The volunteers came together that day at the request of urban farmer and social justice advocate Yonnette Fleming, the force behind the transformation of the once vacant lot. Originally from Guyana, Fleming has worked since 2003 to address food insecurity in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant (or “Bed-Stuy”) neighborhood. While working on Wall Street years ago, she joined the community garden. As she became more deeply connected to the earth, she found it harder to juggle the two worlds. In 2008, she left her job to invest herself fully in the community.

The following year, Fleming had a vision for a permanent market in the adjoining lot. She mobilized neighbors to clear debris, worked out the title to the land with city government, and began building infrastructure. By 2014, market sales were robust, with profits going to rural farmers as well as urban gardeners selling on consignment. A few blocks away, a second farm she started hosts another farmers’ market and a thriving community supported agriculture program.

And Fleming is far from finished: She plans to build a market information center this summer and dreams of a community supported herbal medicine program. She keeps the community and visitors engaged in conversations about racial justice and the food system and continually raises funds to keep the work going in a sustainable way. We asked Fleming about her work as she readied the market garden for spring.

What are you working on?

My two most active projects are the scale-up of the Hattie Carthan Community Market and the preservation of the Hattie Carthan Herban Farm. The market came into being six years ago, through the organization of gardeners and volunteers. We realized early on that most of the results of our work would be going to the rural farmers [at the market] because we were just not able to produce enough food [in the community garden] to build equity. Through Green Thumb, we were able to [acquire] another property at 49 Van Buren Street.

When we dug that farm in 2012, it was a petroleum waste lot. We put in sweat equity and created an herbal farm. We have 170 varieties of medicinal herbs. With assistance of funders who understood our drive for self-sufficiency, we created an apothecary; we convert the herbs into local medicines that [neighbors] can access for their health and well-being. We see the farm as a health justice project–as a place to begin conversations about the disenfranchisement of healers and herbal wise women like myself, and the economics of the pharmaceutical industry.