History of the Community Blueberry Project
(or, How We Started a Hyper-Local Niche for Community and Land Regeneration)
During the COVID pandemic, I did some soul-searching, as I think a lot of people did.
Having written about environmental, social and financial risks for more than a decade in my professional work, I knew that disruption like we experienced was possible, if not probable. But I was still shocked by the speed with which it affected humans around the globe.
The months we spent in limited contact with friends, family and even strangers made me appreciate the importance of community like never before. It also gave me time to think about how the resilience of my local community will likely be tested again in coming years, as other global or regional disruptions spin out from the convergence of escalating environmental and social crises.
To become more resilient to future disruptions, I came to believe we need to regenerate the strength of our local communities and the productivity of the land on which we live. Looking around me, I saw that my neighborhood (Forest Heights) was poised for regeneration. Founded in the mid-1960s, it has 500 homes along the Oconee River in Athens, Georgia, and baby-boomers were rapidly selling their brick ranches and big, grassy yards to younger families like my own, who were ready to invest time and energy into shaping the place where they live.
I wanted to propose a small project that could embody and inspire the regenerative culture I hoped to foster. That’s when my good friend, Clyde Yates, told me about his idea for community blueberries.
Blueberries for Everybody!
The idea was this: Raise money to buy blueberry bushes from a wholesale grower and plant them in the sunniest locations throughout a neighborhood for anyone to pick from.
Clyde installs and maintains landscapes for a living and worked up a budget that suggested we could buy all the necessary materials, including cages (to protect against deer) fertilizer, drip irrigation and mulch for $25 per bush. In the first week of November 2020, I put a flier on every mailbox in Forest Heights, and Clyde distributed them in his Newtown neighborhood.
The flier asked people to donate to the project and/or let us know if they’d be willing to host a patch of bushes in their yard along the street. I was hoping to raise a few hundred dollars and get at least a dozen yards to choose from.
By the end of the month, more than 30 residents in Forest Heights raised their hands for bushes and five in Newtown. Plus, we raised around $1,500.
Getting Bushes in the Ground
Over the next several weeks, we mapped all the potential host sites and visited them to see if there was a spot along the street with good exposure to the southern sky. (Blueberries like as much sun as possible.) Then, we selected the best locations that had good sun and safe access, and that spread the berries equitably across the different areas within the two neighborhoods.
We asked the hosts if they would do their best to keep the bushes watered through the first two summers (while the plants got established) and if they would let people step into their yards, as needed, to pick the berries. Then we called to have the utilities marked along the curbs, and on two chilly weekends in January, we rallied volunteers to do the planting.
Clyde has a “skid” with a heavy-duty tiller that can turn up strips for a patch of five or six bushes in a row. This drastically reduces the amount of digging involved, but there’s still plenty of work for volunteers, who help to rake grass out of the soil, mix in peat moss, spread fertilizer, set the bushes, pin down the drip lines and deer cages, and spread a thick layer of mulch.
With the help of 20 volunteers, we planted 71 blueberry bushes the first year — 48 in Forest and 23 in Newtown.
A Virtuous Cycle
It was really satisfying to get those first bushes planted and know that soon we’d have lots of berries. But my question was, “What now?” How could we grow the project in a way that created a shared sense of identity and pride.
A festival seemed like the obvious answer.
Like many Athens neighborhoods, Forest Heights is filled with musicians, artists, chefs and other creative folks. A festival could tap into that human resource to celebrate our budding project and raise funds for another round of planting and maintenance.
I floated the idea on the Forest Heights Facebook group, and singer-songwriter Claire Campbell immediately responded that she could take charge of booking acts for a concert. Just like that, a huge part of the festival was off my shoulders, and Claire has continued to manage the concert every year since. (Claire, you rock!) She also took the lead on getting our first T-shirts (with a donated image by Jacob Wenzka) produced at a local printing company, Satisfactory Printing.
From there I figured out how to permit and insure the festival, which I decided should also involve a pet parade and a blueberry cook-off with “celebrity” judges (Krimson Black, Kalin Hill and Brian Head) who lived in the neighborhood. I decided Holly Court, deep in the neighborhood with a flat grassy median, would be a great, intimate spot for a small festival, and the surrounding neighbors supported the idea.
I was hoping we would have at least 50 people show up, and I was shocked by how smoothly everything went. About 250 people came out, and we raised another $1,500 for the blueberry project through t-shirt sales, donations and door prizes. A couple dozen people volunteered to help with logistics, and that core group has grown each year (though there’s always a bit of arm-twisting required).
Where Things Now Stand
The festival has grown each year so that it now includes garden tours, a BikeAthens rally for kids, multiple food trucks and a silent auction. An estimated 600 people attended our third festival last summer, and we’ve now planted more than 150 bushes between Forest Heights, Newtown and Hampton Park.
Rather than attempting to create our own non-profit, we partnered with Athens Land Trust (ALT) in 2024. Our mission of regenerating community and land through food culture is well aligned with the organization, which also has two properties in Forest Heights. This year, we’re holding a new Kickoff and Community Forum event with ALT at Oglethorpe Garage, which has been our primary sponsor since year two and a huge supporter through owner and FH resident Aaron Wallace.
The festival now has a core team of volunteers including co-directors, Danielle Gilmer, Philip Bishop and myself, and numerous event organizers like Claire Campbell, Kerem Kilic, Rebecca Vander Platts, and Scott Long of BikeAthens. A big thanks also to Jeff Griggs, who continues to emcee The Blueberry Jam concert and the Blueberry Cook-off competition, and to Jacob Wenzka, Indy Cheri Swirk, Noelle Shuck and Kim Deakins, who have each donated wonderful artwork for our posters, t-shirts and other fundraising merchandise. (All four designs will be released this year on a commemorative poster, pictured above.)
Others who have been tremendously helpful over the years include Andy Trawick, Max and the van Wagtendonks, Susan Brooks, Helene Halstead, Steve Sacco, Jennifer Birch, Stefan Brannan, Laurel Bleich, David Holcomb, Brian Choate, Jonathan Staton, Jay Davison, Rick Marr and many others who I’m sorry to have forgotten.
Big Takeaways & Looking Forward
It’s not always easy to get people to step away from their busy lives and pitch in on a community project, but the people who do turn out make it worthwhile. I’ve met dozens of neighbors who I didn’t know before, and I believe we’ve made connections we can rely on when times get tough.
We’ve created a virtuous cycle of investing in community resources (blueberries) with funding generated by a celebration of community culture (the festival). I think it’s a powerful model for regeneration, and I hope it spreads to other communities and neighborhoods in the future.
Going forward, we may choose to invest in other types of plants or community resources, and we could certainly do more to share ideas for stewarding the land we live on.
See you soon!
