Community Sharecropping is a term coined by 📝John Zdanowski for growing plants cloned from a single parent plant, each labeled with a friend's name, tended by the grower and handed to that friend at harvest.
The practice starts from one plant. Cuttings that survive the winter are propagated into clones, and each seedling is assigned to a particular person rather than grown for the grower alone. Photos document each plant from seedling through pickup, so the recipient can follow its progress. The exchange is relational rather than transactional: no payment or share of the crop comes back to the grower, and what circulates is attention and connection.
The term plays on sharecropping, the tenant-farming system, common in the American South after the Civil War, in which a farmer worked land owned by someone else in exchange for a share of the crop. Community sharecropping inverts that arrangement: the grower owns the plant, does the work, and gives the whole harvest away. It sits alongside 📝Give What You Grow among John's co-op words, which recast familiar economic phrases around giving.
I keep making clones because it's fun. I think about each person every day while their plant is growing, and they think about me every time they benefit from the harvest.