Featherstone Garden Feeds Body and Soul

Organic Gardener Annie Hakim attends to plants at Featherstone Garden. Photograph by Jim West

An organic garden is a lot like a good marriage. If you avoid outside toxic influences and focus on helping each other grow, the result is something nourishing and lovely to behold. Annie Hakim, self-taught organic gardener, follows those principles at Featherstone Garden, MorningSide’s first commercial garden, on Lakepointe.

Annie’s passion, she says, is “to grow healthy food in sync with nature.” She uses no pesticides, of course, but controls pests naturally through “companion planting,” placing plants close together that will protect and nourish each other. Annie knows, for example, that lettuce and chives make good companions, as chives repel the insects that are naturally attracted to leafy greens. And cucumbers appreciate the nitrogen that peas offer them. Taller plants can provide welcome shade to shorter plants that may wilt in direct sun.

Companion planting results not only in incredibly healthy and nutritious vegetables, but a beautiful mixture of colors, shapes, and textures. It’s all part of what Annie calls “creating an ecosystem instead of a production space.”

Running a commercial organic garden isn’t a one-person job, and Annie has partnered with co-owner Aaron Smith of Motor City Grounds Crew, renting the space for the garden from MCGC and working with them on other community projects. In addition to Aaron, three part-time employees work here. Annie also houses several beehives at the garden from Bees in the D, a non-profit which raises honeybees and does education about them throughout metro Detroit.

Featherstone Garden is also an important addition to the neighborhood. The nearby residents all know Annie, and she knows them. On one visit, she told me about a birthday party being planned that afternoon for the relative of a neighbor across the street. And the neighbors helped me find Annie on my first trip there. Clearly there’s a symbiotic relationship between the people here, not just the plants.

Probably the most important lesson Annie says she’s learned from this project is patience. Nothing about growing food or running a business happens quickly, and you need patience to deal with the inevitable setbacks. Although she still has a couple of restaurants that are regular customers, the closing of restaurants in the metro area due to the pandemic has cut off one source of income for Featherstone Garden. Fortunately, her main business goal has always been to sell her produce through a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. With a CSA, members buy a subscription for weekly pickup or delivery of a market bag of seasonal produce. As subscribers, consumers develop a stronger connection to those who grow their food.

For more information about Featherstone Garden and their CSA program, check out their website at www.featherstonegarden.com. You can also follow them on Instagram, @featherstone.garden. Beginning this month, Featherstone Garden will also have a weekly farm stand.

Featherstone Garden
Weekly Farm Stand
Fresh, Organic, Seasonal Produce
Thursdays, 4-7 p.m.
4178 Lakepointe (just north of Mack Ave)
Delivery service also available