The Business Journals · https://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/news/2023/09/14/midtown-bramble-bloom-cooper-young-midtown.html
She asked forty neighbors to let her farm their yards. Half a decade later, the anniversary is circulating, and the gates are still open.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.
1 Corinthians 3:6
The anniversary is what put her back in the feed. Five years ago this winter, a Memphis art teacher named Marisa Mender-Franklin posted a nervous ask in her local Buy Nothing group: she dreamed of farming flowers but owned no land, so would anyone let her grow in their yard, in exchange for lawn care and cut bouquets? Business Insider ran her first-person account of it on June 30, and the post has been making the rounds again since.
About 40 strangers said yes within a day. Neighbors dropped off cardboard for garden beds, lent vases, pre-bought subscriptions before there was anything to subscribe to. Today the micro-farm has seven employees, a storefront, and blooms scattered across nine or ten borrowed lots. She says it "runs on community. Well, community and La Croix, and an unhinged belief in our ability to figure it out."
There is a line in one of Paul's letters, written to a church busy arguing over whose team they belonged to, his or a preacher named Apollos. His answer refuses the whole contest. One of them planted, he says, another watered, and God gave the growth; the planter and the waterer are nothing next to whatever it is that actually makes a seed rise.
Credit for a harvest does not divide cleanly. Most of it was never anyone's to claim.
Her harvest was never hers alone to reap either. It grew because forty households unlocked their gates for a woman they had never met, and kept them unlocked for five years. She brought the seed and the labor. The ground, and the slow green miracle of the thing taking root, came from somewhere else.
The seed was hers. The soil belonged to strangers. The growth belonged to neither, which is the only reason there was ever enough to share.