[Baltimore Sun] Filbert Street Garden and goats ‘is where people come to breathe’ in south Baltimore
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It’s a cool, crisp morning at the Filbert Street Garden, and the livestock is feeling its oats. The geese honk, the chickens squawk and the turkeys strut haughtily, unaware that Thanksgiving is nigh. The goats mill about, willy-nilly, 11 cloven-hooved critters jockeying for handouts from passersby, their slitty eyes on the prowl for anything to munch.
A visitor surveys the farmyard setting and emits a long, slow sigh. Here, it seems, one hasn’t a care in the world. Once again, Filbert Street Garden has done its job.
The one-acre haven, in the heart of industrial Curtis Bay, is salve for the soul.
“This is where people come to breathe,” said Charles DeBarber, 40, one of the park’s five coordinators. “They need green spaces to decompress. Here, you get to be around nature in the way it’s supposed to be.”
In October, Filbert Street Garden — home to a cacophonous menagerie of rescued animals, a thriving apiary, a fresh-water pond and 50 community vegetable plots — was dedicated as a “Sacred Place” by Nature Sacred, a national non-profit which helps city neighborhoods turn oft-blighted lots into urban jewels.
“This is all about the sacred connection between humans and nature,” said Alden Stoner, CEO of Nature Sacred, headquartered in Annapolis. “These spaces are designed for contemplation and reflection; they are beacons of hope and healing for people.”
The foundation, created in 1996, has designed more than 130 Sacred Places in 16 states, which vary in size from the woodsy, 10-acre Stillmeadow PeacePark, in southwest Baltimore, to a sliver of a median strip in Washington, D.C. Sixty of the green spaces are located in Baltimore City and Baltimore County.
Filbert Street Garden, in south Baltimore, attracts more than 1,500 visitors a year. Thousands more come at off-hours to feed and mingle with the goats, whose pen is front and center of the enclosed lot. That’s what brought Monica Mewshaw, a neighborhood resident who arrived one recent morning with a bag filled with fruits and vegetables.
“It’s calming, relaxing here,” said Mewshaw, 24, a hotel worker who arrives with her victuals once a week, often before the gated garden opens.
“Incoming, babe,” Mewshaw shouted to the goats, hurling chunks of bananas and green peppers over the chain link fence. Sometimes, she feeds them by hand, through the wire.
“Hey, be nice, don’t eat my finger,” she said, scolding a goat named Maverick. “That one has tried to eat my pants.”
On weekends, like other local parents, Mewshaw brings her children to stroll amid the noisy rabble.
“Once, my 9-year-old daughter picked up a duck bigger than she was,” she said. “The duck didn’t seem to mind.”
Community activists created the garden in 2009 as a food source for residents. Armed with shovels and seeds, they set about growing tomatoes, broccoli and peppers on a lot once littered with trash, bald tires and syringes. People work their plots with a passion; for those without cars, the nearest supermarkets are a 45-minute walk away.
With DeBarber’s arrival, in 2015, came the animals. An avid apiarist, he sought sanctuary for his colony in Filbert Street Garden. He wound up overseeing the entire site and playing steward to a slew of itinerant livestock.
“I’m just a [big-hearted] beekeeper who took in a bunch of rescue animals,” said DeBarber, an Army veteran who served as a linguist and signals intelligence analyst in Iraq.
In 2016, the first chickens arrived — some from the city’s office of animal control, others via poultry swaps. A few were just tossed into the garden from over the fence. All were vetted, named and left to do their thing, along with a rooster named Casanova. Each year, Caramel, Pepperjack, Popcorn and their ilk produce about 3,800 eggs, which are free for the asking.
The poultry fascinate youngsters, DeBarber said:
“Kids here eat chicken several times a week, but to see them live is culture shock.”
Soon after, several ducks waddled in. Goats made an entrance in 2018. One was left tied to the garden fence; two others, Maverick and Elliott, were rescued from Patterson Park, where they’d been abandoned. Four goats have been reared on site, including Ed, whose birth, in 2020, proved a welcome respite for neighbors during the pandemic.
The newborns, mostly Nigerian Dwarf goats, are named after residents who’ve helped care for the garden — though, as DeBarber said, “that’s not the most dignified memorial.”
He has seen, first-hand, the spiritual oomph that the park provides.
“Some years ago, a man and his son would come by,” DeBarber said. “The father had a bad drug issue. He died recently and his son returned to tell us that [his dad] always talked about how special this place was — and that the only good times he had were here.”
DeBarber himself has drawn strength from his surroundings.
“I brought home a lot of anxiety from the [military] service,” he said. “The most peaceful I am is when I crack open my eyes and hear the unison buzz of the honeybees. Some days, if I’m struggling to get out of bed, I realize the animals depend on me — so I get moving and feel better.”
Annually, those bees produce 100 gallons of honey, the sales of which help fund the garden.
As traffic increased at Filbert Street Garden, custodians reached out to Nature Sacred in 2022 for help improving the site. The non-profit hired a landscape architect, tweaked the layout and replaced the rutted, muddy paths with asphalt walkways that are more accessible for wheelchair visitors, tour groups and gardeners toting wheelbarrows.
“The new paths were a game-changer,” DeBarber said. “Nature Sacred helps you realize your vision for a garden and even make it bigger.”
The foundation also put up a new chicken coop and carved out a quiet niche of the garden for meditation. That spot, beneath a sturdy Mulberry tree, boasts a handsome bench and a waterproof journal in which visitors can pen their thoughts, like latter-day Thoreaus. One entry reads:
“Nature is blessed with many gifts given to us by God. Do we ever think why nature simply brings us peace and quiet? Honestly i dont (sic) know what I’m even trying to say I just want to feel all philosophical and stuff.”
The bench and journal mark each of Nature Sacred’s venues, which demand neighborhood involvement and a communal mindset, akin to that of an Amish barn-raising, in the making of a green space. Many in Curtis Bay had a part in Filbert Street Garden, said DeBarber — from fundraising to grant-writing to just plain muscle.
Each project “brings incredible energies and healing to its [locale],” Stoner said. “It’s about unlocking the power within people in the most transformative and joyful way. Communities always had that power; we just help them unleash it.”
Have a news tip or question about this story? Contact editor Tracie Rawson at trawson@baltsun.com.
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