, because of that garden, that farm.”
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When I was eight, my mother helped me start a garden in the front yard. I grew this bug-eaten lettuce and woody carrots because I planted them in the wrong season, but it didn’t matter, I fell in love with the magic of growing groceries.
The next year I decided I only wanted to grow things I liked to eat, so I planted watermelon and sweet corn. I was going to do the same the next year, but my mom said, “Nathan, why don’t you grow some collard greens.” – Because I don’t like them. “But, Nathan, if you grew them, you’d like them.” No I wouldn’t. “Well, then, Nathan, would you at least grow a row for me?”
So I grew the collards. I planted them, watered them, picked off the worms. When they got big, I harvested and helped my mom chop them up and throw ‘em in the pot.
When she served dinner that night, my mom dished up collards on everyone’s plate, except my own. “Mom, you, you didn’t give me any collards.” Oh, but, Nathan,” she smiled, “you don’t like collards…”
So I ate my words that night.
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I graduated from college in 2008 the last time banks were failing. I didn’t know how to fix the economy, but I did know how to grow food. And, I thought, if things get really crazy, we’ll need a lot more people knowing how to grow their groceries, so I decided I’d hang out my sign.
I knew how to garden, and I was good with numbers, but what was my marketing strategy?
While I was scratching my head, I remember sitting in a long line of traffic and seeing this homeless guy with a sign. I did some quick math. He was reaching 7000 cars a day.
“I could do that,” I thought.
What if I made a sign that said, “Will Garden For Food”?
But how could I improve the overall image? And then it hit me: grand daddy, pitchfork, American Gothic! Overalls, of course! I’ve got this! But…. How will people describe me when they return home or get to the office? “‘Did you see that… ‘man in overalls’ on the side of the road?” Yeah, that’s it!
I made a bunch of big signs: “Grow Your Own Food and Share It,” one with a picture of Rosie the Riveter that said, “We Can Grow Food.” Another that read “Honk for Food Gardens.”
I staked out at the busiest corners – Honk! Honk! and the story caught on. I worked with families, churches, the city’s community garden program, built the demo garden at the Dept of Ag, and co-founded Tallahassee Food Network with a few community elders to foster an emergent food movement across lines of division. Fun times.
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Along the way, I met a group of young people who confided they wanted to start a farm.
So, in the summer of 2012, I was running around town with a couple teenagers gathering supplies for our first garden beds. I was trying to tease out what we should be growing. So, I asked Alexis and Tierra, “What kind of vegetables do y'all eat?” They conferred with one another and concluded, “Nah, we, we don’t really eat vegetables.
O.K.
So that’s where we were starting. We chatted a bit more, and I learned that, for them, greens and vegetables are actually in different categories. “Oh greens?! Yeah, I eat greens. My grandmother…. She’s got the best recipe!”
So, from the very beginning we started cooking with the young people.
We learned real quick the importance of culturally relevant foods. The first week, we cooked greens, which were a hit. The next week, we made pesto. All the kids agreed, “That’s just nasty.” It didn’t matter that it was “healthy” or not if they were just going to throw it away…
So, we came up with a new system. The kids would decide the menu, and then we’d figure out how to make it healthy. Thursday, we’d make a run to the grocery store for a few baseline ingredients, and - Friday - the kids would combine the groceries with as many veggies as possible from the farm to stretch the dollars.
Fast forward a year. One Monday, the young folks left before we decided on a recipe, so when they showed up again Friday and asked, “What are we going to cook?” I said, “I don’t think we can cook today. We didn’t go grocery shopping, so there’s nothing to cook.” They looked at me like I was stupid and said, “Well, we could at least make a salad.” I laughed, “Yeah? I guess so.”
A few young people took the lead and made this incredible salad: lettuce, arugula, chopped kale, green onions, shredded carrots. They even made their signature homemade ranch dressing with fresh dill.
At the end of the work day, everyone went through the line and filled a bowl, full of salad. And I swear, nobody said-a-word (these were hormonal teenagers!) nobody said-a-word for 5 whole minutes because they were gorging on salad. The first break of the silence was this young man, named Delawn. He jumped up and said, “Mmm, that’s some good salad, I gotta get me some more.”
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In 2014, I married a red-headed Jacksonville native, Mary Elizabeth Grant-Dooley who grew up at Fans and Stoves in Five Points. After a potluck wedding weekend in a giant warehouse near Golfair, we took off for 16 months to roam the western world.
We worked a summer in Montana, took a road trip around the country, and did some language learning south of the border. In 2015, we flew to Europe.
We spent 3 weeks in the south of France eating wonderfully rich foods: bread and cheese, dried sausage, plenty of wine made down the street. Delicious. And, what’s more, I felt terrific! I lost weight. I was regular.
Then we went next door to Switzerland. And I ate the exact same thing. And I felt terrible. I was in the bathroom for days, and I thought, “Wait, what just happened!?”
Come to find out, agricultural laws in the US and Switzerland are very similar because they both embrace free trade and minimal agricultural regulation. One thing they’re both doing is using RoundUp or glyphosate as a harvest aid on crops like wheat and sugar cane and oats. When the crop is done growing but before the plant has fully dried out, farmers spray glyphosate to “accelerate desiccation” so they can harvest 2-3 weeks earlier, which does reduce the chances of late season rain or hail damage. So there’s a logic there. But… it means they’re spraying a chemical chelater on our food, binding up the nutrition not to mention inadvertently killing off our intestinal bacteria, which is, arguably, implicated in a $200billion dollar public health lawsuit. If you’re counting, that’s 4x the Big Tobacco settlements. Ever wondered why everyone suddenly got allergic to wheat? Or why Monsanto sold itself off to Beyer, an overseas company? Anyway…
Back in the Atlanta airport, surrounded by our fellow Americans for the first time in months, it struck us how folks were huffing and puffing walking down the corridor. Blotchy, red-faced, swollen, big. I remember people my age struggling down a few stairs to the customs floor. And that’s when I realized: we are frogs in a pot of boiling water. This is not normal. Our cancer rates, diabetes, heart disease, our IBS, allergies, our size… It's not normal. We are lab rats in a food experiment gone wrong.
We need a transformation of the American food system. A this big and multi-faceted demands a million simple solutions.
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So let’s return to this past Sunday afternoon. After Charlotte’s clandestine farm foray, I walk out on my back porch, and I notice my wife on the farm talking to her buddy Hilary from down the street. It’s Sunday afternoon grocery shopping time, so she’s here grabbing some spinach and kale. As I wander out to say hey, Rob and Robin show up to snag some collards. That’s when I notice Kathy with her grown daughter and grandbaby gathering a salad for dinner. Laureen stops in for some callaloo while on a call. Everyone is just grabbing what they need, saying hey, trading recipes, and heading on their way. Nobody is asking permission or “checking out.” A little Kingdom of Heaven moment.
But here’s the crazy thing. Come spend a day on the farm in Springfield, and, right quick, you’ll learn there’s nothing all that special about last Sunday. It’s like this everyday. See, neighbor members pay a monthly fee like Netflix and in exchange they can come pick whatever they want, whenever they please. We call it our unlimited urban uPick.
15 years ago, before my co-workers and I began building a team of farmers in Overalls to grow and support others to grow groceries, I remember a dorm room conversation with friends where we dreamed, “What if we could make healthy food easier to get than junk food?”
I’m cautious to say it, but I think we've found a way to do just that.
So, now we’re asking a new question.
Which is where you come in. See, we’re at a fork in the road. We can maintain the tiny little taste of heaven we’ve cultivated, or we can collect the seeds of wisdom we’ve learned and scatter them at scale. We’re dreaming about a network of neighborhood farms spanning the Deep South.
I’ll be honest: that’s not really something we know how to do. But, some of y’all, here, tonight, know how to grow on that level. Not to mention, if we’re going to start another neighborhood farm or two– or a hundred of them- we’re going to need your help telling - no: writing - the ‘overall story’ as it were.
So let me ask you, where do we grow from here?
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If you're ready to grow your groceries... Please, click here to see our services & book a consultation, so I can assess your site; we'll discuss design, answer your questions, talk #s, and get your project lined up. We offer turn-key raised bed food garden support services. Or, if you've already got a garden, but need a little seasonal support, click here. Then again, since this whole post was actually about Overalls Farm, click here to join our wait list or follow the Overalls Farm story on FB, IG, or TikTok.
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Nathan, Man in Overalls & the rest of team Overalls
904.240.9592
ManInOveralls@Overalls.Life
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