Foodie Fridays: Cultivating Traditions

Foodie Fridays: Cultivating Traditions

Join the Community Gardens Program on June 23 for the first Foodie Friday Event of 2023! Tickets go on sale May 15th.

Our first Foodie Fridays event is a post Juneteenth celebration. Food is deeply rooted in history and place – past events and traditions have shaped what we eat and where we can find it. Listen to a panel of three local growers discuss how and why history, ancestral and traditional knowledge, and culturally important foods influence their farming practices.

Tanya Doka-Spandhla – Founder, Passion to Seed Gardening

Tanya started gardening in 2010 at the South Germantown Community Garden. The benefits she experienced from growing and eating her own produce spurred her decision to start a business in Spring 2015 – Passion to Seed Gardening. PTSG is a Certified Naturally Grown small scale farm situated in the Gaithersburg area. Crops grown include Zimbabwean Corn, pumpkin leaves/muboora, okra, mustard greens/tsunga, and horned melon. As the name suggests, this all came about as a passion from within to practice sowing the seed in the garden and relishing the journey as the seed grows. Tanya shares: “I find therapy in interacting with the soil, putting a tiny seed into the ground, seeing it grow into a bountiful harvest. Personally it gives me hope, faith, renewal of spirit irrigated by drops of love on each plant I put into the ground.”

Nia Nyamweya – Founder & Farm Manager, Beauty Blooms Farm

Beauty Blooms Farm began with the vision to heal the local community’s relationship. Nia aims to engage the power of storytelling to decolonize our relationship to food and the land. As a returning generation farmer with both sides of her family, Black and white, having rich agricultural backgrounds, she honors the complexity of her multi-racial roots and mixed heritage, from both the Abagusii tribe in Kenya and of European ancestry. The beauty, determination, and faith of her ancestors is deeply rooted in the starting of the farm. In 2022, she expanded from a ⅛ acre plot leased through the Montgomery Countryside Alliance’s LandLink program to 10 acres. The farm has produced and donated thousands of pounds of produce to Montgomery County’s Farm-to-Food Bank program. The farm’s goal is to regenerate the land through organic practices and cover cropping to produce food that feeds the community.

Anthony Cohen – Founder & President, The Menare Foundation, Inc.; Button Farm Living History Center 

Anthony Cohen is an historian, author, and explorer of the American past. An early purveyor experiential history, Cohen launched his career in 1996, walking two months from Maryland to Canada, along a route of the Underground Railroad; the secret route to freedom for enslaved Americans. Cohen is the Founder and President of The Menare Foundation, Inc., a national non-profit organization—“preserving the legacy of the Underground Railroad”—and operates the Button Farm Living History Center, a 40 acre farm depicting 1850s plantation life in Maryland. He has served as a consultant to the National Parks Conservation Association, Maryland Public Television, NASA among others and trained Oprah Winfrey for her role as Sethe in the 1998 motion picture Beloved. Cohen is a founding member of the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project. And he is the co-author of the forthcoming book Great Escapes: Journeys on Maryland’s Underground Railroad to be released in the fall of 2023.

This event will be held at Josiah Henson Museum and Park