We recently connected with Ashley Webb and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ashley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

In 2017, my family and I moved to 9th Ward New Orleans from North Hollywood, Ca. One of the first things I noticed was the lack of grocery stores or any stores really. I had only heard of food deserts before, but living there, showed me first hand what being in a food desert is like. We’re lucky in that we had cars and could drive the 10 minutes to the closest grocery store, but for poor folks who rely on public transportation, you either have to get what you can from a corner store (most sell can goods, but not fresh food) . We were already beginner gardeners (we started a community garden in response to living in a food desert), but once the pandemic hit and with the food shortages, we started up our farmer’s market called Barcelo Gardens. We initially were during markets once a month, but now we do them daily.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Ashley and I am the co-owner of Barcelo Gardens (along with my husband). We are a community garden and fresh market in 9th ward New Orleans and in Napoleonville, LA. We set up farmer’s markets in those places during the pandemic in response to them being food deserts. Our goal is bring food to food deserts. We started off in 9th Ward (a historical black neighborhood in New Orleans that was hit hard from Katrina and is only just getting it’s footing to come back) and grow to add Napoleonville (a small rural village of about 600 people, alot of them low income). We grow food, we get produce from local farmers’ and we have vendors on site. We recently opened up a permanent fresh market space, so that we’re available more than once a week. I’m most proud of how much we’ve been able to grow and push ourselves. I didn’t imagine being a farmer’s market owner and slinging veggies, but here I am, and it’s rewarding.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

The biggest thing that has helped us build a positive reputation is honesty. It would be easy to just tell our customers that we grow all the vegetables, but we don’t. We are only learning how to farm on a larger scale and we make mistakes. So as we are learning, we show people, and we also show people where we get our produce from. Some farmer’s lie and say they grow it all. It’s hard to do it all and our customers like our transparency and it has helped us grow faster than I think we would have otherwise.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We bought a property on auction, so that we could build our permanent space, We did a go fund me, we were all ready to start building and boom, our zoning was mislabeled and we couldn’t build on the property after all. We decided to go through the whole zoning change process. It took support from our followers, from our go fund me supporters, and local leaders, but we were able to get the zoning changed to allow for local markets (public markets) in that zoning. It was a huge win and a huge relief when that happened. It delayed our build by a year, but being able to go against “city hall” and win, is a thing I’ll always remember.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @barcelogardens
• Facebook: facebook.com/barcelogardens

Image Credits
All photos taken by me or my husband.