Five years later, she began selling her unique and delicious cuisine from the city’s first upscale food truck. In 2010, she opened Harvest Moon Grille, making it her mission as chef to create one of the city's best restaurants using items grown or raised locally – all within 100 miles of Charlotte.
The final seed for Growing Forward Farms was planted when in 2012, Chef Parsons partnered with Seigle Avenue Presbyterian Church to truly begin to localize the food supply. Having grown ever more aware of issues of food justice associated with the dearth of high quality food in some of our country's lowest income neighborhoods, Parson's intent for the partnership was to begin to provide fresh, local organic produce into one of Charlotte's "Food Deserts" located in and around the Seigle Point community.
With that partnership, Seigle Farm was planted. The land was cleared and 10 (now up to 26) raised planting beds with rich organic soil were created. Alongside this, fruit trees, berry bushes and other landscaping was added to round out the first year's growing plan. Seigle Farm is a small oasis in our busy city. Here our volunteer gardeners find fellowship and bring opportunity to the Seigle Point neighborhood - just a few steps away from Uptown Charlotte.
The beauty of Seigle Farm has been multiplied in several ways. The first was the obvious: outreach to the community and opportunities for fellowship. Then came actually having the harvest to share with the congregation, the neighborhood and to bring to market. That was the genius of Chef Cassie's plan, you see. Chef Cassie would guarantee that the produce was used by buying whatever produce wasn't used by the community for her restaurant.
It's a win-win. Chef Cassie has a source of beautiful, fresh and organically grown produce, the community at Seigle Point and members of Seigle Avenue Presbyterian Church have unprecedented access to that same local bounty AND they are also able to grow their other programs forward with the money earned by selling the produce to area chefs.
Chef Parson's brilliance with this idea didn't go unnoticed. Global Green USA took note of the Seigle Farm project and awarded Chef Parsons and team a Global Green Sustainability award. This provided the "seed" money (literally and figuratively speaking) to move ahead in building a network of urban farms and so Growing Forward Farms has grown from Seigle Farm to a group of six urban farm projects throughout Charlotte. Read more in our coming posts about the story of those other farms and where we're going with Growing Forward Farms!
Keep planting those seeds of change!
Dorothy Hunt
Executive Director
Growing Forward Farms
