Common Ground: Growers of Color Talkback
Connecticut Museum of Culture and History
Hartford
October 9, 2025
“Is farming hard?”
I was the first to ask a question as soon as the moderated section of the talk ended. I was at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History for their "Growers of Color Talkback" lecture. The museum produced a Growers of Color video series that set out to “address the experiences of people at the intersections of agriculture, culture, and community.” The five subjects of the series served as the panelists for the evening.
And down to a person, they said yes, farming is hard. But they also said more than that.
“You're gonna kill things. You're gonna murder things,” said Travis Stewart of Farm With Me LLC. “And that’s all part of the journey. I had difficulty growing rosemary in the beginning. I would say start small. It’s a learning curve, like everything else.”
Azeem Kareem and Sarah Rose Kareem run the Samad Gardens initiative. Azeem’s advice was to basically get out of the way.
“The plant wants to live, and it grows by itself,” he said. “I don't make it go up and sprout this way and have a leaf here. I don't do that. It does it by itself. You're just helping it do what it wants to do naturally. You look at it from that lens, it's just like, 'Oh, OK, this is a lot easier.'”
For Vicheth Im, farming and gardening are places of healing. The daughter of survivors of the Cambodian genocide, her episode of "Growers of Color" focuses on how the process of growing food has helped to connect her with her parents and their story. She said to be successful as a farmer, it’s important to not be too attached to the outcome.
“At the house I stay in, I have a little plot, and I was like, 'I'm not gonna do anything to you. You can just do whatever you want.' And so the lavender grew back on its own. The basil and the mint went everywhere. Then I got tomatoes, they came back by themselves. And then the herbs and the chamomile. So, I was like, I need to make a video so people can just not think it's so hard and not be afraid to try it.”
This issue is one that’s important to me for a couple of reasons. My other job is working freelance for CT News Junkie, and in that capacity I’ve been covering the devastating impact that the Trump Administration’s cuts to the social safety net will have on food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or more colloquially as food stamps. Thousands of people will lose access to SNAP benefits next year. The danger could be even more immediate, as the current federal shutdown threatens the disbursement of SNAP benefits next month.
I’ve also worked to try and alleviate the issue of food deserts in Hartford, particularly in the North End of the city. Many years ago, I was invited by the Hartford Community Loan Fund to be part of an advisory council that was going to help the Loan Fund and other partners develop a full-size, 50,000 square-foot supermarket at the mouth to the North End. That plan, which was well on its way to entering development, was torpedoed by the announcement of what became Dunkin Stadium. (You can read about the whole sordid tale here.).
More than ten years later, there’s still no full-sized grocery store in the North End. So with the lack of access to healthy food in the city, and with the looming threat of food assistance being cut off, growing one’s own food is not an academic pursuit. It’s a matter of health and survival.
There is cause for hope. One of the audience members, a woman named Cureene, took the time to sing Travis’ praises for helping her to build her first raised bed for gardening, and for helping her raise chickens and teaching children at the local Boys and Girls Club about where their food comes from.
“Travis, your work goes way further than you can even imagine. All the children at the Boys and Girls Club knows that those chickens lay eggs. They've seen them. All the children in the preschool there, every single day they get to come out and see real chickens … So the work that you do, the trees you have planted, you may never sit under that shade, but know that there are people who are sitting under the shade of the work that you have done and you are doing already.”
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Jamil is taking the weekend off. See you next week!
