Queer Food Growing Collective

Our Ecosystem

QFGC has four gardens throughout the Cape Flats and beyond. Our gardens are sites of resistance, where food is medicine and healing begins with the land. No one can be equal unless we all eat equally, and without nourishment, even medicine fails. Returning to the soil connects us with ancestral memory, challenges capitalist systems, and reclaims our right to thrive. Growing food is not just survival: it’s a political act of Black, queer, African liberation.

Oppie Yaart

Oppie Yaart is about restoring and learning Indigenous knowledge systems in the community, recalling our relationship with the land, with indigenous plants, and herbs. Oppie Yaart is about learning the land and cultivating food growing, teaching the soil, food, medicine, and community consciousness on the Cape Flats of Cape Town. The land is a form of healing for all of us.

Atlas

Atlas is a future garden site and holistic healing center rooted in community care and collective memory. It will hold workshops, language and indigenous medicine classes, and offer space for healing and generational trauma held in the body. At its core, Atlas is about reconnecting with the land, reclaiming identity beyond the colonial narrative, and remembering who we are through nature. 

Other Community Sites

If you’re interested in visiting our community garden sites or becoming part of the collective, we’d love to connect. Whether you want to grow, learn, organize, or simply be in the space, there’s a place for you here. Reach out through our contact form to join the work, access garden locations, or find out how you can support. This is community-led, land-based healing, and everyone is welcome.

Pan-African Connections:

The Queer Food Growing Collective is deeply rooted in Pan-African and African Diaspora solidarity and liberation. Through relationships with groups like Freedom Balconies in Kenya and Uganda, we recognize that our struggles and dreams are interconnected across borders. By supporting local partners such as the Paarl Organic Project in Mbekweni Paarl, Kuyenzeka in Bokmakierie, Athlone, and Oppie Yaart in Elsies River, we foster connections to land and green spaces that are vital for healing and food justice. These relationships affirm that queer, Black, and African futures are intertwined, and that collective food growing is a powerful and political tool of resistance and regeneration.