Planters outside Recipe Oak Cliff. Photo by Victoria Hernandez.
Outside Recipe Oak Cliff on South Ewing Avenue, planters filled with kale, mustard greens, bok choy, shallots, green onions, and more line the left-hand side of the parking lot.
Tisha Crear, owner of Recipe Oak Cliff, has been keeping this small garden for quite some time. The garden has grown in size with new planters she purchased after receiving a Love Your Block Grant last summer.
The City of Dallas Love Your Block Grant is a resident-led grant program that is part of the Cities of Service initiative. The mini-grants awarded support projects that contribute to the revitalization of neighborhood and community spaces, such as community cleanups, public art, and beautification projects.
The grant provided funds for sturdier and wider planters, bringing more produce to life for both her restaurant and the community. Crear said that part of the reason for having the garden was that while running her restaurant, she already had seeds from the food used.
“Everything I made, if it has the seeds, I’ll just throw it out here,” she said.
Crear said that as a kid, she was able to pick blackberries from a bush before school, and her 91-year-old father recalls more fruit trees growing around Dallas.
“We can still grow those things and have it where people can enjoy fresh food growing right there in their neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why I opened this place, because it’s the food desert or whatever, there’s not a lot of fresh food that’s available in stores. What about it available just coming straight out of the ground?”
The planters also bring an opportunity to connect through the process. Crear wants to use the planters to help educate the community, with aspirations to develop more structured programming in the future.
“Just educating people on how food grows and grows, you can eat it, talking about the history … and the nutritional value,” she said. “Survival, especially in these times that we’re in. It’s like, ‘grow your groceries.’ You could do that.”
