Volume 1 No. 2 Fall 2013
LENI TUDE News from Cultivating Community
CULTIVATING
COMMUNITY
Students from Portland’s East End Community School get ready to dig in at their school garden.
CO NT E N T S 1
Cultivating Community News The Greening of Our Schools
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Focus on the Farm Summer 2013 at the Packard-Littlefield Farm
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The Greening of Our Schools
Community Cultivators Elizabeth Tarasevich of Brentwood Farms Community Gardens
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Cul ti vating Community News
Upcoming Events Plenty: Join us for Cultivating Community’s Fall Celebration
Cultivating Community Youth Growers harvest kale at the Boyd Street Urban Farm.
Cultivating Community came into existence in 2001. One of our first initiatives was to join with Portland Public Schools (PPS) to launch a comprehensive school-garden-based program: teaching students to grow food; teaching the elements and practice of good nutrition; and promoting healthy local foods in school cafeterias via Maine Harvest Lunch Week as well as seasonal school-garden-based eating. Laura Mailander is Cultivating Community’s Urban Agriculture and Community Gardens Specialist, and she came to us with several years of classroom-based experience. “Classroom education can be so decontextualized, but garden-based education contextualizes
everything,” Laura says. “I think that the experience of digging out potatoes changes who students are. They enjoy the active learning. More kinesthetic learners are reached. And while the garden-based experience is transformative in itself, it also enables students to deepen their understanding of how food reaches us through agriculture and food systems in our country. They get the value of taking part in the local, sustainable food system.” Today, Cultivating Community provides garden and classroom-based education, garden club leadership, and garden-based events with outreach to 1,142 students at five Title I Portland elementary schools—Howard C. Reiche Community School, Presumpscot Elementary, Riverton Elementary, Ocean Avenue Elementary, and East End Community School. We also reach out to students’ families by operating farm stands at two school locations. Continued on Page 6
C o m m un i t y C u l t i v a t o r s
Elizabeth Tarasevich of Brentwood Farms Community Gardens Brentwood Farms Community Gardens is located on two acres in Deering Center, Portland, on the site of the original Brentwood Farms owned by the Risbara family. Beginning in the 1920s, Clement Risbara used heated greenhouses to grow tomatoes and cucumbers yearround, anticipating the current push for season extension by nearly a century. Then the Depression hit, drastically reducing the Risbaras’ sales. The family lost the land on a tax lien to the City of Portland, and the lot sat largely untouched for decades. Today, the site is productive again, a beautiful urban garden graced by birds and sunlight. Amidst nasturtiums, marigolds, and a few tomatoes and sunflowers, we interviewed Elizabeth Tarasevich, who helped found the community garden and who heads up its management committee. What is the value of a community garden, in your experience?
People think the value is in the land, and that’s true. But it’s also in gardening together. Community gardens unite people with diverse expertise and a range of gardening experience, and we learn from one another. For example, at our gardens, we have a landscape architect among us who helped us grid out the property once we got permission to use it, as well as Master Gardeners from the Cooperative Extension program who’ve taught workshops and who mentor newer gardeners.
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I find it interesting that community gardens are springing up in rural areas where land is plentiful. People are discovering that to garden, you do need space, but what you need more is other people. What is the greatest challenge in starting a community garden?
Identifying and securing a piece of land and building support for people growing food communally there. Enlisting a neighborhood association can help. Typically, they’re incorporated 501(c)3s, which provides a sense of identity and allows you to fundraise to cover
startup costs. But if you can’t find a piece of land that seems unwanted, you can try thinking about property ownership differently. Perhaps you can garden in someone’s uncultivated backyard and share the produce with the owners. How is your community garden organized, and how have the gardeners organized themselves?
We have three levels of involvement: 68 individual 10’ by 10’ plots; 20 smaller common share beds where people don’t have their own area, but sign up for shifts and work and
Plenitude is published quarterly by Cultivating Community. Each year we help dozens of new Americans build farm-based businesses; we strengthen the leadership and advocacy skills of hundreds of young people; and we connect thousands of Maine families with affordable access to a nutritious diet. All of our work is rooted in building a strong, sustainable, and local food system, and we couldn’t do any of it without the support of people like you. To make a donation, please visit cultivatingcommunity.org and click the Donate Now button. Thank you!
www.cultivatingcommunity.org
Cultivating Community 52 Mayo Street, P.O. Box 3792 Portland, Maine 04104-3792 T: 207.761.GROW F: 207.541.GROW E: info@cultivatingcommunity.org
Above: Sharing the work and sharing the harvest are cornerstones of Brentwood Farms’ philosophy. Below: A birds-eye view of the garden.
share the produce; and, finally, we have community gardens in which we cultivate larger plants, such as fruit trees and vines, potatoes, asparagus, and, in the children’s garden, corn. As for the gardeners, we have a management committee, a four-person compost team, and a fruit team. We have workdays at the beginning and end of the season when we might work on our fence or our shed or weed or work on the compost heap.
The gardeners pay fees—$35 per year for individual garden plots and $20 to participate in the common share program. What else would like to tell us?
There is so much that can be accomplished together. In these first five years, our focus has been on building the garden. In the next five years, we hope to expand our gardening programs for new gardeners, as well as share what we know about growing
our food. We’ve had fun here with the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook. It’s amazing how many people participate. Farmers name and describe their seeds, and you write them and tell them what you want to use their seeds for, and they sell some to you or they don’t. I love the idea of farming for seeds, maybe growing several generations of a seed for a plant you really know. It’s a heritage you can share. In a way, we are circling back to the time of the Risbaras and to the days of WWII, when there were victory gardens in this neighborhood. I think today’s community gardeners are getting back to their roots. CC
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Learn about the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook: http://www.seedsavers.org/
Volume 1, No. 2 • Fall 2013
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F o cu s On T h e F a r m
Summer 2013 at the PackardLittlefield Farm Cultivating Community operates Maine’s largest incubator farming training program at the Packard-Littlefield Farm in Lisbon. Originally 80 acres, this farm, which has belonged to the Littlefield family since 1853, now encompasses 402 acres, 260 in managed tree growth, 90 in hay production, and 30 leased to Cultivating Community and farmed by New Americans. The whole farm is permanently protected by agricultural conservation easements held by the Androscoggin Land Trust. planted reflect the grower’s individual marketing plans. For example, this summer, some tried fennel, parsnips, celeriac, sage, and oregano, as well as more traditional crops. Meanwhile, Congolese farmers grew crops not
P h oto co u r t e s y A M Y T E M P L E
Volunteer to spend a day working at the Packard-Littlefield Farm, and you’ll join our New American Sustainable Agriculture Project (NASAP) participants growing vegetables on their own plots. Crops
Farmers in the NASAP training program grow many vegetables, like tomatoes (above), that most farmers’ market customers would recognize, as well as varieties such as African eggplant or amaranth that appeal to more adventurous palettes or that are popular sellers in Maine’s burgeoning ethnic markets.
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GET INVOLVED
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Cultivating Community’s farmer training program is specifically for New Americans, but Maine offers plentiful resources for any beginning farmer. • The Beginning Farmer Resource Network (http:// umaine.edu/beginning-farmerresource-network/), of which Cultivating Community is part, provides a great first point of contact for new and aspiring farmers to identify information and resources that will help them grow their businesses. • The USDA hosts a clearinghouse of similar information but covering the entire country at www.start2farm.gov.
normally seen in America: African types of eggplant that don’t resemble Italian or Asian varieties, as well as leaf amaranth, both big sellers in African immigrant communities. Our Lisbon farm is a dynamic place. This fall, nine farmers will graduate from NASAP, while individuals from Congo, El Salvador, and Somalia joined last winter. Farming organically, the growers supply the vegetables for Cultivating Community’s CSA (we had 300 CSA customers this season) and farm stand programs, as well as for 18 wholesale
P h oto c o u r t e s y A M Y T E M P L E
Christine Pompeo, who markets at the Deering Oaks Portland farmers’ market as well as to her CSA, will graduate from NASAP this year. She’ll be sharing some of what it has been like for her to farm in Maine at Plenty on October 24 (see p. 6).
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A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. —May Sarton
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accounts. Just as importantly, they grow vegetables to sell through their own retail businesses at 20 Maine farmers’ markets and elsewhere. The 2013 growing season has not
been an easy one. The weather has been challenging with a cool spring, double the normal June rainfall, and cool punctuated by hot humid spells after that. Currently, we have dry and cool conditions that are not the most nurturing for slow-growing vegetables. In addition, pest pressure meant some crops had to be planted three or four times. However, people managed to recover from setbacks, the growers kept yields up (the fall veggies are coming up well as we write this) with an expanded range of veggies, and the farmers increased sales over last year’s level (in the last three years, NASAP farmer sales have grown by a factor of ten). New farmer Jesus Hernandez says about this growing season, "For us, it was special. We didn't earn much economically, but we learned a lot about the farm and market. Many
thanks to Cultivating Community staff. We are eager to continue if given the opportunity. Thanks, and God bless you all." All of us associated with the farm want to thank our friends in the community for supporting our growers via our CSA program, our farm stands, all your participation in the local, sustainable food system, and donations to Cultivating Community. We would also like to thank the many groups that participated in volunteer workdays at the Lisbon farm this year, including Bowdoin students, Procter and Gamble employees, members of the Bahai faith, and members of the Waldorf School community. If you would like to bring a group to work at one of our farms next growing season, please shoot us an email at info@ cultivatingcommunity.org CC
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The Greening of Our Schools (continued from Page 1) In addition, we’re collaborating on a farm-to-school transformation in all PPS cafeterias that touches the lives of 7,000 students. Led by food service director Ron Adams, this effort promotes local foods year-round. One element of this effort is to increase the proportion of dollars spent on locally sourced foods in the food service budget—with the
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I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me. —Robert Brault
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target of allocating 50% of food dollars to local foods by 2016. Achieving this will require 60% student participation in school lunch. To build participation, this year PPS has designated every Thursday as Buy Local Day featuring delicious local food lunch options, and parents can support the local food effort by encouraging their children to buy lunch at school on Thursday. It’s important to note that when students buy healthy local foods at school, they are not just gaining a taste and nutrition boost. Their purchases help our neighbors, the Maine farmers who’ve invested their lives in the local, sustainable food system. We are fortunate in this community because so many of the benchmarks for successful farm-to-school transformation have already been
achieved: the PPS food service director has built the infrastructure and skilled staff that scratch cooking requires; there are already strong relationships between school food service and purveyors of local meat, fish, dairy, and produce; there is already a network of school gardens and trained garden and nutrition educators embraced by teachers and administrators. To contribute to this process, Cultivating Community will continue to provide young people with as much experience-based education as we can. It doesn’t work if healthy food just shows up in cafeterias. We need to give young people the tools they need to value that food, in part by grounding them in rich gardening experiences. CC
u p c o m i n g e v en t s
Plenty: Join Us for a Fall Celebration What does Plenty mean to you? Come celebrate the bounty of the harvest season with Cultivating Community and friends. Join us at Mayo Street Arts Center on October 24th at 7 – 8:30 PM. Our end-ofseason celebration will bring together farmers who have grown our food this summer, the marvelous young people in Cultivating Community’s programs (they grow food, too), and our many and diverse friends in the community. We’ll provide the libations and hors d’oeuvres (featuring locally grown produce, of course), and we’re putting together a short program, too, honoring the farmers in our lives. Above all, we see this as an opportunity to embrace old friends and make 6
new ones. Please save the date and tell your friends. You won’t find a more joyous celebration anywhere. Mayo Street Arts Center is at 10 Mayo Street in East Bayside in
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Portland. We are accepting rsvp’s via email. Please contact Lesley Heiser: lesley@cultivatingcommunity.org if you are able to attend. CC