On a recent night out in Garfield Park, Reilly Olmstead was surprised when her wife, Brooklyn Robinson, didn’t mention most of their dinner was still in the dirt.
“I thought we were just gonna show up and there was gonna be dinner,” Olmstead said. “And then, as soon as we’re walking in, she was like, ‘By the way, we’re actually harvesting it and making it ourselves.’”
Olmstead and Robinson got their hands dirty during the park’s monthly Dollar Menu Night, an opportunity for residents to learn how to harvest vegetables and cook affordable plant-based meals. The program is led by Leah McMichael, a naturalist at the Garfield Park Conservatory. She has filled Blake’s Garden with vegetables such as black chickpeas and galangal to honor German, Burmese and Mexican immigrant communities.
The native section of the garden includes beans using corn stalks as a natural trellis for them to climb, and squash growing in between the crops to help shade the soil to suppress weeds and conserve water. McMichael said the symbiotic growth patterns of the plants also symbolizes the importance of community.
“It’s important to be a good neighbor,” McMichael said. “Flourishing is mutual, and nobody wins when they don’t play by those rules.”
The garden — created in 2019 to honor Blake Bowell, a 25-year-old who died from brain cancer two years earlier — is also home to multiple animals. Each one plays an important role in sustaining the farm and the low-cost meal program. The chickens, which include the matriarch, Pearl, supply eggs. A worm farm composts manure from the park’s tortoises, and the liquid from the worm farm fertilizes the trees.
Dollar Menu Night
During the summer grilling season, McMichael utilizes the crops and a hot plate to create a monthly community meal for Dollar Menu Night. Keeping it budget-friendly, McMichael only spends about $15 each time on additional ingredients, such as pasta noodles or cheese. Diners harvest the rest before they eat.
The idea took root as she watched close friends struggle to find comfort in the midst of mass deportations, as well as impacts from federal disinvestment in community resources.
If you go
Dollar Menu Night
🗓️ 6-7 p.m. July 1, Aug. 5, Sept. 2
📍 Garfield Park Conservatory, 2505 Conservatory Drive
🎟️ $1, advance registration is preferred
“I found if you gather people around a shared task, that can be a really good place for people to connect and unexpected relationships to happen,” McMichael said. “And community feels like a really important defense against a lot of kinds of violence. It’s a way that we look out for each other and can meaningfully keep one another safe.”
McMichael said attendance varied last year with only a family or two in the beginning, then sprouted into a gathering of about 20 by last fall. Some people even brought a grill and food to share for the final feast of the season.
“Families would come who didn’t know each other and their kids would start playing together,” McMichael said. “I’d have the tortoises out roaming around and parents would be kind of watching each other’s children and talking together, working on food together.”
“We struck gold!”
During the first event of the season, Olmstead and Robinson spent the evening harvesting, washing and cutting up produce to cook their meal from scratch. The menu was relatively simple: sourdough bread, herbed potatoes, freshly laid eggs and a berry salad.
The process of plucking and preparing nearly all the ingredients of the dish seemed to add an extra layer of magic for the couple who live in Fountain Square. Plus, there was the added bonus of an affordable meal.
“Um, for a dollar? We struck gold!” Olmstead exclaimed while rinsing the potatoes she harvested.
Robinson admits she was initially skeptical – especially with the price – because it can be difficult to find community programming for adults.
“I was like, ‘Oh, is this gonna be like carrots and ranch (dressing) you know? Like, is this for the kids because it’s a kid’s garden,” Robinson said.
By the end of the night, the couple was singing McMichael’s praises for teaching them how to make a cheap and healthy meal completely from scratch.
Dollar Menu Night is held once a month, typically the first Wednesday. The next dinner will be July 1. McMichael hopes to host the program until the beginning of October, depending on the number of crops that are left.
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Mirror Indy reporter Elizabeth Gabriel covers the south side of Marion County. Contact her at elizabeth.gabriel@mirrorindy.org. Follow her on X at @_elizabethgabs.
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