Tyrone Irving Jr. learned everything he knows about gardening from Garden on Mars and the woman who ran it, Jeannette Bell.
Before Bell started her community garden across the street from his house in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, Irving only grew grass. Now, after nine years, he has his own garden, chicken coop and bird feeders.
”She got me keeping it going, and it looks real nice over there,” he said. “So it's been a blessing to me and my kids to learn other things to do that they don't get to see in their lifestyle.”
He said her garden of fruit trees and vegetables has been a huge benefit to him and his neighborhood, where 70% of residential land is covered with vacant lots. Not only does the garden provide a shady green space for his neighbors, but Bell also uses it to teach community members how to grow their own food.
“Everyone know her. She take care of everything, keep it clean,” said Irving, “And it just gives other people inspiration around here.”
But Bell’s time stewarding this land has come to an end, and it wasn’t a happy one. She was caught off guard when New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity (NOAHH), which owned the land, sold it.
”My frustration is that Habitat does not respect the people of this community,” she said. “ Because these were the only teaching gardens in the community.”
Devin Wright, Deputy Director of Producers and Sustainability at Sprout, a local organization that supports small-scale farmers, said this is an example of a larger problem with the perception of urban agriculture in New Orleans.
“Urban agriculture is seen as a temporary land use. That ends up meaning that these multi-year-long, land stewardship projects get pushed to the wayside and are often underconsidered when land transitions happen,” she said.
While the struggle to keep land is nothing new for growers in New Orleans, the problem has received more attention lately, as growers turn to social media and public support for help.
In January, Gloria Ward asked the public for help saving her Treme garden. Though she wasn’t able to reach an agreement with the landowner, the response allowed her to find a new home for the garden in the Lower 9th Ward. In the past month, after raising awareness on social media and a petition with more than 2,000 signatures, volunteers running Frenchmen St. Community Garden in the South 7th Ward were able to pause the sale of the garden’s land.
Frenchmen St. Community Garden
According to volunteers and neighborhood residents, Frenchmen St. Community Garden has existed on the corner of Frenchmen & Marais in several iterations since before Hurricane Katrina. When the lot became overgrown and blighted, neighbors would come in and clean it up over the years.
“ I used to live right across the street over there,” said Austin Fontenot, who has lived in the South 7th Ward for 40 years. “I used to come in with my weed eater and try to keep the weeds down. Then other people came in. They was planting stuff in there.”
This is called “guerrilla gardening,” or gardening on a space without explicit permission from the landowner, or even an informal agreement.
“Guerrilla gardening has a super long history in this country, globally, and in this city in particular — in terms of a post-Katrina fabric of vacant land or land that was either temporarily or permanently abandoned,” said Wright. “That situation is precarious, but it's ultimately an attempt to make something better for the community.”
The latest version of the garden started in 2019. It now produces fruit, vegetables and chicken eggs, which are distributed to elders in the neighborhood and garden volunteers for free, according to volunteer Ashley Schneider. Some of it is sold occasionally to cover costs.
“ We’re very DIY, very collaborative. We really shift the space according to the needs of the neighborhood,” said Schneider.
Matt Campbell, the incoming president of the New Marigny Neighborhood Association, said the garden also brings much-needed green space — a priority of the association.
“The neighborhood itself, the goal is to have more foliage, have a more invested-in looking area, that’s cooler, that is better able to manage water,” he said. “And this community garden is a cornerstone of that effort.”
Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) owns the land the garden is on and received the lots in 2008 from the city. Recognizing the precarity of their situation, volunteers said they repeatedly tried to engage NHS over the last four years to enter into a formal agreement by signing a lease or buying the land.
In 2023, they raised the money and made a cash offer of $30,000 for each of the three lots, which NHS rejected.
But in May, NHS put two of the lots up for sale for only $15,000 each.
“ It was at once both devastating and deeply disappointing to see it happen when I saw the price that was half of what we offered three years ago, and at the same time, something that I've mentally been preparing for,” said Schneider.
In response, volunteers contacted the city to stop the sale and used social media to garner attention. A petition to save the garden got more than 2,000 signatures. Mayor Helena Moreno’s office then responded to the volunteers last Thursday.
“The City is currently reviewing the extent of the mayor’s authority in this matter, but Mayor Moreno’s position is clear: if she has the authority to approve or disapprove this sale, she will not approve it. The administration is aware of the concerns that have been raised, and those concerns are being taken seriously as the city evaluates the matter,” the Mayor’s Office said in a written statement to WWNO.
Schneider said the mayor’s response shows the community that the issue “is a priority for them, and that they're serious about the future of green spaces.” Moving forward, Schneider said the garden hopes to partner with the neighborhood association to find the right model — potentially a community land trust model — for continued operation.
NHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Garden on Mars
Jeanette Bell did not have the fortune of turning to the city to stop the land sale for her garden, Garden on Mars.
According to Bell, she was originally gardening on six lots owned by NOAHH. In 2021, the nonprofit took back five of them and agreed to extend the lease for the current lot for $1 annually.
NOAHH officials said the extension expired in September 2024, while Bell said it expired in the fall of 2025. Bell said she did not receive a written agreement, and NOAHH did not provide the lease extension to WWNO to confirm before the publication of this story.
“There was very little paperwork involved in Habitat transactions,” Bell said.
“Handshake agreements” where there is no official paperwork are extremely common for urban gardens, Wright said. They can take many forms — including allowing a lessee to stay on the property past the expiration of the lease — but these kinds of agreements can go wrong quickly.
“Aside from not having any kind of legal defensibility — which is ultimately where the buck stops in these kinds of situations — it really ends up being kind of like a relational challenge,” Wright said. “Because it really quickly boils down to ‘he said, she said.’ And it's really easy for folks to misremember the terms of an agreement that they made a year ago.”
In late 2025, Bell said she reached out for another two-year extension so she could continue a program on the garden in partnership with Southern University that certified growers in sustainable urban agriculture.
She sent a description of the program and its successes so far, including graduating 27 students, to NOAHH. According to a text message between Bell and an employee reviewed by WWNO, NOAHH asked her in January to send over details for a new land use agreement. She said she was still waiting on that paperwork when she learned that the land had been sold.
Bell said she wasn’t aware the property was up for sale.
“ I found out that it had been sold when a neighbor called and said that she had encountered someone on the property, and she was questioning why they were there,” she said.
Adrian Allen, a lifelong resident of the Lower 9th Ward, bought the lot from NOAHH. He had already purchased one of the original five lots with one of Bell’s gardens.
“At no point did Ms. Bell indicate any interest in purchasing the property, to NOAHH or to Mr. Allen, who purchased the property in Spring of 2026,” a spokesperson for NOAHH said in a written statement to WWNO.
Allen said he grew up surrounded by gardens pre-Katrina, so he bought this property to make sure this one stayed in use for the community. He said he asked for Bell’s permission before purchasing it.
“I didn't put my name on a contract. I didn't have a purchase agreement. I didn't do anything until she told me that it was OK,” he said.
Bell said she did have conversations with Allen about potentially buying the land, but didn’t know his timeline. She said NOAHH should have contacted her directly before making the sale and given an opportunity for those who put work into the garden, such as some of the surrounding neighbors, to buy it.
“After 9 years of my being here and working and improving this property, they felt no obligation to contact me and say anything,” she said. “Not even after the sale, no one contacted me.”
Meanwhile, Allen sees it as a good thing that NOAHH moved so quickly on the sale because acquiring lots in New Orleans is typically a much more difficult and slow process, especially when working with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority. He sees it as a barrier to revitalizing the vacant land in the Lower 9th Ward.
“ If they would just sell all that property to people who wanted to do stuff with it and let them do it, it would be gone,” he said. “Properties would be bought. Farmers would buy the land. Homeowners would buy the land. People would extend their backyards.”
Allen said he is still open to working with Bell on maintaining the garden, but Bell said she has decided to focus on running her other flower garden business Uptown.
Wright said it can be painful when handshake agreements like the one Bell had with NOAHH go wrong, because gardens require a large investment to maintain.
“ Ms. Jeanette has put in just an unfathomable amount of time into all of these lots,” she said. “It's a really easy situation to be really deeply hurt by because you have invested so much time and energy and effort in building something that is pretty misunderstood by a lot of different people.”
There is often an unequal power dynamic, too.
“The landowner has all of the legal recourse and all of the power, and the land steward has essentially zero power, zero recourse besides making a stink about it on social media or through public media,” she said.
That method has worked out for gardens like Frenchmen St. Community Garden and Ms. Gloria’s Garden. But Wright said the city could be doing more to prevent these situations by creating easier pathways for growers to acquire vacant land.
”It would just be so much nicer if we had better systems for how to legitimize urban agricultural projects and how to support operations,” she said. “Not having to get to that point where people have to expend a ton of resources and social capital and call on their neighbors to try and prevent bad things from happening.”
