Seed Money for Seeds

By Helen Brady, President, Friends of Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center

The receipt of a generous grant from the Community Catalyst Fund allowed the Friends of Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center, Inc. buy the necessary vegetable seeds, soil amendments and supplies to plant our first Community Supported Agriculture program.

Hilltop Hanover Farm and Environmental Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, is a regional education center that offers programs on healthy and sustainable food production, and teaches skills for small-scale suburban and urban farming, illustrating sustainable living practices for regional and local communities. The farm features demonstration models for backyard farming, rainwater harvesting, composting, and green-roof technology. Visitors can hike the farm’s 3.5 miles of woodland trails; picnic on the farm grounds; buy a CSA share, purchase produce from a farm stand and at U-Pick; or attend numerous classes and lectures. The Farm offers tours, classes and field trips to school groups, garden clubs, and scout troops, with specific emphasis on agricultural preservation, drinking water protection, and the promotion of environmental stewardship.  The farm is open to the public, harnessed 1,700 volunteer hours in 2010, and donated 4 tons (est. value $18,000) of produce to regional food pantries.

Purchased in 2003 by Westchester County for watershed protection, and agricultural education, due to budgetary constraints within the County the Farm lost 50% of its funding for the fiscal year 2011, the loss of funding eliminated the budget for seasonal employees and horticultural supplies. To save and support the Center, the Friends group was established in June 2010, with the goal of fully funding and operating the Farm. The Friends is working cooperatively with Westchester County to reach the goal within three years.

The $3,000 grant towards seeds, soil amendments and supplies was the “seed money” that allowed us to start a Community Agriculture Share (CSA) program of 100 members.   A CSA affords farm customers the opportunity to become farm supporters by committing before the growing season to buy a share of the farm’s produce, in our case members receive 20 weeks of vegetables from June to October.   This arrangement helps the farm better plan for the season, particularly in the area of staffing. Through the sale of CSA memberships the Friends raised over $60,000, critical income for 2011.  With the income we hired 6 local seasonal staff, and provided needed working capital.

It is clear that the financial return on investment for this grant is outstanding, but it is equally important to highlight the impact the grant has had within the community; local food, local involvement, and local jobs at a Farm that teaches sustainability.

Thank you Community Catalyst Fund.

A Community Harvest in Mansfield, CT

By Dr. Beth T. Gankofskie, Food Service Director

Mansfield Public Schools

With support from the Community Catalyst Fund, Southeast Elementary School’s Garden Project started last summer (2010), has continued through to this spring (2011), and will continue through the summer. The garden is a raised bed measuring 20 feet by 24 feet with a surrounding fence that is attached to the side of the school building.  It is conveniently located near the school kitchen and close to where the students exit the building for recess.  Often, students can be seen standing at the fence admiring produce such as strawberries, pumpkins, beans, eggplant, tomatoes, and green peppers, all at different stages of growth.

All of this did not happen by a miracle, but through school community partnership and old-fashioned “elbow grease.”  Initially, the lumber for the raised beds was purchased and then assembled by school staff.  High school students dug the fence pole holes and rolled and hung the wire fence.  The Town Recycling Coordinator helped sift compost that was used to enrich the soil.  In addition, the Town Garage delivered a load of top soil.  Together the raised bed was filled and enriched.  Seeds were purchased last year and again this year.  These seeds were planted in the school greenhouse by the students in the “Green Thumbs” Club, a second-grade teacher, and the Food Service Manager, who then placed seed starter kits all over available windowsills hoping to expand the garden with a “square foot” and “climbing” method for season 2011.

Last harvest season was very successful. Students were able to sample tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, rhubarb, squash, cucumbers, eggplant and beans.  This season is sure to be a success as well, providing the complete experience as a lesson.

Community Catalyst Fund helps Groton student garden expand and grow

By Chad Devoe
Guest Blogger
Groton Central School, Groton, NY   

    

Groton Central School is a rural district in the Finger Lakes Region of New York, with an enrollment of about 1,000 students. 2010 represented the third growing season for the GCS “Student Farm”. A year prior to its inception, we started a school-wide composting program (“Rot-in-Groton”) and composted on-site behind the school.

People started asking what would be done with the finished compost and a school garden seemed like the logical answer so students could see and take part in the complete recycling loop. We started with a 25’ x 25’ plot of grass that was roto-tilled into a decent garden. It was a rough and weedy start but it paved the way for future improvements. The garden attracted many volunteers since this was (and still is) the only community garden in Groton. 

 
“Rot-in-Groton” Composting Video (dated back a few years)

Teachers and students volunteered their time as well as the Groton Girl Scout Troop, Rotary Club, and Youth Department to improve this valuable asset. Some produce was (and still is) used at the student-run Groton Farmer’s Market. Most produce, however, is planned so that harvest occurs in spring and fall so as much food as possible is used in the school cafeteria, offering students fresh and local organic produce at no additional charge to them. This year we are providing lettuce, spinach, garlic, melons, string beans, peas, winter/summer squash, beets, corn, potatoes, peppers, onions, and tomatoes to the cafeteria. Our food service director is very supportive and appreciative of our efforts since he is a gardener himself. Some preparation will be done by study hall students this year to minimize any extra work for the food service workers. This is a great learning experience in itself.   

After two successful growing seasons, it was time for an expansion of the garden so that we could make a larger impact on cafeteria food choices. Clean Air-Cool Planet’s  Community Catalyst Fund helped bring about major improvements this year including a 20’ hoop house so we could extend our growing season by at least two months, a garden expansion to 45’ x 45’ with 23 raised beds, a new fence and gate, and the beginning of a fruit orchard. Additionally, the high school has added a 1/2 year science/health elective titled “Food, Land, and You”.   

Learn more about raised garden beds from Earth Easy

 This spring-semester class will focus on gardening and our food supply through the lens of sustainability. Funding will go towards purchasing supplies for this hands-on class including canning materials, fresh produce and ingredients for healthy cooking recipes, and seeds. These improvements would not have been possible without this funding! Future plans are to expand the fruit orchard, establish a bed of asparagus, and further integrate garden-based education into the curriculum.

Starting a national conversation – about food!

By Julie Munro
Climate Fellow,
Clean Air-Cool Planet

 
 

Julie Munro is working with Claire Roby in Oklahoma on Charting Emissions from Food Services (CHEFS) and Greening Tulsa. A new graduate of American University in Washington, D.C., she was “very active in campaigning for campus sustainability and I helped to establish a community garden, farmers’ market, and Clean Energy Revolving Fund on campus.

As a part of our work on CHEFS, we are also 1) creating momentum within corporate foodservice providers to green their own operations, and 2) contributing to the body of life cycle data for food production in North America. We have partially completed a first phase of piloting the new tool, but will also be undertaking further pilot testing with a revised version of the tool throughout 2010. Julie is coordinating the communications with each pilot site, recruiting new pilot partners, and synthesizing the outcomes into best practices and outstanding questions.

Julie is also at work in the office of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, where she is bringing the large-scale carbon accounting work with CHEFS to action and programming at the local level. Approximately one day per week will be spent supporting the Chamber’s “Tulsa Young Professionals” group with several environmental projects.

Here’s a question to chew on over your lunch break: Where does your food come from?

Several years ago, as I was assisting with a summer camp program at Southside Community Land Trust’s urban farm in Providence, Rhode Island, I posed this same question to the young, inner-city campers.  Cursory answers like “the supermarket,” “the refrigerator,” and “the drive-thru” (yikes!) started flying in all directions.  My mission for the summer was to instill in them that food actually originates in the ground, and that even as seemingly powerless children growing up in a sea of impervious surfaces, growing food in their urban environment was still possible. 

This summer, I have a new target audience – institutional food service providers – and I’m quickly learning that even environmentally minded answers like “our food comes from the ground” won’t cut it.  Clean Air-Cool Planet’s “CHarting Emissions from Food Services” (CHEFS) tool is an initiative that will assist campus-based institutional dining services to quantify the carbon impact of food production, processing, preparation, and disposal. As I investigate “life cycle assessment”  (LCA) of different foods in order to build a database for the CHEFS tool, I am realizing that beauty “life cycle” is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Much like another national (and perhaps a tad more controversial) debate demonstrates, there is always a question of when life begins. Consider a milk carton: If you asked one of the kids at the Providence summer camp, they might say the milk originated from lunch lady in the school cafeteria. If you asked an average person on the street, they might say the milk originated from the cow. If you asked me, I might say it originated in the cornfield that grew the primary ingredient for the feed that would eventually be fed to the cow that produced the milk. Or I might tell you that the milk originated at the gas station where the CEO of the Dairy Company stopped to fill his tank on the way into the office that day.  None of these answers would be wrong, but would any of them truly be right?

While these differences in life cycle perspective will make it infinitely more difficult to pinpoint values to use in the CHEFS tool, the major problem thus far has not been too much information, but rather, not enough information. The overwhelming majority of scholarly life cycle assessment reports about food come from Europe or Japan with data based on systems completely different from that of the infamous monstrosity bolstered by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Thus, the desperately necessary shift to a more environmentally responsible and less carbon-intensive food system in the United States will need to be a bottom-up approach. While we can’t all take the time to research and assess the life cycle of the food we eat, we can use the all-mighty power of consumerism to ignite a national conversation.  We at Clean Air-Cool Planet hope that the CHEFS tool will be a key part of that national conversation, starting with college campuses and instigating reforms up through the corporate food sector.  Understanding our impact is the first step to changing it, and it all begins with asking, WHERE did THIS food come from?

What does sustainability look like? What does it taste like?

By Harry Alper
Climate Fellow,
Clean Air-Cool Planet

Harry Alper is earning an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is involved in environmental justice efforts and “grateful for every chance to ride bikes with friends and to serve dinner on my front porch.”  He will be working this summer on The Seacoast Science Center’s Carbon Challenge – helping the Center to make the Challenge part of their climate education offerings. He will evaluate and assist in the successful cultivation of Northeast Science Center Collaborative.

Imagine we live in a truly and completely sustainable world. We don’t extract and burn fossil fuels. Everything we manufacture either decomposes, returning to the soil from which it came, or is reused and recycled indefinitely. We release no toxic compounds into the environment. Our countries do not wage war over scarce resources, our communities have ended structural poverty, and our varied cultures are fresh and participatory. This is the society I want to live in, and since you’re at this blog, it’s probably the society you want to live in too! And it looks different in many ways from life in the USA in the year 2010. How do we turn people on to this new world?

One of my tasks as CA-CP Climate Fellow at the Seacoast Science Center is to help the Center engage its visitors in solutions to global warming. Most of those visitors are elementary- and middle-school-aged children. I’d like to sit down with a bunch of six-year-olds and try to put environmentalism into context, to explain some of the connections between commercial media, consumerism, and climate change. But the issues are bigger than the attention span of a very young person asked to sit still and listen.

It might not work to just lay out the whole complex web, and hope the children will make sense of it all. Instead I’d like to send them off to have a taste of sustainable society. And as they grow, and hopefully continue to experiment in ecological living, they will come to their own understanding of sustainability and how to bring it about.

We can encourage fifth graders to sit down with an elderly neighbor and ask her, “What was this neighborhood like when you were my age? Was it sustainable? Why?” Parents can bring their elementary school kids to a nearby garden and help with the harvest (expect to hear, “Oh! That’s how asparagus grows?” or “That’s where eggs come from?”). As they turn sixteen we can encourage them to think about the places to which they drive. Could they walk or ride a bicycle instead? Try it! It feels better, no?

Arundhati Roy, Indian author and alter-globalization activist, said “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” I want to reach the children who visit the Science Center, help them to slow down and tune out the toxic din of television advertisements, and to try something new. Or old, as it would be…: Gardening.  Neighborliness. Peace.  Walking.  And if they receive enough support, and are left enough creative space, they may choose to usher in this other world, a world of global citizens with the knowledge and the care to solve global warming.

What’s your story of tasting sustainability?

CSA – Hooray!

Teal Tigner, Clean Air-Cool Planet

By Teal Tigner

Corporate Program Consultant

Clean Air-Cool Planet

I have always loved vegetables.  I’m probably the only 5 year old who asked for a dinner of steamed veggies … with a side of French fries, of course.  I mean, I was still 5 even if I DID love vegetables.  Fortunately, my love of veggies has continued into my twenties (so has my love of French fries, but that pesky metabolism thing mandates a reduction in their appearance).  And, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more adventurous in my veggie choices.  I’ve always loved okra, but moving to the East Coast 8 years ago gave me a whole new appreciation for squash varietals as well as rare, yet tasty, fiddleheads.  But this winter and spring I found myself in a veggie rut.  I was making the same spicy butternut squash boats and chicken parmesan stuffed acorn squash.  I needed to branch out, but my local Stop & Shop wasn’t inspiring me.  Enter my next door neighbors….

Last year, Kevin and Laura jumped on the chance to sow and reap the harvests of their own labors by signing up for a shared farm plot at Fodor’s Farm, right around the corner from us.  Sadly, my fiancé and I recognized that we would not have the time to manage our own farm plot, so we set out in search of another solution.   After talking to our neighbors, we heard about Stone Gardens’ Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program… and signed right up.  Each week for 22 weeks, we get a ton of basic fresh vegetables including multiple types of lettuce, bok choy, swiss chard, salad fixings, and kale.  In addition we get weekly “cool” vegetables, as I call them.  These are the different, seemingly exotic veggies that you cannot find at most supermarkets.   And, more often than not, you have to find a recipe in order to figure out what to do with them – although sautéing seems to be a safe bet for just about everything.  So far, my favorite veggie has been Kohlrabi.  Like the translation of its name implies, Kohlrabi is similar to a cabbage/turnip blend yet has the consistency of a potato (again with those French fries!).  While Kohlrabi tops my list of “cool” vegetables, that list literally changes every week as we get new and exciting grab bags of fresh produce.

What’s even better is that cooking dinner has become fun againl  For a while we were in a “couscous and salad” or “grilled chicken and salad” rut.  The CSA share has put us back in touch with our cookbooks and spice rack…and has added a creative element back into cooking.  In addition, we’re eating less because the produce is so flavorful.  Lettuce, that green watery stuff that rarely has its own flavor sans salad dressing, has layers of flavor.  Salad dressing is out the window.  Now I can have a delicious bowl of mixed greens and taste pepper, lemon, and grassy goodness just by munching my way to the bottom of the bowl.  And, because of the weekly herb plants we receive as part of our share, our backyard herb garden is exploding, making even my Sunday night Penne taste better.  But most of all, it means something to me that I know where my food comes from and who is behind its lifecycle.  I even e-mail with Monica, the lady who runs our CSA and is responsible for growing everything we’re eating.  That’s much better than simply exchanging pleasantries with the Stop & Shop check out lady.  Granted, our CSA goodies have dirt and the occasional garden slug on them.  But that’s an easy tradeoff when I consider the benefits of eating local, supporting local businesses, and increasing my overall well being.

Words From a Novice Vegetable Grower

Meg Giuliano

By Meg Giuliano

Climate Fellow

Clean Air-Cool Planet

Jenny, one of the garden managers at Strawbery Banke, is a practical, no-nonsense woman who really knows her stuff.  As I sat down to meet with her about my new community garden plot, it was as if she knew what I was going to say before I even opened my mouth.  I can’t quite remember how I had intended to begin the conversation (I was probably thinking something like, “So, I don’t have any idea what I am doing”) but she cut me off after my first word, saying, “You know more than you think you do.”

Perhaps…but I still wasn’t sure exactly where to begin.  I had just arrived at my home for the summer – Hough House, at the Strawbery Banke Museum – and unfortunately, I was a bit too late to plant from seed.  Worse, it looked like the other gardeners had set their plots into motion ages ago.  I knew in the back of my mind that all would be well in the end, but it was totally unclear to me how I was supposed to start.  So, I sat there, staring at my weedy patch of dirt.

Gardens are actually very familiar to me, from the wonderful smell of a tomato stem to the feeling of warm, damp soil on my hands.  I spent the summers of my childhood playing alongside (and in!) my parents’ extensive vegetable garden, a veritable forest of tomatoes and broccoli and eggplant and towering sunflowers. These days, during the academic year, I volunteer on local farms and organize community events at my graduate school that are centered on sustainable food and agriculture.

But this seemed different, somehow. Perhaps because this was my very own plot, my own “bit of earth,” as Mary Lennox called it in The Secret Garden (one of my favorite books as a child), and I alone was responsible for helping it to grow productively. Unless you count a failed attempt at city-style bucket-gardening in Somerville, MA a few years back, I had never tried to make a garden.  This time, it was my job to choose the plants and plan their spots, to think about how to use the limited space and nutrients and sunlight most efficiently.

For me, new things are sometimes intimidating, even when they shouldn’t be.  Maybe it’s because I am a perfectionist at heart, though my experiences as a scientist and teacher have taught me that nothing ever happens perfectly the first time.  When I don’t know what’s going on, I usually turn to books, and this time was like all the others – I went straight to the library and found a pile of books about organic gardening, kitchen gardening, growing food.  They were helpful, of course, but they still didn’t tell me exactly how to start, what to plant, or where to plant it.

I quickly realized that my fellow gardeners were going to be my best resource.  Jenny, of course, is full of knowledge and tricks and information, and some of the other gardeners have had plots in this place for ten years.  Yet, for these folks, each summer is a new and creative experiment – an adventurous endeavor in gardening. Each year, the community gardeners try to grow something new, or, better yet, something old in a new way.

In the end, we decided that I should go to the Portsmouth Farmers’ Market to buy seedlings, which I did two Saturdays ago.  I planted Sungolds and Brandywine tomatoes, red and green lettuce, bell peppers, basil, cucumbers, beans, kale…really, I just walked around and snapped up whatever caught my fancy.  After an hour or so of weeding and turning (being sure not to harm the tiny rogue seedlings of orach and dill that Jenny identified for me), I planted my little veggies and hoped for the best.

Now, a week and a half later, I have a couple of yellow flowers on the tomatoes, and everything is still alive and mostly thriving (yay!).  I’m looking forward to future hours of playing in the sun and dirt, and to the (eventual) harvest, and I’m excited to meet and learn from the other gardeners.  It turns out that starting a garden is not so hard after all.

Last year, I read a wonderful editorial by Michael Pollen in the New York Times, entitled “Why Bother?” In this piece, Pollen sets out a case for planting a garden, as one example of something individuals can do to simultaneously combat climate change and improve the quality of their own lives.  He closes with the following paragraph, which I think about whenever I check on my seedlings:

“At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools…The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit…suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”

The Greenhouse Effect in the Garden

by Adam Markham,
CEO, Clean Air-Cool Planet

It was brilliant last week to see Michelle Obama taking Michael Pollan’s advice to “rip out your lawn” and to begin a vegetable garden. Our family has ripped up a lot of lawn in the last fifteen years and it’s been a wonderful way to introduce our daughter to nature. She learned early on that food you grow yourself tastes transcendently better than anything you can ever buy in the shops. She’ll eat berries, tomatoes and peas straight from the bush and with the other neighborhood kids she can strip a row of lemon sorrel and a strawberry patch faster than a blue jay can crack an acorn. Once on the way to an agricultural show at the local Grange she ate my entire exhibit of prize runner beans – raw, before they got a chance to be prizewinners.

Gardens instill a lifelong love of the smells, sights and sounds of the outdoors – not to mention a healthy appetite for fresh produce. And there’s nothing like gardening to keep you in touch with the seasons. When we lived in Northern Virginia the summers were perfect for plump sun-warmed tomatoes and a dazzling display of zinnias, but the heat and humidity confounded our attempts to coax a show from some of the more sensitive perennials. Four years in New Hampshire taught me what a proper New England winter will do to lovingly nurtured rosemary and lavender plants. Kill them. No messing. Completely dead. Now, in our fifth southern Connecticut growing season we’re struggling to work out whether we are in gardening zone 6 as USDA says we are, or whether in fact global warming has shifted our old Virginia climate up to meet us and we’re now in zone 7 again.

Truth is, it’s not so easy to pin the climate down these days. It’s been a splendidly snowy winter in New England and January and February were surely cold enough for any fan of Robert Frost’s Winter Eden, but there’s no getting away from the fact that New England winters are losing their bite. University of New Hampshire scientists Elizabeth Burakowski and Cameron Wake have done the number-crunching to show that over the last 40 years winters have gotten warmer by an average of nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit. What’s more, the long-term trend is toward less snowfall and a lot less snow on the ground.

Global warming is changing the nature of our seasons and those of us with gardens can already see changes, harvesting our tomatoes later in the autumn and finding the occasional rose in bloom in December. But warmer winters are much less effective at killing garden pests and when you are an organic gardener like me, you want the weather to give you a big, Malthusian helping hand in keeping down the slugs and grubs.

Aside from warmer winters, I’m expecting drier and hotter summers, and that means more mulching the flower beds to conserve precious water and keep the soil cool and moist. The heat will send my spinach, arugula and lettuce to seed in a flash and it’ll encourage the mildew that plagues my phlox. No doubt too it will put paid to my ambition to have a fresh jar of gorgeously scented sweet pea blooms on the kitchen table every day from June to September, because if there’s one thing these beauties can’t stand it’s parched and overheated soil.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the vagaries of the seasons and the unpredictability of the weather. That’s a big part of what makes gardening fun. Climate change won’t stop me growing vegetables for the table – although there may be more okra and olives in future. But what global warming will do, unless we put the brakes on fast and hard, is change the New England climate so rapidly, dramatically and irreversibly that when my daughter teaches her children to garden, the seasons and weather conditions will be unrecognizable from when she was growing up. We’re taking a natural cycle, we’re playing with the atmospheric drivers without fully understanding the consequences and it looks as if we’re going to leave the next generation to clean up the mess.