Beneath the Surface: What Garlic Teaches Us About Modern Resistance

By Chamear Davis ● AgriCULTURE ● Amended as of June 4th, 2026

Right now at Mear Mae’s Meadow, my urban farm in Charleston, WV, the soil is sending up these wild, beautiful, curly green shoots called garlic scapes. They are the seasonal stems that grow out of the top of garlic plants, tasting like a mild, sweet cross between garlic and a green onion. Most people in our community have never seen one, let alone cooked with it. Before we could harvest a single one of these unique green curls in the spring, we had to stand in the mud of late autumn, freezing, with dirt under our fingernails, placing a bet on a harvest we wouldn’t see for months.

📷 [PHOTO: garlic scapes coming up at Mear Mae’s Meadow — current spring harvest]

That is the reality of urban land stewardship. It requires a kind of patience that runs counter to everything in our modern, fast-paced world. This harvest is beautiful, but the story of how these curly scapes got here is the real medicine. It is a story of resilience, late nights, and a beautiful web of community connection that spans across different neighborhoods and backgrounds.

📷 [PHOTO from left to right: Mavery Davis, Chamear Davis, and Carolyn Young in the garden]

Our journey began last October. The air was turning crisp, and the window to get crops into the earth before the hard West Virginia freeze was rapidly closing. It took a village of co-conspirators to get those cloves into the ground. It started with Stacy Kay, a passionate local grower who handed me five pounds of seed garlic because she wants to see garlic growing all over the city. But seeds need soil. The rich, aged compost manure that filled our two new raised beds came thanks to a connection from my WVU Extension Master Gardener Mentor, Carolyn Sue Young, whose friend has been consistently dropping off loads of black gold all over the West Side to support local growers. My husband, Mavery, and I spent hours hauling and collecting that compost from another community farm space tended by Gloria Lopez.

These women became true co-conspirators in this work. They understood that this vision is bigger than any single one of us, and they used their skills, their soil, and their access to help anchor this movement right here in the neighborhood.

📷 [PHOTO: Chamear and Mavery planting by headlights, October — or raised beds before winter if available]

Mavery and I found ourselves racing against the clock and dropping temperatures. As the sun went down, we weren’t ready to quit. Back then, the lot was wide open with just our two new raised beds, so I pulled my car right into the meadow, flipping the high beams on so we could see what we were doing. Working by the glow of those headlights in the autumn chill, we used the light to guide our hands as we carefully tucked more than 260 individual cloves into the dark earth.

When the spring sun finally warmed the meadow, those tiny cloves didn’t just wake up; they burst through the soil, resilient and strong. Now, they are throwing off those beautiful, curly scapes. Snapping them off for culinary use is actually a win-win. It tells the plant to stop wasting energy on the top greenery and pour all its strength into growing a massive, robust garlic bulb underground.

📷 [PHOTO: close-up of scapes curling out of the soil — the money shot]

Bringing something like fresh garlic scapes to the Charleston, West Virginia, community is about so much more than just selling a unique ingredient. It is about food education, expanding our palates together, and reclaiming our food sovereignty. We get to show our neighbors how to chop and sauté them, toss them into hot pasta, or blend them into a vibrant green pesto. It introduces something fresh, healthy, and exciting to local plates.

Looking out at the meadow now, I realize that every single curly green stem we harvest is a living testament to what happens when local folks show up for each other. Stacy, Carolyn, Gloria, Mavery, and I were all working toward the same goal: feeding the soil so we can feed the community.

And honestly, that is the deepest lesson the garlic teaches us. Once those 260 cloves were buried last winter, there was nothing left to do but wait. We trusted that underneath the snow, life was quietly doing its thing. The most important growth happens in the dark, out of sight, when everything looks still on the surface.

That is the exact space farmers find themselves navigating today. Right now, across the country, we are watching vital funding, institutional programs, and resources meant to support minority farmers get systematically stripped away and dismantled. The political climate wants to freeze us out.

​I felt the weight of this directly when the USDA suddenly terminated forty-nine of fifty grants under its Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program. It wasn’t just a headline for me. This cut hit my friend and mentor Jason Tartt Sr. and his EDGE Demonstration Farm down in McDowell County, a place I’ve traveled to several times. The last time I was down there, I was standing at his sawmill, learning how to cut lumber, feeling the raw potential of what independent infrastructure looks like. With a stroke of a pen, roughly 1.1 million dollars disappeared from his operation, three new farm businesses that were set to launch this summer stopped in their tracks. In that same sweep, Nourish WV and a coalition of eleven organizations lost an 8.5 million dollar WVU grant. This is the heavy context The Meadow is growing inside of. (Black By God covered this directly — read “They’ll Cut Off Your Project.”)

But as history has always shown, when the topsoil gets hostile, our work goes underground. It becomes an under-the-cover movement. Just beneath the surface, away from the gaze of government systems and corporate red tape, those who know know. We do the invisible, essential work of building our own infrastructure, preserving our own seeds, and relying on our own networks to survive. We build alliances with folks who are ready to conspire with us to bypass the gatekeepers entirely.

That network already has a name and a shape. The Afro-Lachian Food Network — which includes Mear Mae’s Meadow alongside T&T Organics, Unity Sisters Farm, HARVEST, Miss Ruby’s Corner Market, Chef Ke, and any grower who shares this cultural kinship with the land — is not a formal organization. It is people finding each other, staying informed, and leveraging local media like BBG’s Farmer on the Flag to stay connected and visible. It runs on shared infrastructure, cooperative distribution, and the kind of relationships you build over years in the dirt together. 

📷 [PHOTO: AFN network members together

And just like those 260 cloves we tucked into the cold ground last October — trusting something we couldn’t yet see — that is exactly how this works. You plant in the dark. You show up for each other. Wait a season, then something breaks through.

Every dollar from this garlic harvest goes right back into growing fresh, local produce for our neighborhood. We don’t need a government grant to validate our right to grow. We are proving that with a little patience, a lot of sweat, and a solid network of community co-conspirators, we will always find a way to sustain ourselves, one square foot at a time.

​If you are local to the Charleston, West Virginia area, you can pick up your fresh garlic directly from Miss Ruby’s Corner Market or right from The Meadow once the harvest drops at the end of June. To lock in your share ahead of time, visit our waitlist and order form at linktr.ee/MearMae. You can also use that same link to tap into our journey, donate directly to our GoFundMe to help us build independent infrastructure, read our articles in Black By God, and connect with our social media platforms to help keep this movement growing.

Black By God is reporting on how Black farmers in Central West Virginia are rebuilding agricultural systems despite barriers to land, policy, and capital—highlighting what’s working, who’s leading, and how communities are adapting.