SUELO SANO

The City of Chicago, undoubtedly emanating its slogan, Urbs in Horto, city in a garden. An ecosystem within an ecosystem within greater ecosystems. One of which lives in a small garden near Homan & Le Moyne, where I met Valentine Espinoza, a Humboldt Park community farmer who devotes their time, ancestral knowledge, and care towards building more sustainable practices for growing food and herbal medicines. Val (Valentine) is a self-taught farmer focusing on soil ecologies and collaborating with other growers across Chicago. She has traveled the world where she’s learned from independent growers and farmer collectives.

“Being able to grow your own food is a life skill that's important. And it’s something that’s existed throughout my family intergenerationally, and I feel like I'm the one who's kept up with that life skill, and just a way of life, growing things and being able to grow and sustain yourself. Just working with plants, you know, it's a beautiful way of life to be able to interact with the plants and grow things,” says Val. “I feel like there's more fulfillment in just taking care of the land and also taking care of the plants and animals and considering all the things that no longer have their natural ecosystems because of the foundation that exists in the concrete jungle. So, any availability or chance I get to try to restore them or kind of build a place where they can also benefit; that's what's important to me. Living in reciprocity with the land and all the kinds of life forms that exist.”

After graduating from University, Val dedicated her time to learning how to grow. She moved to the Southwest. It was there where she was introduced to dry farming. “[It’s] completely different, because the climate that exists here is, you know, we have water, when we have the Great Lakes versus there, they have very little rainfall. So it was learning how to farm with less access to water, and resources.”

But her main influence came from that of her family. “Just having the privilege to go to Mexico since I was a kid and being around plants and herbs like that's always been part of my home environment. And then also being part of different symposiums throughout Mexico and working with different coffee collectives, that really created a whole perspective on growing. Taking care from seed to harvest.”

“[That’s] when I started to learn about soil health, from the caretaking that these coffee growers created, their dedication to the soil and creating that taste in the tasting room, through the variety of the seed to harvest, processing the coffee, and fermenting.”

“Aside from traveling to Mexico, and then Luxor, it was being in the Southwest and learning with my indigenous friends there who have been intergenerationally farming for centuries.”

After a few years, Val came back to Chicago and continued growing and gardening. “I found this space [in Humboldt Park], and it was great. But like many other spaces throughout the Chicagoland area, there's high levels of lead and other contaminants. From there, I was more interested in soil remediation and what that looked like, what that really meant, as far as remediating a site or bringing it back to health, if something was imbalanced. I feel like as a grower, I understood the components of growing, but I didn't really understand the ecology of, and the ecosystem that exists within the soil spectrum. And so for the last three years, or two years, I've dedicated my time to learning more about soil remediation with social ecologies, and continuing my education, through a Soil Keepers program that exists.”

Val shares with me a printed manual called The Ground Rules: A Manual to Reconnect Soil and Soul by Nance Klehm. The manual documents various testing sites, one of which Val points out as El Parquito. The small community garden was stewarded by neighboring residents called Parquitoans, and they built a rainwater harvesting system, five bee hives, mushroom logs, and transformed old toilets into planters. That garden site is no longer there, due to gentrifying development, but the data collected by proven soil remediators exists and is a resource that has helped inform Val and other soil keepers.

“There's so many people that are great growers here in Chicago, just because of the diversity that exists. And so, you not only have your own personal experience, but there's also the beauty of learning from somewhere else that has just equal amount or more knowledge or experience than you. It's great when you can collaborate and exchange with other people who are interested in the same growing things.”

Val took her  experience with ecologist Nance Klehm to develop a workshop that could be applicable to the community. “I just wanted to create a conversation around soil. Maybe I have something that other people may benefit from, and they may have something also that I can benefit from. So it's a reciprocal kind of exchange. That was the kind of atmosphere that I wanted to create as far as, like, a workshop.”

“I grew up in Humboldt Park. So I feel like this is important, being here (Val points to the garden), connecting with a community garden, with the Honeycomb [Network], and other people that are growing and interested in plant health.”

Working with various soil remediation techniques has motivated Val to bring information and tools to the gardening community. By organizing workshops in collaboration with gardens in Humboldt Park, Pilsen, and Little Village, people are able to come and participate in soil testing, and learn hands-on with experienced gardeners.

“It's a really sad thing to learn about your soil health and not being able to grow directly into the ground. It's our responsibility as growers to bring up these conversations and to bring up hope. Even though a site may be contaminated, that doesn't mean that it's not capable of growing and sustaining life, it just means you have to work with it longer, it takes soil so long to form. People want answers now, you know, but it's like, it took three glaciation periods to get the soil that exists now. So what we do now to our soils may not benefit us in our lifetime, but maybe in three, four generations. And that's how we have to look at it because it's not something fast.”

For further education, Val recommends reading Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets. “[It’s] probably my favorite book right now. [It] goes over the history of how soils evolved and the remediation methods that predate the existence of plant matter, and what that looks like, and how, why it's so effective.”

Upcoming workshops where you can connect with Val will be this Earth Day, on April 23RD, at Malinalli Garden in Little Village where she will be hosting a workshop to educate people on soil health. The EPA Region 5 office will also be providing soil testing for lead contamination, for anyone interested. 

Additional information regarding The Soil Keepers program can be found at www.socialecologies.net