Once a dirty baseball diamond, now a row of cabbages.

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

For Lucia Daugherty, it’s all about planting seeds—in every sense. She’s sitting among the thriving purple cabbages at Pisgah View Community Peace Garden, which she co-founded and manages with her husband Bob White. Just three years ago, this space at the center of Asheville’s largest public housing complex was an abandoned, hard-packed baseball diamond littered with empty bottles and condom wrappers. Today, it’s a lush urban oasis of vegetables, flowers, and neatly mulched paths with fruit trees and climbing vines.

It’s also become a model for community self-improvement through agriculture. The project brings together such diverse organizations as I Have a Dream, a foundation that provides long-term educational support to low-income students and is also Daugherty’s employer; Nuestro Centro, a Latino community organization in North Asheville; and Earthaven, the eco-village in Black Mountain. All aim to provide fresh, organic food and training in marketable skills to a community beset by poverty, drugs and gang violence. The garden covers its expenses by selling CSA shares. Apart from that, it runs on in-kind donations and uses seeds, starts and tools donated by expert gardeners.

The garden is unique in that it’s grown, so to speak, entirely from within Pisgah View, a 262-unit low-income housing complex in West Asheville. Built in the 1950s and located off State Street, the neighborhood, which Daugherty and her family have called home for the past ten years, regularly makes the news with drug-related shootings. For Daugherty, an Ohio native, creating a healthy community for her three daughters is not an abstract ideal but a matter of urgency. It gives her the boldness she says is required to work toward positive change in an entrenched system like public housing. “You have to be willing to maybe step on some toes,” she says with a laugh. 

She describes with enthusiasm the new projects planned for this summer: distributing produce to the neighborhood’s elderly and disabled, food preservation workshops, kids’ classes in beekeeping and chickening. But her voice becomes fierce when she digs deeper, down to the spiritual roots of the work she’s doing here. “When we feed each other, we keep each other alive,” she says. “And that’s sacred.”