The Huffman Historic District in east Dayton has started planting roots for its Huffman Grows Homesteading Pilot Program.
The neighborhood was founded in the late 1800s by William P. Huffman, who had a vision of an economically diverse, tightly knit community.
Now, homesteading consultant Lauren Craig of Greene County is donating her time and expertise to lead the urban homesteading pilot program in the Huffman Historic District.
The pilot program will focus on increasing access to healthy food.
Craig currently owns and operates Humble Hive Consulting in Xenia.
"I design gardens, landscapes and homesteads for clients all across the U.S.," she said. "I focus primarily on utilizing edibles and medicinals and native plants in order to achieve clients' goals for abundance."
Craig is working with nine families in the neighborhood to build a roadmap she hopes other urban communities can follow to increase their resilience and food security.
“The hope is that over time they can then begin to train other individuals within their communities to come on board and start hosting homesteading elements of their own, in their own yards,” she said.
The pilot program will rely on community teamwork, which means different houses will help out where they can. Two households will host chickens while others will grow orchards and gardens or build with salvaged materials for community use.
"I had each residence fill out a list of various homesteading elements or responsibilities and had them check off things that they might be interested in hosting or responsibilities they might interested in filling for the network," Craig said. "Just to determine viability for each of the various homesteading elements that they would like to host."
The project will see its official start closer to September with multiple community clean-up days before residents begin planting in the spring.
"We're going to schedule community work days where invasives are removed at each of the sites," Craig said.
"Once invasives are removed, we're gonna be preparing the spaces for the food production installations via the process of sheet mulching."
Sheet mulching is a process by which cardboard is broken down into organic matter by layering wood mulch over the typically abundant resource.
"You put two to three layers of cardboard on top the grass, or whatever presently resides in the space, and then you top that with four to six inches of wood mulch," Craig said. "And that works to kind of reset the space and infuse a lot of beautiful organic matter."
Craig said having a community homestead in a city neighborhood can address common urban issues such as air pollution, higher temperatures and a lack of food access.
"Growing our own food, replacing our grass with vegetation and with trees really works to speak to all of those various issues while working to feed our urban communities,” she said.
Craig plans to install 27 8-by-4 raised garden beds, 48 fruit and nut trees, 62 berry and nut shrubs and 102 berry bushes. Other houses will also support the community with mushroom cultivation and seed starters.
"I'll be working with the carpenters to take repurposed windows and doors and turn them into greenhouses for our two seed-starting households," she said.
Craig said they will discuss costs for the program in greater detail at the first Huffman Grows community meeting in late August.
"My thinking is that each individual household will pay for whatever trees [or] bushes end up being installed, as these items would ultimately go with the sale of each home," she said. "And in this way, each individual household can have greater say in the variety, should they be 'going for' a certain aesthetic."
Craig said she is hopeful that this pilot program will show others the power of a community coming together under one common goal: healthy food access.
"I was inspired, if you can say, by a lot of the funding cuts that have been taking place because they do affect our marginalized populations," she said. "And I'm very inspired by the Margaret Mead quote of — 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.' And I firmly believe that."
