On a warm morning in late August, Myeasha Taylor wades down a row of nearly waist-high greenery at Black Butterfly Farm, a teaching urban farm on 6.7 acres in Curtis Bay that’s part of the nonprofit Farm Alliance of Baltimore. Taylor, the farm’s education and production manager, picks a handful of ripe fish peppers—bright red chiles about the size of small jalapeños—from among the 100 “row feet” of plants running down the plot between columns of indigo, flowering okra, and red amaranth taller than she is. Bees weave through the summer air. Butterflies alight on the tallest sun-drenched plants.

“This is our little ancestral crop section,” says Taylor as she lifts a tangle of vines woven through a line of near-invisible trellises. Most of the peppers are still the same shade as the leaves surrounding them, some are painted in stunning kelly-green and orange stripes, some are vermillion, still others the color of butter. A few are white, a distinction that gave the fish pepper its name, as it was favored by cooks in 19th-century Chesapeake Bay oyster and crab houses for use in their fish stews, disappearing into pale, creamy soups, and before that, in Black communities in the Mid-Atlantic where the peppers were grown and used in fish and seafood cookery.

That fish peppers are now growing in this South Baltimore field, are being sold at the 32nd Street Farmers Market, and are on the menu of such places as Blacksauce Kitchen, Artifact Coffee, and Spike Gjerde’s Woodberry Tavern—where they’re used so liberally, the peppers have their own mis en place containers at the chefs’ stations—is largely because of Denzel Mitchell Jr.

Mitchell, the Oklahoma native who is one of the founders of the Farm Alliance and is currently its executive director, got interested in urban farming 15 years ago. That was also when he first learned about fish peppers from a local farmer. He had never heard of them.

“So, I go home, I look up the fish pepper, and find out that it’s intrinsically connected to the enslaved African experience in the Chesapeake. It has a storied history in Maryland,” says Mitchell.

Captivated, he went to local nurseries and farmers markets, thinking he’d have no problem finding the peppers—but to his surprise, no one was growing them. It was as if the pepper, once so widely found in fish houses that it was named after them, had disappeared.

Mitchell is a cook at Blacksauce Kitchen, the Remington restaurant he helped Damian Mosley open in 2016 that specializes in barbecue and biscuits. Blacksauce uses fish peppers in a house-made hot sauce, in fish sandwiches, in mayonnaise, and in other seasonal preparations. As he shares his fish pepper origin story from Blacksauce’s tiny dining room, he pauses, disappearing into the back and returning with a Mason jar of pickled fish peppers. He opens the jar, adding a few peppers to a dish of curried chickpeas on a Trinidadian flatbread known as bara. The peppers are fruity, floral, with a heat similar to a serrano—spicy but not bitter.

“The story of the fish pepper really spoke to me,” he says, lifting more peppers from the jar. “It was an homage to enslaved African foodways, and that influence in Chesapeake Bay cuisine, that connection to the cuisine in this region—it was the most popular pepper in the fish houses, so there’s this heritage.”

Mitchell’s initial research led him to the culinary historian Michael W. Twitty, author of the James Beard Award-winning book The Cooking Gene, who specializes in traditional African-American foodways. Twitty had curated an African-American heritage seed collection, the first of its kind, with the Landreth Seed Company. (Founded in Philadelphia in 1784, Landreth is the oldest seed company in the U.S.)

Twitty theorizes that Haitians fleeing the Haitian Revolution, a rebellion of the enslaved against French colonial rule in the late 1700s, initially brought fish pepper plants to the Mid-Atlantic, where the peppers were grown by enslaved Africans and became popular in Black community cooking and later among regional fish houses. Then by the early 20th century, due to urbanization and changing food styles, the pepper was largely forgotten, absent from regional cookbooks, missing from farms, and impossible to find in the ground.

“When you’re erased from history, what can you do? Things disappear because people get exhausted, even when things taste good. It’s simply not worth the time anymore,” says Twitty, speaking, of course, not just about the trajectory of the fish pepper.

The preservation and subsequent rediscovery of the pepper happened largely by accident. Sometime in the 1940s, a Black artist from southeastern Pennsylvania named Horace Pippin traded some fish pepper seeds with Pennsylvania beekeeper and seed collector H. Ralph Weaver in exchange for bee stings to treat his arthritis. (Bee stings have long been used as a therapy for joint pain.) Years later, that beekeeper’s grandson, food ethnographer William Woys Weaver, found his grandfather’s seeds, realized how rare they were, started growing them, and introduced the seeds to the Seed Savers Exchange.

“They were in the freezer at my grandfather’s house,” says Weaver now, noting that properly frozen seeds will keep for many years. “I’ve planted corn frozen in 1999 and gotten 100-percent germination,” he says, adding that wheat can keep for 1,000 years. “He had them all in little baby food jars at the bottom of the deep-freeze. Probably my baby food jars because my grandparents raised me,” says Weaver. “I had [seeds] that nobody could find at that time.”

“THE STORY OF THE FISH PEPPER WAS AN HOMAGE TO ENSLAVED AFRICAN FOODWAYS.’’

Many years after that, Mitchell would order seeds whose lineage can be traced back to Pippin’s bartered handful and begin the next renaissance of the fish pepper in Baltimore.

Not long after Mitchell started growing his 21st-century fish peppers, he ran into Spike Gjerde—one of the foremost chefs in the region and the only Baltimore chef to have won the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Mid-Atlantic award—and the two got to talking about produce, as food people do. As Mitchell tells it, Gjerde stopped in his tracks when he found out what Mitchell was growing. “He was like, ‘Fish peppers! Fish peppers? Where? Can we go right now?’” Mitchell smiles, considering the jar in front of him, filled with its deeply aromatic crimson treasure.

At the time, Mitchell was farming on six vacant lots in Baltimore’s Belair-Edison neighborhood. “I only had 15 plants, but no one else was growing them,” says Mitchell, whose Five Seeds Farm, which closed in 2016, is now the site of Hillen Homestead’s flower farm. “Spike wanted to get Tabasco out of his restaurant and have a Maryland hot sauce that represented Maryland cuisine on Chesapeake oysters, grown by Maryland farms.” Gjerde bought all the peppers Mitchell had. Soon he was growing enough peppers so that Gjerde could start making Snake Oil, his own brand of hot sauce, a heady mixture of mashed fish peppers, cider vinegar, and sea salt that’s sold at Artifact Coffee and used in abundance at Gjerde’s restaurant, Woodberry Tavern.

Back at Black Butterfly Farm, Taylor says they’d recently started harvesting the season’s fish peppers—55 pounds of them had just gone to Woodberry. “They’re easy to grow. And they’re easy to pick; they just take a long-ass time,” she says, smiling under her broad sun hat.

For years, the Farm Alliance has been buying fish pepper seeds each season—these days primarily from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange—but this year, says Taylor, they’ll probably start saving some of their own seeds as well. “Seed saving is really important,” she continues, noting how the peppers were off the market for so long and that Farm Alliance gets funding for ancestral crops through a grant from the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education organization. The practice, of course, is also how the pepper survived in the first place.

Taylor surveys the adjacent crops—in addition to the amaranth and indigo, there are rows of sweet potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, and bright marigolds nestled below the amaranth like stray bursts of gold. Those crops will head to Farm Alliance’s market stall at the 32nd Street Farmers Market in Waverly, and many of the peppers will migrate to Gjerde’s kitchen.

“I became aware of fish peppers from reading about them, from accounts by Michael Twitty and William Woys Weaver, because they weren’t around,” says Gjerde, sitting on the patio outside his restaurant one afternoon. “I started asking people about fish peppers, and it was really Denzel who found me.”

When Gjerde went to Mitchell’s farm for the first time, the chef still hadn’t even seen a fish pepper, much less tasted one. “They’re bright, hot, not as aggressively spicy as habañeros, with a grassy quality. That was the first time I’d ever seen an albino [pepper],” Gjerde says. “We even tried to make a white hot sauce, but it was a kind of unappealing tan.”  Gjerde smiles ruefully as he considers the notion of beige hot sauce. “We’ve made green Snake Oil in the past, but we mostly just use the red. Anytime we’re adding heat or spice to cooking at Woodberry, it’s through pickled fish pepper, dried fish pepper, or Snake Oil.”

Although the production of Snake Oil paused during the pandemic, Gjerde says they’ve got a healthy supply of it, in the form of about 100 cases of bottles and 50 barrels of pepper mash, and he’s planning to jumpstart production soon. Gjerde likes the rather histrionic appeal of his hot sauce’s name, as “snake oil” has long been used to describe cure-all elixirs.

“It’s not hot hot. We always have to relieve people of the notion that it’s gonna, like, hurt them.”

He looks over his latest menu, cataloging the dishes that use fish pepper: on the deviled eggs and the crudites that make up the Tavern Board, in the scrapple musubi, the pit-beef carpaccio, the smoked-clam savory pie, the fried chicken, the crab cake, and the steak au poivre. So, most of the dishes on the menu? “Yeah,” he says, with a rather startled laugh, “now that you mention it.”

These days Mitchell is not the only local farmer growing fish peppers. Gjerde’s personal culinary obsession, running to thousands of pounds of the peppers a year, requires sourcing beyond the Farm Alliance’s fields, and has expanded to include One Straw Farm in northern Baltimore County, Heritage Acres Farm in Pennsylvania, and 78 Acres in Smithsburg, all of whom now grow fish peppers, too.

As more people have become aware of the cultural history and importance of local produce and demand has grown, more farms have added the peppers to their repertoire, including Sassafras Creek Farm in Leonardtown and Tomatoes, Etc. in Westminster, whose owner, farmer Jim Crebs, sells the plants at his family’s stall at the JFX farmers market during the summer. David Thomas, who with his wife, Tonya, runs H3irloom Food Group, a Baltimore business dedicated to exploring Black food traditions, plans to grow fish peppers at Gabriel Fields, their Upperco farm.

And fish peppers aren’t just at Woodberry. Chef John Shields, long a proponent of Chesapeake cuisine, uses them in a Haitian-style dish with blue catfish. And in Upper Fells, chef-owner Robbie Tutlewski of Little Donna’s ferments fish peppers and adds them to aiolis and sauces, and doses his crab and catfish stew with them—a fitting destination for the peppers, whose bright colors are no longer hidden in the pot.

Mitchell is circumspect when he considers the role he’s played in Baltimore’s current fish pepper renaissance, which is not so much the second regional revival of the pepper but the third.

“I think the first one was actually the 1810s to 1830s, during the enslavement period,” he says, tracing the pepper’s heritage back before the oyster and crab houses to when those cooks learned to add fish peppers to their soups from the Black communities who had grown the peppers in the first place. “It was in the Black enslaved service community, then in the Black culinary community,” Mitchell says.

“We’re talking about the peppers that were used with terrapin, blue crab, rockfish, oysters, and shad,” says Twitty. “This particular pepper comes to be associated with the genius of these Black cooks working in these fish houses,” he continues, noting the importance of pepper vinegar and pepper sauce.

In Twitty’s 70-page pamphlet, Fighting Old Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Marylanders, 1634-1864, he includes a recipe for fish pepper sauce; it’s also the second recipe in The Cooking Gene. That recipe, calling for fish peppers, kosher salt, and apple cider vinegar or rum, bears a striking resemblance to the ingredients in Gjerde’s Snake Oil, which is not a coincidence.

“It’s confirmation that food transcends all types of barriers; food is the connection. It’s pretty cool when you think about it,” says Mitchell. In Blacksauce Kitchen’s single dining room booth, he sits back, smiling. “I mean, there could be worse things attached to your legacy.”

DENZEL MITCHELL JR. 

Putting the “farmer” in Farm Alliance.

Every single Friday, the extremely hard-working Denzel Mitchell Jr., co-executive director of the Farm Alliance of Baltimore, walks the land—all 6.7 acres—of the new teaching farm near the Farring-Baybrook Recreation Center, tucked between Curtis Bay and Brooklyn.

Mitchell, who has a strawberry tattoo on his right hand, is pointing out the sweet yellow onions and garlic growing in neat rows, just past the apiary, where the greenhouse and fruit orchard will eventually reside, on the Baltimore City Recreation and Parks land the alliance hopes to lease. The nonprofit, now in its 11th year, currently has 17 farm members all within city limits with one exception—Catonsville’s Great Kids Farm, owned and operated by Baltimore City Public Schools. The Farm Alliance’s mission is simple but impressive—to support urban farms in Charm City through resource sharing, soil testing, marketing, technical assistance, plant giveaways, networking, and a co-op booth at the Waverly Farmers Market.

When Mariya Strauss tapped Mitchell to share her executive director duties this past January—she focuses on development and advocacy; Mitchell on education and operations—it was because she wanted the organization to finally be led by a farmer.

“She also wanted it led by a person of color, preferably Black, to represent the population of the city,” says Mitchell, who previously owned farms in Baltimore City and County with his wife. “It was the most beautiful and most stressful time of our life.”

That deep understanding of the literal blood, sweat, and tears that goes into cultivating land helps him better “serve farmers and address their needs.” The Farm Alliance’s newest program—The Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy—is a nine-month training program focused on sustainable agriculture methods and the business of owning a farm through classroom sessions and on farm work and field days.

“We’re teaching the business and practice of small-scale farming,” says Mitchell. The idea behind the intensive program is to produce a new batch of innovative and creative farmers, who will (hopefully) be Farm Alliance members, too.

ATIYA WELLS

Building a basecamp for young nature lovers.

Atiya “Tia” Wells is instantly likeable. The former pediatric nurse has an easy laugh and a foul mouth. She can always be found somewhere at BLISS Meadows—BLISS stands for Baltimore Living in Sustainable Simplicity—where she is the founder of Backyard Basecamp, an initiative to connect city kids with nature through exploration, play, and other educational programming.

Wells, who grew up “in the hood of Newark, New Jersey,” was not always a nature lover. The first time her now-husband, Kieron, took her on a walk in the woods she thought, “He’s gonna kill me.” But soon those hikes became a weekly ritual. It also helped Wells realize, “You don’t really need to travel far to experience nature or to be immersed in the outdoors.”

That eventually morphed into outdoor time with their children and then Wells starting the Baltimore chapter of the Free Forest School, a nonprofit that promotes unstructured outdoor play. Other parents would ask her questions and Wells realized, “If I’m going to be leading people outside, I should probably know what poison ivy actually looks like.”

She signed up for nature classes and workshops and observed time and time again, “I was almost always the only Black woman.” She couldn’t believe it since most of the classes were “in and around Baltimore—a Black-ass city.”

Wells started researching the why. “I learned a lot about environmental justice, food apartheid, and ancestral wounding or generational trauma,” she says. For many Black people it simply boils down to the belief that “the outside is no place for us,” says
Wells.

Around that time, Wells was exploring her own Frankford neighborhood and found what seemed to be a greenspace not far from her home on Moravia Road. It turned out the lot—which had been initially intended as a tiny homes’ community for the unhoused—was just sitting empty after permitting woes.

In the three years since, thanks to the generosity of the park’s owner, who donated the land to Backyard Basecamp, Wells has turned the 10-acre property into a city oasis that includes a pond full of loud frogs and trails where foxes and deer explore. There are also chickens, sheep, and goats, a garden full of leafy greens and potatoes, an eight-week summer camp, and after-school programs that have served over 800 kids.

A house that sits next-door to the property (and serendipitously happened to be empty) is now being turned into their headquarters thanks to a robust GoFundMe. The hope is the space will house an ample kitchen where Wells and her tireless staff will be able to show families how to prepare the vegetables they grow.

“Once I made the decision to fully commit to this project so many things just fell into place, almost like it was meant to happen,” says Wells. The land, the generosity of the park’s owner, the vacant house. “For everything to happen the way that it did—you can’t make it up.”

KATE JOYCE

Building resilience and job skills through farming at TALMAR Horticulture Therapy Center.

There’s something magical about TALMAR Horticulture Therapy Center, nestled in Cromwell Valley Park, just a few miles from I-695. The nonprofit, helmed by Kate Joyce, is a beautiful, 10-acre farm that provides a safe space for vocational and therapeutic programming in agriculture and horticulture.

On a bright Tuesday morning, some adults with autism are readying an area for loofah and mushroom growing. “Last week they did more than we expected,” says Joyce, who is the kind of person you’d want to share a beer with. (But be warned: By the end of the night, you’ll likely be her biggest donor.) “No more baby chores. Today we gave them real farm work.”

On another field is a group of veterans that are part of a 15-week Veterans Affairs (VA) Farming and Recovery Mental Health Services program.

“Those veterans are putting tomatoes in,” explains Joyce. “In two months, they are going to be harvesting tomatoes that they grew from seeds in a greenhouse—that’s spectacular.”

When the program is over, they’ll have spent 150 hours learning the basics of farming and that includes fieldwork, classroom time, and weekly group therapy that meets under the big oak tree.

“Everyone has their own reason for being here,” explains Joyce. The only criteria are they must be eligible for services within the VA Maryland Healthcare System and be physically fit enough to partake in farm chores. There’s also a gentleman who is in recovery from a stroke and uses TALMAR’s adaptive tools to work the land. (There’s a full-time occupational therapist on staff.)

“We have this brace he can put on over his arm so he can use the hoe and rebuild the conversation from his brain to his hand.” It’s often the same movements that would happen inside a rehabilitation facility but “being outside is different,” says Joyce, as sunshine bounces off the picnic tables and a flock of chickens strut around nearby.

“We want to be the go-to place for accessible farming,” explains Joyce, adding that no matter what someone’s limitations are they can be engaged in farming. For example, the greenhouse—which is being turned into a 12-month edible food forest with banana trees, strawberry plants hanging from the ceiling, fruiting tomatoes, and vining squash—is entirely wheelchair accessible with rolling tables to make for wide passageways.

There’s a quiet amazement here, says Joyce, whether you’re clipping peonies to sell, weeding, tending to the bees, or drying marigolds for a natural dye.

“We use the farm as a tool and a toolbox for therapeutic programs and the crops are just an output of all of those programs,” says Joyce. “Everyone is here hoping for the best for everyone else.”

Just weeks after Governor Hogan deemed farmers markets as essential businesses, allowing them to remain open throughout the coronavirus pandemic, a blow to the local food system landed with the announcement that the Maryland Farmers Market Association (MDFMA) would be closing its doors, effective this past Friday.

Citing financial challenges, the nonprofit organization lost one of its primary grants through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which was confounded by shifting funding availability following the outbreak of COVID-19, such as a hold on local agricultural dollars following Maryland’s mandated state spending freeze.

“For a small group that runs on a shoestring budget and is driven by passion, those grants can take you far,” says Juliet Glass, external relations director for the MDFMA, who is one half of the recent two-woman staff with market programs director Heather Hulsey. “We were working hard to find a sustainable path forward, but with the pandemic, it just became increasingly difficult. And we are not unique, there are small food system nonprofits across the country that are just a breath away from not being able to operate.”

Since its founding in 2012, the MDFMA has played a vital role for farmers, farmers markets, and the communities they feed across the state, acting as a sort of unofficial governing body. Over the last seven years, they’ve worked to improve fresh food access, such as increasing the number of markets that accept the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for low-income citizens to nearly 50 percent, and support the livelihoods for farmers, through the likes of promotion, advocacy, and financial assistance.

“From the beginning, they were a unifying entity,” says Beau Johnson, board of directors’ vice president for the 32nd Street Farmers Market in Waverly. “They really connected all of these little independent islands and brought us together as an extended farmers market family with a larger common goal.”

Farmers markets will continue to operate without the MDFMA, but over the last month, its value has become increasingly apparent in the face of a global health crisis. With empty grocery store shelves and growing support of local food, the organization has stepped up to educate farmers on how to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, with efforts including sharing COVID-related safety guidelines, creating a marketing toolkit for their newfound demand, and continuing to inform the public about how to participate in the local food system. Their Google Map directory of regional producers has been viewed more than 60,000 times since its launch in early March.

“The MDFMA was really the force multiplier for farmers markets,” says Mariya Strauss, executive director of the Farm Alliance of Baltimore, a network of urban farming producers and advocates. “They were the group that coordinated efforts and convened local food producers across the state, and they had the perspective to see what would benefit everyone. I’m worried about who is going to play that role going forward.”

Other local, state, and nonprofit organizations will work to fill in certain gaps, with support networks for regional farmers already in place at the likes of the Maryland Department of Agriculture, University of Maryland Extension offices, and Future Harvest, a regional nonprofit focused on sustainable agriculture.

“Our doors might be closed, but we’re still open for business,” notes Ginger Myers, Extension’s agricultural marketing specialist. “We don’t have a central clearing house anymore, if you will, and markets themselves are going to have to pick up the ball more to get the word out to their customers.”

“This is a symptom of a much larger issue,” says Dena Leibman, executive director of Future Harvest. “It’s just so ironic that at this particular time in our history an organization like the MDFMA can’t raise the funds it needs to keep going. It’s not their fault, the resources are really scarce, and our government just continues to underestimate the importance of a strong local and regional food system. It put all its eggs in a large global supply chain, and now we’re seeing the effects of that.”

Perhaps the MDFMA’s most important contribution, though, has been its Maryland Market Money program, an initiative that monetarily matches purchases made with federal nutrition benefits at participating farmers markets throughout the state. With just two markets when the program launched in 2013, there are now 36 involved across 11 jurisdictions, including the likes of the 32nd Street, JFX, and Druid Hill Park farmers markets in Baltimore City, with food insecure Marylanders spending $455,000 in federal benefits last year across some 461 farms.

“Losing a statewide incentive program is really hard and the people who are going to suffer the most are those on the lowest socioeconomic ladder,” says Glass. “For folks on a very limited food budget, a five-dollar match can be the difference of an extra meal. This helps people eat healthier food, and for farmers, those five-dollar purchases add up.”

The news came on the heels of the Trump administration’s attempts to cut federal food stamp funding that would have resulted in the loss of benefits by some 700,000 SNAP recipients nationwide, though in the wake of heavy criticism, the USDA has since backed off.

But with some city and county funding already secured for Maryland for 2020, the hope is that another local organization can incorporate Maryland Market Money into their work, and some groups have already expressed interest. Meanwhile, market managers like Johnson are scrambling to match the funding on their own.

“Not everyone understands the economies of scale of farmers markets, that prices might seem higher than at grocery stores, but the cost of production on a half-acre farm in Baltimore City or a five-acre farm in Baltimore County is very different than a 100-acre farm in California that sells wholesale,” say Neith Little, urban agriculture educator at the University of Maryland Extension in Baltimore City. “Maryland Market Money helped bridge the gap for customers with limited resources. It made it more possible for those on SNAP and WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) to participate in the local food system.”

Strauss sees this as a loss for the farmers themselves, too, noting that the MDFMA has been a steady source of resources, information, and technical assistance for Farm Alliance members. She recalls the way in which its staff would readily hop on the phone and walk their farmers through lengthy federal application processes for the likes of SNAP certification.

Even throughout this weekend after the association’s doors were officially closed, they continued to use social media to share updated coronavirus information and availability news, like the arrival of asparagus and strawberries.

“They were one of the few statewide groups that was really looking out for the smallest of the small farms and businesses,” says Strauss. “We are going to continue to grow food and bring it to market and hope that all of the good people around the state who are interested in having a sustainable local food system can come together and figure out how to fill this void. But losing the Maryland Farmers Market Association is going to be hard on all of us.”