Rilka: What is your favorite home-cooked meal?

Kofi: Favorite home cooked meal is saltfish and bakes. My mom would cook that a lot in the morning, and it would smell amazing when you woke up. You’d smell that on the stove— and I can eat a fair amount of bakes, so I was always happy about that.

Rilka: What’s bakes?

Kofi: Bakes is a dough that you throw onto some hot oil and fry up. Almost like our version of biscuits in the Caribbean, my family is from Dominica.

Rilka: And salt fish is just salty fish?

Kofi: Exactly, it’s like salty fish, like cod fish. We do it with onions and peppers and some seasoning.

Rilka: In Haiti there is a similar dish. My family is Haitian.

Kofi: Oh ok, sak kap fet? [laughs]

Rilka: [laughs] sak kap fet! I feel like a lot of Caribbean food overlaps.

Kofi: Yeah! We’re island people, so we’re eating fresh fish and veggies, and all of that.

Rilka: Talk about what brought you to gardening.

Kofi: What brought me here was people for sure. It’s always been about people [Kofi talking to Ms. Francis] Hey! Good morning, Ms. Francis!

Kofi: Ok, so what brought me into gardening.

Rilka: You said “the people” and she came right on cue [laughs].

Kofi: [laughs] I pay her to show up at opportune times.

Rilka: [laughs]

Kofi: I was living on Greene Avenue and I was throwing this comedy show in my apartment, and I needed some chairs, and there is a garden across the street called The People’s Garden. There  I offered to help out around the garden in return. From there he told me that they were trying to build a new dance floor, and I said that I’ve got some experience with that. I ended up getting a truck to pick up lumber for the new dance floor. And from there, I got to witness how many people in the community had a connection with the garden. That project took a couple of weeks, but throughout that time, I made some good friends. So, I started to come back more and more to the garden. Through paying attention, I started to get an idea about what people wanted to see in the garden, what they needed in the community, and started to look at what skills I had that I could use to get some of those things done. Then, I built one raised bed, then that turned into 10, then that turned into 50.

Rilka: When did this garden start — The Good Life Garden?

Kofi: October 2017. I sent an email to the manager of the senior home across the street asking if we could have a meeting so I could come in and clean up this space.

Rilka: Was the space already a garden or just an empty lot?

Kofi: So the history of it is a bit cloudy. From the oral history of people on the block, this was a garden built around the ‘90s. Then there was an agreement between the city and the senior home to take care of the land, but whoever was in the senior home passed away or moved away. So it fell off the city’s radar. As places in our ‘hood become neglected, they can quickly become overrun with trash, drug activity—and then it becomes very dark and very dangerous, very quickly. That’s what was out here for a while. It was the older man from The People’s Garden, an old, loud, Puerto Rican activist, named Hernan Pagan, a real community revolutionary. He told me about this place. I was a little bit incredulous because I was living around the corner and nobody had ever mentioned this place. I never walked by here because this is not really on the way to anywhere.

Rilka: It’s kind of on this weird perpendicular street. It’s tucked away.

Kofi: Yeah, this is a half street. Which is a benefit now because it’s a bit of an oasis. But that was also the problem because no one could see how bad it was becoming. So he [Hernan] sent me over here to check it out. I was amazed by the amount of space. It was covered in trash, bottles, and all types of crap. But physically the space was massive. And I was already on the Board of the Brooklyn-Queens Land Trust as the Head of Operations for 35 gardens, so I’ve seen all kinds of gardens throughout Brooklyn, but I’d never seen one with this kind of infrastructure. The reason for that is because most gardens in Brooklyn are the result of a landlord burning down the place or a place being otherwise demolished, and neighbors, especially back then, usually Black women, would come in and organize a clean up and turn that abandoned lot into a garden.

Rilka: Prior to 2017, you had already been on the Board of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust?

Kofi: Yes, which is a collection of, now, 36 gardens throughout Brooklyn and Queens. They’re all owned by the community. That’s just a good model for communities. They take back some land and form these trusts or collectives to own property.

Rilka: That’s cool. It’s not only gardens. It’s about housing too.

Kofi: Not only gardens, it’s about ownership of land, however you want to use it. And we have the same gardeners from The People’s Garden over here at The Good Life Garden. That was part of the effort in the last couple of years. It was to use these gardens as a bridge for these neighboring streets. It’s Brooklyn, so there are a lot of people who come in and out, a lot of turnover, so there is a lot of tension. People don’t really talk to each other. But with these gardens, it’s a safe, open space. People will come in here and sit down for hours or come to an event and meet each other. These gardens are a way to get people back outside and start becoming a bigger community again.

Rilka: What is your favorite fruit or vegetable and why?

Kofi: Watermelon, because I feel like it’s done a lot to bring people together on this block. I’ve never seen a watermelon grow in Brooklyn, but I figured, hey, we have dirt, we have sun, why not try? We bought some watermelon seeds and built a giant raised bed, and we planted them, and they started to grow.

Rilka: They grew big?

Kofi: They grew really big! [laughs]

Rilka: Woah! [laughs]

Kofi: It started as this personal thing, I wanted to do something that made me happy. But a lot of people were coming in just to see the watermelons. Then when they were getting ready, people on the block were talking to each other, talking about it like “when are they going to be ready? When are they going to be ready?” And then when they were ready, we cut it up and handed out slices up and down the street. It was a real moment of joy. And it’s got a connection to a lot of Black folks in the South. When they come in here, their eyes light up. This brings you back to a place. Fruits, vegetables, seeing things grow, it’s a way to transport people back to a time. I gave this one woman a cantaloupe and it reminded her of her grandmother from South Carolina. We’ve got these memories, these moments of joy, the fruits and veggies are the key to unlocking those.

Rilka: How many watermelons were there?

Kofi: I think we grew about 17.

Rilka: You can feed a lot of people with that.

Kofi: Truly.


Rilka: How does gardening affect the way we think about food?

Kofi: It brings us closer to it. You’re putting your hands in the soil, you’re seeing the fruits of your labor directly. It creates a more direct relationship with food. You also understand how bad the food is that you’ve been eating when you start to garden. When you taste a tomato that you’ve grown for the first time, and you think, “oh it’s supposed to have flavor!”

Rilka: What was it like being on Ellen and how has it changed the garden? If at all.

Kofi: It was cool.

Kofi: One of the producers on the show saw a video of me in the garden, probably on Instagram. We've been very fortunate because people around the world have seen the movement and have shown support. Like Mark Ruffalo and Don Cheadle, they have an organization in California [The Solutions Project] and they shared videos [of the garden] with other people. So, the producer at Ellen shared our story with her.

Rilka: Yeah, of course. 

Kofi: I was already having a good day, I was feeding chickens when he called. So you know, I had my bit of peace and I said whatever happens is good. He's like, yeah, we want to have you out. Can you fly out on Tuesday? And I said I'm going to check my schedule and get back to you and then he was like what? I was just joking, you know. I'll come out there. So I went out there and that was nice. The whole, you know, going backstage, big audience, then talking to her. It was all fun. It was cool for me, but it was really cool for my mom. My mom had a really good time with it.

Rilka: Did she come out or was she watching from home.

Kofi: She was watching. And she told everybody, all of her friends in Dominica.

Kofi: I was in Dominica last February, and one morning, me and my uncle were driving through the mountains. We were trying to get into this private hotel to relax, and we got to the security guard and my uncle was explaining that we wanted to drive around and see the property. The guy is like, no, we can't do that. And my uncle is like, OK. fine. but the security guy was just staring at me and. I was like, uh hi, how are you doing? And He was like,  “Oh! You were on Ellen!” *laughs*

Rilka: *laughs* Local celebrity!

Kofi: Yeah, it was really funny. People were talking about it on this tiny island.

Kofi: And then you asked, how has it changed this place? It has not. Maybe the amount of people who have connected with us. Because I get a lot of emails from different people across the globe that want to start a garden. But other than that, we still do the same things that we've always been doing.

Rilka: What do you think about the term food desert?

Kofi: So I heard it explained pretty well by Soul Fire Farm [an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm in Grafton, NY]. They wanted to rename it from food desert to “food apartheid” because a desert is a naturally occurring thing, but the access and price of food in our communities, those are all decisions made by people. That’s why the term “food apartheid” is more appropriate, we’re not naturally living in the desert. There are people who voted in policies, gave loans out to certain businesses to put certain fast food restaurants around here - it has been decades in the making; erasing all of the small farms around here. We quickly forget the history around here. We’re in Bushwick. We’re in New York. New York used to be a major agricultural player. The word Bushwick, comes from the Dutch word, Boswyck, which means “town in the woods”.

Rilka: I didn't know that.

Kofi: It used to be just trees, horses, cows, and farms all over the place.

Rilka: Yeah, and other parts of Long Island too, right?

Kofi: Yeah! Farms used to be all over. And that's why it's not surprising when you try to grow food here [Brooklyn]. It grows really well because this is a climate where things grow very well. The overdevelopment of apartments and buildings —- they've just wiped out most of the green space and farmlands for higher profits. The food apartheid that we live in is not natural and it's not an accident.

Rilka: How can gardening be a revolutionary act?

Kofi: It’s a revolutionary act for a few reasons. You're bringing joy to your life and joy is revolutionary. You're creating some self-reliance and that is revolutionary. Independence goes against a system that wants you to be dependent upon them.Once you start taking your life into your own hands, your ability to feed yourself, that is a major revolutionary act. Then, if you're gardening, as most gardeners do, in abundance, you grow more than you need and, therefore, share with your neighbors. You're feeding other people and you're building community and, today, that's revolutionary. Spending more time with each other, experiencing more joy, and we're all well-fed, so we have more energy, we're getting more nutrients, so we're all healthier, and we're living longer. That’s the way life is supposed to be.

Rilka: What is your advice to people nervous about getting into gardening?

Kofi: People will say, oh, I have like a brown thumb, and I had all kinds of excuses. If you were trying to pick up playing the piano, you wouldn't get one note wrong and go well, I guess I'm not a piano player,  I'm just going to give this up. So I'd say, just have patience and take it as a learning process. Don't expect to grow this plant successfully the first time. There are people who've been farming for 40 years that are still learning about how to farm.

Rilka: What is it like working with older folks, like in the senior home across the street, and young people? Why is it Important to work with both?

Kofi: We’ve been working with the senior housing facility across the way for a while now, and it's been great to have them. They've been such a major benefit to the garden. It's such a rare home where there are seniors from all over the world—from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, to China, and they all live in the same building. Once we welcomed them into the garden, they started to plant and then we received the opportunity to see how generations of farmers from all around the world tend to land. I also partner with local schools around here workshops. , and to create environmentally based curriculums. They bring a lot of curiosity, a lot of questions, a lot of passion, and a lot of enthusiasm. I had a group of 20 5th graders out here helping me pull weeds. , It took them about half an hour to weed everything. That would’ve taken me 2 days. Then they were like, ok, what's next? I was like, yo y'all are different, because it was like a game for them. When the assignment is to run around outside and use your hands, they enjoy it.

Rilka: Yeah, a lot of schools in the city don't even have outdoor space.

Kofi: Right. A lot of schools don't have any green space, and that was part of the original design of The Good Life Garden. I  designed the garden with the youth in mind to have  an outdoor classroom space for them. And with the seniors in mind, we have taller beds for them.

Rilka: So they don’t have to bend down.

Kofi: Yes, and it’s wheelchair accessible here. When I started cleaning up the garden, there were a lot of people telling me that the seniors wouldn’t want to garden because they’re older.

Rilka: The naysayers. There are always naysayers!

Kofi: Always. Especially when you’re doing something good. The raised beds we built for the seniors  filled up quickly, so I talked to the manager of the senior home because they've got some space around the outside of their building that wasn’t used. I asked if i could come clean that up and build a garden out here. And she was like, yeah, so I built more raised beds around there with some volunteers.

Rilka: I've seen those beds. They’re so nice.

Kofi: And we put up a sign-up sheet and that filled up in one morning with names.I don't know if anybody over there speaks English, but they all talk to me. It’s so funny to watch. It's almost like a game of farming charades —it's all with their hands. They'll bring me over and just  point at things, and then I try to figure out what’s wrong and try to fix it.

Rilka: That’s really sweet.

Kofi: They’re all so adorable. The cutest grandmas and grandpas with all the plants that they’re growing.