Volunteers Bloom to Prepare Cleo Bailey Experiment Garden for Spring

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The bees at The Cleo Bailey Experiment have not waited for the calendar to declare spring. On Saturday morning on Anderson’s East Whitner Street, they were already taking what Zephaniah Smith, a co‑founder of the project, calls “orientation flights,” small golden blurs zigzagging over raised beds where blackberries are beginning to push new growth through the soil. Around them, a couple of dozen volunteers in work gloves and hoodies picked their way carefully through the half‑acre urban garden behind the old Cleo Bailey School, turning soil and straightening beds while trying not to disturb the life that winter, such as it was this year, had failed to fully tamp down.

Smith calls it a “pre‑spring cleanup,” a phrase that carries equal parts practicality and superstition, like sweeping out a house before guests arrive. The work is deceptively modest: clearing paths, shaping rows, making sure irrigation lines have survived the cold snaps that never quite settled into a season. But this year’s chores come with a caveat.

“We’ve had a weird season,” said Smith. “We’ve got blackberries already starting to push through. Our bees around back, they’ve already started another brood.”

The garden is waking early, and the people tending it are under orders not to overdo their tidying.

Smith offers, almost offhand, what he calls a public‑service announcement: if you feel the itch to purge your garden of last year’s debris, resist. The brittle stems of coneflowers and the hollow branches of spent annuals are not, he reminds the volunteers, trash but tenements—housing for ground‑nesting bees and other “critters that you want to keep around,” the quiet work force that will pollinate and protect the garden all season long. The Cleo Bailey crew, he insists, is “pre‑ready,” not ruthless, intent on giving those small tenants “an opportunity to thrive and survive in the ecosystem we’ve created around here.”

That ecosystem did not begin as a garden. The Cleo Bailey Experiment, the nonprofit Smith runs with his wife, Whitney, took root in 2020, when the couple bought a retired 1913 schoolhouse in a former mill village on Anderson’s East Side. The brick building—28,000 square feet on two green acres—had slipped into disuse, a monument to a neighborhood that had seen better factory days. The Smiths’ intention was both ambitious and oddly intimate: to restore the school as a community hub and to chip away at what they describe as the “cycle of generational poverty” that has left families in the surrounding blocks with limited transportation, few services, and persistent food insecurity.

The Oasis Garden, as this half‑acre out back is known, became the first proof of concept. Fourteen raised beds and additional rows now hold a rotating roster of blackberries, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, greens, and herbs. In the 2023 season, the garden produced between 2,500 and 3,000 pounds of produce, much of it destined for people who rarely see fresh vegetables in their regular grocery bags. Neighbors can also claim small plots, growing their own food with the help of volunteers who explain the difference between pruning and butchering a plant, between feeding soil and merely fertilizing it.

The garden’s yield has become an unassuming but critical part of a local safety net. Across East Whitner Street, the Anderson First Seventh-Day Adventist Church food pantry serves roughly a hundred to 120 families every Wednesday, lining up those familiar cardboard boxes of dry goods and canned staples that stretch the week but do little to enliven it.

“Where we come into play is all of our excess that we grow here,” said Smith. “We bring that nutrient‑dense, packed food over to them.”

Blackberries and zucchini slip into those boxes alongside rice and peanut butter, turning what might have been an abstract lesson in “community” into something you can sauté.

Smith is quick to point out that the vegetables are, in a way, a by‑product.

“We’re getting people’s hands back in the soil,” he said, standing between beds where volunteers of various ages and experience levels work side by side. The garden functions as classroom, sanctuary, and job site. Children learn that carrots grow in dirt and not in plastic bags; adults reacquaint themselves with the patient intervals of germination and harvest. Workshops on basic gardening, composting, and pollinator health share space on the calendar with neighborhood events: back‑to‑school supply giveaways, outdoor movie nights, and partnerships with other nonprofits that turn the campus into a kind of open‑air commons.

Inside the school, plans are underway for something more permanent. The Cleo Bailey Experiment’s long‑term vision reads like a careful inversion of the building’s past. Classrooms that once drilled multiplication tables may eventually house afterschool and summer programs, early‑childhood interventions, and life‑skills classes ranging from conflict resolution to financial literacy. The Smiths imagine minority‑owned small businesses operating out of the hallways, paying reduced rent or none at all, their services feeding back into the neighborhood. A theater space might host dance or karate lessons; upstairs rooms could become studios or counseling offices. The point is not to import a ready‑made program but to provide walls and wiring for ideas that already exist in the community.

For now, though, the action is out back, where a this winter has unsettled the usual pacing of the year. The volunteers move from bed to bed, talking about seed orders and last summer’s tomato blight, stepping gingerly around small flags that mark ground‑bee nests. The air carries the faint sweetness of turned soil and, from somewhere beyond the school building, the low hum of traffic on Anderson’s east side. At the edge of the garden, the school’s redbrick facade presides like a patient elder, its windows still boarded in places but ringed now with murals and careful plantings.

If the work feels modest—an afternoon spent straightening a half‑acre, with a few wheelbarrows of debris to show for it—it also hints at the peculiar scale of the project itself. The Cleo Bailey Experiment is neither a large institution nor a private gesture; it occupies a middle space where a handful of determined people, a neglected property, and a small city’s worth of need intersect. A warmish February, a restless hive, blackberries in premature leaf: these are, for Smith, less anomalies than reminders of how finely tuned such ecosystems are, whether botanical or human.

“Don’t get rid of everything,” he again reminds anyone headed home to their own backyard. He means the hollow stems, but he could as easily be speaking of a hundred‑year‑old schoolhouse, or a neighborhood some had written off as blighted. In Anderson, on this strange not‑quite‑spring morning, the experiment lies in seeing what happens when you decide, gently but insistently, to keep things alive.