Grid Magazine May 2020 [#132]

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These streets are made for walking

A vegan convenience store ramps up

p. 8

p. 24

Art exhibition visualizes climate change p. 28

MAY 2020 / ISSUE 132 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

T O W A R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

is spurring is is r c l a b lo g e How th social change

From 1973, when a few neighbors established Weavers Way, to reaching our 10,000th member household in 2020...

The Co•op

is

Community

First

www.weaversway.coop

Monthly Maker Susan Murphy Philadelphia, PA jawnaments.com @Jawnaments TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF I’m Susan Murphy, owner and founder of Jawnaments, Philly’s hyper-local ornament company. I’m a late bloomer at NextFab - but love the creative and supportive vibe there.

I started Jawnaments in my kitchen in 2017 and have since moved production to NextFab - making use of the laser lab and woodshop. Each Jawnament is made from original photos or art and laser cut from birchwood. I’ve evolved the collection from 4 to 14 in 2019 - with more planned for 2020!

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON? Since NextFab is closed due to COVID-19, I’ve been busy at home with my Fishtown Free Mask Project. I’ve been sewing FREE face masks for neighbors and clipping them to the fence in front of my house every few days. To date, I’ve given away over 250 masks with more to come! I’m also working on ideas for new 2020 Jawnaments and getting artwork prepped for fabrication later this summer.

WHAT’S THE HARDEST PART? Keeping up with demand! I’m constantly considering how to improve productivity so I can fulfill orders quickly during the holidays. This year I hope to stockpile inventory, and streamline the packaging process so I can mail orders fast!

Discover more stories nextfab.com/grid #nextfabmade

NextFab is a network of collaborative makerspaces.

North Philly South Philly Wilmington M AY 20 20

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1

EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by

alex mulcahy

You Are Not Alone

publisher Alex Mulcahy managing editor Alexandra W. Jones associate editor Timothy Mulcahy copy editor David Jack Daniels art director Michael Wohlberg business development Meredith Jones intern Francesca Furey writers Bernard Brown Francesca Furey Alexandra W. Jones Randy LoBasso Claire Marie Porter Meenal Raval Aaron Salsbury Lois Volta photographers Rachael Warriner Albert Yee illustrators Kirsten Harper Lois Volta published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850

In the shadow of the pandemic, we turn our attention to digging in the dirt, cultivating fragile but resilient life. They say planting a seed is an act of faith. How improbable it seems that seedlings will emerge, searching for the sun, thirsty for the rain.

The #CoopGardens movement invites us to take the leap of faith, to heal ourselves and the planet simultaneously, to believe in regeneration and have hope for the future. It asks us to see what we have, seek what we need and figure out how we can help.

If we didn’t know before, the pandemic has told us exactly what our deepest needs are. Food and water for sustenance, shelter for safety and one another for comfort. We are all suffering, and many are grieving; we have to lend a hand whenever we can.

I’d like to dedicate this issue to the memory of my neighbor Joanna’s mother, and to her daughter Elizabeth. May the sun keep you and your family healthy and warm. To the memory of everyone lost to the virus, and those who carry on without them. To my mom and the memory of my dad. To everyone who has taken the time to offer a tender word, cook a meal, send a card or make a phone call to someone in distress.

It gives one hope, like a seedling in an egg carton.

alex mulcahy Editor-in-Chief alex@gridphilly.com

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

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was leaving for work on my creaky old bike, which now you can hear on our vacated streets. I spotted my neighbor holding a newborn, seated in a folding chair in a sliver of sunshine.

“Congratulations,” I said, without rushing over. I would see her from no closer than 20 feet. She thanked me and said she was sunning her baby, hoping to keep the baby’s bilirubin down and avoid a trip to the doctor. Her baby was born just five days before.

Then she asked me how’s your family, and I paused for a second. Do I share my heavy news in this moment of joy?

“My father died,” I told her. “Complications from a surgery.” My voice faltered as I finished those words.

Sadness and grief from a fresh wound revealed itself, in her eyes, on her face. Just a few months before she lost her mother, she knew how I felt and was sorry for my loss.

Surely I would have hugged her if things had been different, but we kept our distance as we shared our pain.

Thirty minutes later I arrived at my office, thousands of square feet with nary a soul. And there in my inbox was a message from my neighbor. Could she make us a meal and leave it at our door?

For those of you with children, can you even imagine cooking for someone with a newborn in tow? It’s a small, heroic kindness I’ll never forget as long as I live.

Grieving in the time of COVID-19 adds a level of strangeness that’s hard to convey. Will the virus recede and allow for the mourning with family and friends that would comfort so much? The future is murky, and you just can’t make plans.

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COV E R IL LUSTRATIO N BY KIRSTE N HA RPER

One in three Philadelphians drink water from the Wissahickon Creek—which makes caring for our watershed a full-time job. Annually, Friends of the Wissahickon removes over 10 tons of trash, improves 50+ miles of trails, and conserves 1,800 acres of Wissahickon Valley Park to protect drinking water for the City of Philadelphia.

Join our mission as a member to help us continue to preserve Philadelphia’s premiere park. fow.org/membership

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by

lois volta

DEAR LOIS,

What can we do to reimagine our homes now that we spend so much time in them?

F

rom our homes, we can be a light.

I am not on the front line of this pandemic, but in my own quiet way, from home, I press on. Being at home has been a blessing and a curse for all of us. I am learning how to be resourceful, optimistic and a better listener. I have always promoted simplicity, but now I must put it into practice.

I believe that we all share a similar intention for our homes—they are places we can rest, restore and feel safe. But in these last few weeks, they have become drastically different places. It is jarring to work from home, homeschool the children and keep the family afloat and healthy while maintaining a sense of order. When the dining room table serves as a desk for two people, a surface for puzzles and the place where we eat together, it takes a massive amount of work to keep things under control.

While it is a huge change to suddenly have so many multifunctioning spaces in our homes, it is also an opportunity to address how these areas can be more efficient and holistic. We have to come to terms with this new way of living. Denial and frustration cost far more energy than taking a day or two to overhaul our common areas.

This work takes a lot of time but is worth the effort. When we channel our energy into making our homes more positive places to be, we can cope with the world in a different way.

There will be times when every room in the house needs attention, and I am hopeful that my family will work together to clean them up. I want this for every family. It is 4

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essential to find the bonds of love and security within our homes.

Decide what is important to you now and listen to what is important to the people you live with. Move on from hurt feelings and give yourself a chance to step up to the plate.

Our homes should be safe, where we find refuge in the midst of this pandemic. You will find that it feels good when you move on from hurt feelings, let go and begin to love again. As Leonard Cohen said, “Love’s the only engine of survival,” so we drop the useless garbage, evolve and show up.

With that said, it is important to know what personal vulnerability actually means and how to admit where you are wrong to

move forward. For me, I need to confront my bad habits, my harsh tone and keep my emotions under control. I also know that addressing my failures is difficult and I must come to terms with the versions of myself that I have pushed down because they are too painful to confront.

My kids are learning that I’m fallible but unbreakable. I might snap, but I also have learned to go into their world. I want my children to feel safe and provide them with what they need to get through this time as smoothly as possible. It is important for me to take the time to understand my children and their needs. I am finding myself falling in love with them again and again.

We adults of the house may be at odds with each other (to different extents) for days on end, but I know that having safe, conscious, mutually respectful relationships requires forgiving negative feelings that came before and honoring what positive things you do have. The hope is that our partners will be willing to look at themselves the same way to co-create a new type of camaraderie to weather this storm.

Each family has a unique experience with balancing work, family and entertainment all from one place. If we can keep the word respect at the tip of our tongues, we might be

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

TH E VO LTA WAY

IL LUSTRATIO N BY LO I S VOLTA

able to grasp the full spectrum of how we can be there for each other. Gender equality and division of labor might look completely different now; be open to talking with your partner (or other adults in the home) about how to work together. We don’t have to tear each other apart to build each other up. Take the time to encourage each other.

Showing up in our homes looks different for everyone. For me, I am showing up by using grace as a tool. I have grace for myself for getting frustrated or falling apart and I give the people around me a break. I show up by getting dressed in the morning and loading the dishwasher. I show up by having high standards of ethical behavior and holding firm in unpopular opinions.

Social distancing and taking neurotic sanitation efforts to prevent the spread of the virus should not be taken lightly. I, for one, have received a lot of criticism from even some of my family members and close friends for being skeptical and cautious. It seems that at the beginning of our efforts to slow the virus, those of us who took the news very seriously were ostracized as alarmists. We must not be afraid to act on and speak the truth.

I am finding that I am far more resilient and conscientious than I gave myself credit for, and so are you. You grow stronger every time you cry with those who cry and take joy in simple victories. Collectively, we can fan the flame in our hearts by small acts of solidarity and conscious living.

Washing our hands is the easiest way to understand our human connection. When we are aware that something invisible can kill, and embrace that careless actions can have lethal effects, we awaken to the personal responsibility we have to make right what has gone awry. We are all human, and the virus doesn’t care who you are.

We might feel useless because we are locked in our homes, but we can still stand together.

Now more than ever we must hold up our little light and reflect back the starry sky.

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lois volta is a home consultant, musician and founder of Volta Naturals. loisvolta.com.

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EN ERGY

by

meenal raval

Grow Hope, Not Fear

N

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ew words have crept into our vocabulary since March: Self-isolation. Social distancing. Pandemic.

No-touch transactions.

Fear about the COVID-19 pandemic has captured our focus. We now obsess about hand-washing, mask-wearing and who touched something last. Even healthy people like me are contemplating their wills.

Sad and frightening as the times are, our changed lifestyles have also been an exercise in low-carbon living—traveling less, buying food in bulk, cooking and eating at home, meditating and savoring this spring more than ever with daily (isolated) walks.

For me, the convenience of takeout foods or eating at a restaurant has been replaced by the pleasure of cooking each meal at home and trying out new recipes.

The virus has brought our globalized economy to its knees. This wake-up call has forced us all to rethink what is essential and what is a luxury—clothing and jewelry stores, liquor stores, real estate activity, legal services, gambling, barbershops, nail salons and gyms, restaurants and bars.

What’s essential is food and health. Our heroes today are healthcare professionals and grocery store workers, and behind them, the people who grow, process and bring food to our grocery shelves.

Listening to the Earth during this time, the messages I hear are that we can no longer go on killing and forcing into extinction wild animals and plants without repercussions; that our own pollution of air, water and soil have brought us a plague; that global pandemics are symptoms of our own attacks on the Earth’s ecosystems.

What can you and I do about this? While our other activities have slowed down, a reawakening of the importance of health and

food could lead us into a space still accessible under a stay-at-home order: the garden.

A garden offers us fresh air, fresher now due to fewer cars on the road. A garden offers us a reconnection with the Earth, which could reduce virus-related stress. A garden offers us time away from our screens and a way to step away from the constant discussions about this virus. A garden offers for a teaching and learning experience with our neighbors, allowing for a six-foot distance, of course, plus produce to share.

Don’t own land? You can grow herbs in a sunny windowsill; container plants on a balcony; raised beds on a patch of ground outside your front door; and, of course, vegetables on a community garden plot.

Victory gardens galvanized our nation during the World Wars. Now, people are organizing #CoopGardens across our nation.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc around the world, economies are tanking, supply chains are being disrupted, and shortages of critical supplies and food items are already commonplace,” the Cooperative Gardens Commission writes on its site.

“We hope people in cities will take over defunct community gardens and vacant lots and fill them with life once more. We hope people in towns and suburbs who normally work hard to keep their lawns green will instead rip up grass and plant vegetable gardens,” the Commission continues. “And we hope rural farmers who normally grow big fields of commodity crops—folks who know how to farm and have a great capacity to produce lots of food—will set aside at least a portion of their land and labor to grow fruits and vegetables for their neighbors and for those in need in nearby communities.”

In such an uncertain time, seeing seeds sprout and grow can bring a lot of hope. It’s time to return to the promised garden.

meenal raval is a catalyst for the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign and Solarize Southeast PA, which assists those transitioning away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gasoline.

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P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

Planting a garden is one way we can exercise control throughout the COVID-19 crisis

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bike talk

Room to Breathe MLK Drive is open for runners and bikers in response to COVID-19. by randy lobasso We shouldn’t stop there

A

ny other year on St. Patrick’s Day, you’d have seen a barrage of green-plastic-Leprechaun-hat-sporting college kids falling over themselves as they paraded the sidewalks of Center City.

This year was different. Bars were closed and the city was slowly moving toward a stay-at-home order due to COVID-19, the virus wreaking havoc around the world.

But the streets were still open, along

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with the trails. Like a lot of Philadelphians, I decided to utilize those trails for my own physical well-being and sanity.

I grabbed my three-speed Americano bicycle and headed out to the Schuylkill Banks Boardwalk for some fresh air, but when I got to the Schuylkill Banks, it did not look good.

Don’t get me wrong: People were running, walking and bicycling along its boardwalk and river trail. It was more packed

than ever—and that was the problem. The CDC recommendation for practicing six feet of social distancing was nearly impossible, as there was very little room along the trail.

It was a wake-up call for myself and the scores of Philadelphians who wanted to get outside and stay safe—we needed more space. With much of the economy shut down, I felt it was important for groups like the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia to advocate for better, more efficient usage of street space in order to keep Philadelphians safe during the pandemic.

Not just for the physical safety of those using outdoor space, but to better maintain exposure to the virus and flatten the curve.

The next day, my Bicycle Coalition colleague John Boyle reached out to the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission with a few questions: What could our metropolitan planning organization tell us about trail usage at this time? Was what I saw that afternoon an anomaly? Were more people than ever using the trail systems in the city?

DVRPC has electronic counters on several sections of the Schuylkill River Trail. The data posted is a month behind, so we asked if they’d be able to check the data from the last couple weeks since businesses in the U.S. began slowing down.

They did. And what they found confirmed our suspicions.

Bicycling on the Kelly Drive Trail was up 471 percent, compared to the same time period a year earlier, according to a report created by DVRPC for the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. ‘That’s great!’

I thought.

But it’s also dangerous.

Most trails in our region are only about 12 feet wide, meaning while so many of us were using them for recreation and transportation, it was almost impossible to maintain the safe six feet of distance. It seemed plausible, given how little space there was for people to exercise, someone could be infected while using the trails.

P HOTO G RAP H BY AL BERT YEE

The city needed more public space.

We made DVRPC’s information public and sent an official letter to the Kenney Administration, formally asking that they close Martin Luther King Drive so that safer social distancing could be practiced.

We created a petition. In the course of just a few hours, more than 1,000 people responded.

By Friday night, the City of Philadelphia’s communications team issued a press release stating they’d close MLK Drive to motor vehicles, and open it to people.

“The City of Philadelphia strongly encourages residents to stay indoors as much as possible. However we recognize that physical activity is important to well-being, and under current restrictions, are providing opportunities for park and trail use,” the release states.

Since then, Philadelphia has become a model for what other cities can—and can’t—do.

Around the country, cities have looked to Philadelphia’s success in closing streets to motor vehicle traffic for the safety and health of its citizens. Denver was the quickest city to follow suit, and Chicago followed.

New York City enacted an open streets program to allow for safe social distancing but abandoned it soon after.

Many believe Philadelphia should continue what it started.

Dr. Bon Ku, director of the Health Design Lab at Jefferson University, recently spoke with Conrad Benner of StreetsDept. com, a blog about public space and art, on an Instagram Live chat. “I think [closing streets to motor vehicle traffic] would be a great public health design intervention that would limit some of the close contact that Philadelphians have,” says Ku. “We don’t need this many streets any more to be open to motor vehicles. I think that would be a great policy decision to make to help people get outside, get some exercise, get some fresh air and not be in close contact with the person next to them.”

An editorial penned by urban advocate Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman in The Philadelphia Inquirer went a step further: “Narrow sidewalks and streets filled with parked cars make it difficult to pass other people at a safe distance, forcing people into the street regardless. Not everyone has access to a patio, yard, or trail ...

The good news is we’ve done similar things in the past with the annual Philly Free Streets and the popular block party program. Such systems can also be enacted using volunteers or paid stewards to monitor major intersections and keep the barriers in place.”

Around that time, I gathered with members of other advocacy organizations around the city, including Clean Air Council, 5th Square, Feet First Philadelphia and University City District, to figure out where else we could give people access to safe social distancing practices.

Here’s the thing: safe space for bicycling and walking serves the greater good.

It’s not just better for the environment and our infrastructure—it helps keep people both physically and mentally healthy. The pandemic didn’t change any of that—but it did call attention to it. The work to create a city where anyone, regardless of age or ability, can get around without the use of a private motor vehicle is more important than ever.

More public space for citizens to walk, bike and run throughout the city is essential to create a greener, healthier and happier Philadelphia.

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urban naturalist

Urban Decay Philly fungi enthusiasts are on the hunt for mushrooms around the city bernard brown

had low expectations for the fungus walk that the Philadelphia Mycology Club hosted last year in April.

I showed up as part of the City Nature Challenge, an international urban citizen science event that connects people to nature while documenting urban biodiversity. I sit on the Challenge’s local organizing committee, and while we welcomed events from any nature-oriented group, I was skeptical that anyone would come to the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look at mushrooms.

Fifteen people showed up, proving me wrong. Bethany Teigen, founder and co-organizer of the Philadelphia Mycology Club (Mycology is the study of fungi) led the attendees to explore around Boathouse Row “as an attempt to show people you don’t have to go to the woods to find mushrooms,” she says. “You can find them in your backyard, you can find them in the mulch pile behind the bank. You can find them all over the place.”

Apparently, you can find mushroom enthusiasts all over the place, too. The club, which Teigen founded in late 2018, has more than 1,400 followers on its Facebook page and hosts weekly mushroom walks. When it’s too cold to do a walk, they shift to fungus-themed craft nights.

“That was my first activity with them,” says East Falls mushroom enthusiast Julie Margulies. “I made flower ornaments out of shelf fungi [relatively flat varieties that tend to grow out from tree bark].”

“You just stick a skewer in them and you have something to go in your flower arrangement,” she says.

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A member of the Philly Mycology Club harvests fungi during a meetup.

When Teigen started the club, her goal was to learn about mushrooms rather than teach people about them. She moved to Philadelphia from Gainesville, Florida, in 2015 and found work as a dog walker.

“I wanted to try to have some kind of relationship with nature, so I originally tried to identify plants around me while I walked dogs,” she says. “Eventually, I stumbled upon some mushrooms.”

Though Teigen found online communities of mushroom lovers who could help her identify her finds, there was nothing local.

“I thought that obviously people do it around here. I just don’t know them. If

there were a club I could make them all come out of the woodwork and teach me,” says Teigen.

Margulies had been waiting to emerge from the woodwork to learn from other local fungus enthusiasts.

“Ten years ago I started to learn about mushrooms, but I got very frustrated because there was nothing in Philadelphia back then,” she explains. “Now I’m getting back into mushrooms since there are many extremely knowledgeable people in the mycology club.”

Rita Berson, a university academic advisor who lives in Cheltenham, discovered the

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club at a fungus-themed event at Bartram’s Garden in March 2019.

“I started going on hikes,” recalls Berson, who describes herself as a naturalist with a general interest in biodiversity. “I like that the group is not just science geeks. There are a lot of people just like me who are interested in biodiversity. But when we get together, we all learn from each other.”

I met up with Teigen at Bartram’s Garden in early April to talk fungi. The original plan had been to join a club mushroom walk, but they had canceled all walks in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, Teigen and I conversed from either end of an approximately six-foot-long fallen log whose bark was covered with the small orange fans of false turkey tail and patches of white brittle cinder fungus. At my end of the log, we found a black fungus called carbon balls, looking like it had boiled out from under the bark.

We then explored a much larger downed tree and added a few more species to the day’s list, including split gills: white mushrooms with a bewilderingly complex system of reproductive sexes that can yield nearly 23,000 mating combinations.

Although we focused on what we could spot on the surfaces of the logs, the real action was happening inside the wood.

“The actual fungus itself is a lot of tiny tendrils, kind of like a cobweb,” explains Teigen, “and they’re inside the log, eating the log. When they want to produce spores in order to reproduce, they create a fruit, a mushroom.”

While the fungi we were finding make their living decomposing wood, others, such as the fly agaric (which appears above ground as a red-capped toadstool) grow in concert with living plants. They form vast “mycorrhizal” networks in the soil that exchange nutrients with plant roots and can connect trees to each other across the forest.

Even when they’re out of sight, the fungi are hard at work beneath our feet.

Margulies notes the ease of learning about fungi compared to studying faster wildlife like birds.

“The first time I went snorkeling I was amazed at all the wildlife in front of me,” she says. “Mushrooms are similar. They’re everywhere, they don’t move, and they’re crazy interesting.”

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waterway protection

Cleanup Time Philadelphia local with a ‘heart for trash’ shares how he fell into cleaning by claire marie porter and maintaining our region’s waterways

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lec clelland grew up on the isolated, South Jersey peninsula of Delanco, without much to do but explore the shoreline of the Delaware River. Doing so, he encountered lots of garbage, and occasionally brought back some of the “treasures” he found.

Despite aggressive cleanup efforts and notable improvements in fish populations and water quality during the last 50 years, the Delaware River is still one of the most polluted waterways in the country, according to PennEnvironment. In 2012, 10 million

pounds of toxic chemicals were dumped into Pennsylvania waterways, making the Delaware River the seventh in the nation for highest amount of toxic discharges at the time.

You could say Clelland, now 27, grew up with a heart for trash—but it wasn’t until he was a bit older that he realized pollution was more than just an individual person’s litter.

Clelland moved 5 miles north to Palmyra, New Jersey, when he was 17 years old, and lived across the street from the Palmyra Cove Nature Park, a bird sanctuary with very little pedestrian traffic, he says. But

he was shocked that it had even more trash than the peninsula he grew up on. He poked around and found that a dump was backed

Philly local Alec Clelland has organized waterway cleanups for lululemon and United By Blue.

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P HOTO G RAP HY BY AUB R EY A BEL

right up to the park—the wind blew trash from the dump into the sanctuary.

He had a realization: “Clearly, it’s not people just being jerks,” he says. “It’s definitely more of a systemic issue—a design flaw.”

Every day, an estimated 38,356,164 pounds of trash are dumped into our oceans, due to illegal dumping, unregulated communal dumps and marine-based pollution, like vessels dumping garbage overboard.

He realized that targeting those at the top would be more productive than targeting individual litterbugs, and getting involved with cleanup at a systems-level grew increasingly important to him.

Clelland began hosting cleanups with a few friends at a time along the river in Palmyra. He also worked for lululemon athletica in his early 20s, and hosted cleanups at local parks and community gardens for them as part of a grant program.

In 2018, Clelland applied for an internship with United By Blue, an outdoor brand that removes a pound of trash from oceans and waterways per purchase. To date, more than 3 million pounds have been removed. The company, which factors sustainability into all of their products, sells clothing and everyday reusables kits that include everything one needs to remain plastic-free throughout the day, such as straws, utensils, beverage holders and meal kits, among other things.

After completing his internship, Clelland was hired by the company this past January, and began working as its cleanup operations associate, before all future cleanups were postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and he was subsequently laid off.

Clelland’s job entailed event planning, particularly that of nationwide cleanups.

They got the bulk of their weight with “highyield cleanups,” he says, which include hired crews that remove large amounts of trash. They just removed 750,000 pounds of trash from Trenton at the end of February.

“For high yield, we don’t typically go back to the same location since most of the locations are what’s called a ‘legacy dumpsite,’ which takes years to get as bad as they are when we step in,” he says.

Clelland hosted 15 nationwide cleanups last year.

He says people leave the cleanups with a different perspective on trash.

In 2012, 10 million pounds of toxic chemicals were dumped into Pennsylvania waterways, making the Delaware River the seventh in the nation for highest amount of toxic discharges at the time.

“Once someone picks up five Dunkin’ Donuts cups,” he says, “they’re like, ‘I’m never using one of these again.’ ” The massive quantities of familiar-looking garbage that volunteers interact with every day seems to have a big impact, he says.

“It’s the repetition of being in their face,” he says.

Often, volunteers came to the cleanups because they’re a fun, outdoorsy event, and great excuse to get outside.

The cleanups averaged 198 people nationwide, but the local average at their Philadelphia cleanups was much higher—between 300 and 400.

“Philly loved our cleanups,” he says.

People would often come in groups and stick together, says Clelland. But it was most powerful to him when people came alone. Typically the loners will quickly start talking with one another and find common connections with ease while picking up trash side-by-side.

“It offers this environmental-awareness opportunity,” he says, “but also human connections.”

Clelland’s shepherd-mix rescue Yolla joins him on almost every cleanup. Together they have collected more than 10,000 plastic straws.

Plastic straws are the more normal things Clelland has found during cleanups, among things like firearms, porcelain dolls, and safes. A volunteer in Philly Mills once found a $100 bill and donated it to a nonprofit.

“We’ve never saved anything. Maybe we should’ve started a little museum,” he says.

In February, while scouting a site for a cleanup, Yolla found a deer antler in the middle of West Philly and has been gnawing on it ever since, he says.

The 25 cleanups he’d planned for later this year have been postponed indefinitely, and “virtual cleanups” have taken their place, led by United By Blue’s Cleanups Coordinator, Maria McDonald. With guidance

from an Instagram Live video, volunteers can grab their quarantine partners and head to a local waterway or park where they can safely dispose of trash and recyclables.

In a time when the zero-waste movement and sustainable living have taken a back seat to survival, Clelland encourages readers to still make those conscious decisions when possible.

For him and his fiancé, eating a plantbased diet for environmental reasons has been difficult to maintain in the midst of a pandemic, but he says trying to be mindful, and not getting caught up in the guilt of one bad decision is essential.

He says to try avoiding things you don’t need, especially when you’re bored.

“Being stuck at home and having access to the internet can be a slippery slope when it comes to buying things we don’t need,” he adds.

Take this time to reflect on the things we were able to live without, like eating out, and using single-use plastics that often come with takeout containers.

“We have the time to cook at home, and by doing that, we can avoid altogether the packaging that comes with takeout food,” he says. And by doing so, we can re-evaluate a new and better normal when the time comes.

“When we rush back to these lives, it’s important to think about what we’re actually getting back to,” he says. “We get to decide what that normal should look like.”

For Clelland, his experience has shown him that his passion can be maintained through a work environment, and he has no plans to diverge from that.

“My fiancé and I are currently looking at a move to the West Coast,” he says. He’s looking for jobs that mirror his values over there. He says he would love to open a cleanup operation on the West Coast for United By Blue or join a like-minded organization—or maybe even an operation of his own.

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MARKUS SPISKE/UNSPLASH

A GROWING TREND Gardeners and farmers share resources as the #CoopGardens movement gains steam story by aaron salsbury

In mid-March, seed sales skyrocketed for Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds.

“We can hardly keep up with online orders,” he says. “We are selling out of seeds that we had imagined would last several years, and so we may have a limited catalog in the next year or so.”

The situation at his seed company is not unique: larger companies are having trouble keeping up with demand, too. Burpee Seeds posted a note on its website in April that it was experiencing an “unprecedented” volume of orders. The same month, Renee’s

Garden issued a note to buyers that “most orders will not ship complete” as they’d run out of stock on many varieties.

According to Google, the search term “How to start a garden” reached peak search popularity this March and April—the same timeframe COVID-19 cases began to affect much of the country.

In a short time, a majority of Americans, who have never had to consider food sovereignty or their place in the local food supply

chain, have faced sudden hard truths undertaking the long-term planning of how to feed themselves. In many cases, this also extends to their loved ones and potentially their communities, all while maintaining as little contact as possible.

“COVID-19 has brought to light the level of blissful ignorance that many in our society had the pleasure to live in,” says Matt Foran of Vepo Farms, a Philadelphia organization that runs agriculture-education initiatives such as the “Staying Rooted” video series aimed at educating children and novice growers.

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ing, supply chains unraveling and food prices hiking, these abruptly emerging challenges echo the concerns that our current food system is broken.

“For people who have lived in impoverished areas all their lives—in food deserts— that were lucky to have bananas and apples and maybe oranges at the corner store, food insecurity is nothing new,” Foran explains.

“As enthused as I am that sustainable agriculture is gaining notoriety during these unprecedented times, it is disheartening that it took a global pandemic for most people to realize that they actually have no true sense of where their food comes from, and just how lucky they may have had it.”

In this time of home isolation, could this pandemic be the very wake-up call we need to establish a healthier and more resilient future?

At the very least, it is time to plant seeds.

A Call To Action Nate Kleinman, co-founder of the Experimental Farms Network (EFN), is eager to engage with this sudden surge of interest in growing food.

“We want to encourage more people to start growing food, to encourage traditional crop farmers to start growing more vegetables for human consumption, so that we have more local food and are less reliant on a national supply chain that is proving itself to be pretty brittle during this crisis,” he explains.

In the last few weeks, he’s formed the Cooperative Gardens Commission (CGC), a broad-based coalition of farmers, food activists, seed banks, students and volunteers designed to support the rapidly expanding movement. This community-centered and open-source effort is encouraging the free sharing of resources such as seeds, soil, labor, land and, most importantly, knowledge.

“We expect that people are already making some big lifestyle changes right now, and we see our role as supporting those changes,” Kleinman says.

Realizing that gardening and farming don’t come easy to everyone, he felt a sense of urgency to begin organizing to assist in getting the proper tools into place. Kleinman’s aim is to convert as much available land into food production sources, aka #CoopGardens, much like the gardening efforts undertaken en masse during World Wars I and II. The commission will be focusing on com16

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COVID-19 has brought to light the level of blissful ignorance that many in our society had the pleasure to live in.” —matt foran, Vepo Farms munities who have needed local, healthy and reliable food sources long before this pandemic began.

The CGC’s assertion is, “the best response to disruptions within the food supply chain is a nationwide grassroots movement of communities growing their own food.”

The genesis for this idea came via a March 18 Facebook post on the EFN page in which Kleinman made an impassioned plea for a large-scale mobilization of resources, akin to the national gardens initiative for food production that once swept an imperiled America.

Written in all caps, and flanked by a 1943 World’s Finest Comics image of Superman holding vegetables was the three-word core of what he asserts we could all be doing to improve our current situation: START GROWING FOOD. “Today EFN is launching a ‘Corona Victory Gardens’ initiative urging everyone

who can to start growing food,” the post reads, “and we’re building a broad-based coalition to help. If you don’t have land, contact your school, college, church, workplace, local government, etc. (there are plenty of lawns and fields to turn into productive growing spaces).”

His lengthy post was accompanied by a simple Google survey to help identify roles in the project, along with links on how to immediately take action. The end goal is simple: form working groups, build tech tools and get as many people as possible, at home and abroad, to produce healthy food for themselves and their communities during a time of deep uncertainty and fear.

Planting season is nigh, and, at press time, Kleinman’s home state of New Jersey harbors the second-highest rate of people infected with COVID-19. With so many of us stuck at home endlessly scrolling and searching for something to do to take action, the sense of urgency in Kleinman’s call to P HOTO G RAP HY BY RACHAE L WARRI NER

• From left: volunteers sort seed donations inside of West Philadelphia’s Making Worlds Bookstore; a handful of donated seeds; Nathan Kleinman smiles while taking a break from sorting donations.

action resonated widely and the post has since been shared hundreds of times.

Among the top resources needed: clean soil, land access, information and seeds.

“I realized this is going to very quickly become a big project, and probably bigger than anything I’ve ever organized before,” Kleinman says. “We made that post on March 18, when there were serious shortages of major items in grocery stores, including, of course, toilet paper, but also some staple food items like potatoes and onions and eggs, and a lot of these supply chain problems have continued. Now we see farmers are tilling under crops that they don’t have a market for ... and you have, at the same time, miles-long lines of cars at food banks.”

Within a matter of days, Nate’s Google survey had racked up more than 800 responses—almost 50 percent with volunteer labor to offer.

“I think people realize that the systems

that we thought would keep everything going as usual, even in a time of crisis like this, are not working right. And, you know, there’s a lot of questions about the ... let’s say, the effectiveness of our national leadership,” Kleinman says.

Hacking Resources, Together For many born after the 1940s, the concept of a victory garden is likely something one is familiar with only from propaganda posters in history books. One thing that’s new this time around is the technology being used to organize (and sustain) them.

On March 20, Kleinman hosted the CGC’s first national-organizing call, of more than 130 participants, with technical assistance provided by members of InterOccupy, a platform for activists and grassroots mutual-education groups with limited budgets.

The concept of “hacking” technology to gather resources and mobilize volunteers with little to no overhead isn’t new to the

InterOccupy movement. In the fall of 2012, when the East Coast found itself gripped by a Category 2 hurricane, a splinter group dubbed “Occupy Sandy” launched a brilliant strategy utilizing Amazon’s online wedding registries as a backdoor for cataloging badly needed relief items.

By reprogramming its core function, the hacked registry served as a compartmentalized wish list for the needed resources to be shipped and distributed to affected areas, many of whom were missed by the official relief response. Registering the flim-flam marriage to “Mr. and Mrs. Occupy Sandy,” the “hack” raised well into six figures worth of goods by directing donors to a wide range of requested items, from batteries, blankets and hand warmers to high-ticket items like laptops, tablets, water heaters and propane tanks.

“We’re trying to organize this collective in the horizontal democratic way, so we’re making decisions collectively, and that can be challenging to do in person, and it definitely is extra challenging when you’re working with people you’ve never met before, and when you’re working remotely,” remarks Kleinman, who is also one of the founders of InterOccupy.

The Maestro teleconferencing system first utilized by InterOccupy, and now by the CGC, is laid out in such a way that more than 100 people can actually be on a call and vote on subjects democratically, without talking over one another.

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can keep track of who is on the line and requesting to address the group. Callers are unmuted when called on to speak and listeners use the keypad to communicate with moderators numerically.

“We had a really good model for it in the Occupy Sandy work ... we did in New Jersey, where most of the organizers were spread out across the state, so we weren’t meeting face to face regularly, and we used the same conference-call technology ... eight years ago for that effort,” says Kleinman, regarding the teleconferencing system. “And that enabled us to actually make decisions. You can take votes. We’re using Zoom and we’re using [Google] Hangouts for working group meetings and just trying to make sure that we take it slow enough that we get to know each other and build trust and, you know, build these relationships but also work fast enough to meet the urgency of the moment.”

From the first social media post to the Maestro organizing call, Kleinman estimated that only $80 had been spent on the initiative by that point, three-quarters of which went toward registering unused sites.

Employing free and donated resources like hashtags, Google Docs and the use of InterOccupy’s teleconferencing facilitation, the collective has quickly hacked together a nationwide network of interest-spanning multiple generations that could have only been dreamed of by the National War Garden Commission.

“Community” used to mean only those in your town, your neighborhood, at your fingertips, so to speak; now our immediate communities can span worldwide via the devices in our hands. Thus, the working groups from the CGC knew that the first step past reaching a communally agreed-upon name for the project would be to harness the power of social-networking sites. The urgency of the crisis at hand demanded an interim tech solution that allowed them to begin matching resources to need right away.

One of the immediate priorities was voting to rebrand “Corona Victory Gardens” under the name “Cooperative Gardens.”

Leah Penniman, a member of the CGC and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, was instrumental in the advisement of renaming the project. At Soul Fire Farm, a Black, In18

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• Leah Penniman is a co-founder of Soul Fire Farm and a member of the Cooperative Gardens Commission.

digenous and People of Color (BIPOC)-centered community farm in Upstate New York, the motto is “to free ourselves we must feed ourselves.”

The promotion of food sovereignty is key to their agricultural operations and the larger #CoopGardens movement, Penniman says. She explained to the team that the term “victory gardens” is linked to anti-Japanese racism during WWII. “While victory gardens and other landbased ‘patriotic’ movements were being promoted as more ‘American’ replacements for food systems powered by BIPOC labor,

many BIPOC growers developed alternative food systems to sustain their own communities in response to internment, systematic discrimination, forced migration and other forms of racialized violence and oppression,” she explains.

She notes that BIPOC-led organizations and communities have a rich history of growing food in provision gardens and that those with fewer resources and luxuries are disproportionately affected in this pandemic.

“Grocery stores increasingly do not have surplus food to donate, as they themselves

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Community Resilience Through Gardening

also struggle to keep up with more demand due to panic buying,” Penniman continues.

“Individuals and families who are limited to WIC and SNAP-designated food purchases do not have the space and/or financial resources to stockpile food, or usually rely on schools and other currently closed institutions for meals may be experiencing more acute food insecurity.”

In addition to systems and policy change, home and community gardening can fill gaps in food access, she explains.

Post-Pandemic Planning “We’re trying to build something lasting, something that’s going to be able to impact people’s lives well after this pandemic, because we’re trying to address problems that existed long before this pandemic,” remarks Kleinman. “Personally, I’m a farmer. I run a nonprofit, I’ve got stuff to do. This can’t be a one-person show. Thankfully, people have been stepping up all over the country and taking leadership of working groups and just doing amazing work out there.”

Core groups of volunteers who focused on outreach, technology and logistics, media relations and education initiatives immediately set out to work tackling pressing issues. They keep track of their progress and share information via Google Groups.

then also tapping into existing networks.

We’re able to reach people who are not on the internet also. We’ve set up a hotline so that people can call us and ask questions and get connected to folks, and even if people don’t have internet access—if they see our number on a flyer or something—they can call and get connected to people in their community, ideally, or just ask questions about gardening or farming.”

To him, this work holds a deeper significance and could potentially help humanity through more than just the pandemic.

While organizing relief for Operation Sandy and observing the hurricane-devastated farms in his own South Jersey, Kleinman realized that, unless work was done to address the source of climate change, his community would one day be under water permanently.

“In my normal work, I’m a climate activist, and the work that Experimental Farm Network is doing involves developing new crops for climate-change mitigation—perennial staple crops, grains and oil seeds,” explains Kleinman. “We grow a lot of things like canola and soybeans for oil now, but we really should be growing more perennials, like hazelnuts, that could also provide edible oil but will sequester carbon at the same time.”

Individuals and families who are limited to WIC and SNAP … do not have the space and/or financial resources to stockpile food … [and] may be experiencing more acute food insecurity.” —leah penniman, Soul Fire Farm Their calls are recorded and transcripts are available online. Updates, progress reports and important information are distributed regularly to the email addresses associated with the pin numbers required to register for conference calls.

Things can move quickly, but, more importantly, they move through a decentralized system of management that empowers each individual to co-create a collaborative, solutions-oriented community.

“We’re working all over the country,” says Kleinman. “By using the internet, we’re able to reach people anywhere, and

He has since set out to address this issue by changing the way we farm, promoting biodiversity with the EFN by focusing on rare and endangered seeds, planting carbon-sequestering perennial crops and engaging in agroforestry and other forms of carbon farming vital to this mission. After seven years of establishing this path with the EFN, the timely need for #CoopGardens is another in his long list of efforts to inspire young, would-be farmers to join him in his quest.

“I think a lot of people are afraid of food-supply shortages,” he says. “They’re

afraid that things aren’t gonna get back to normal quick.”

The pandemic has sparked fears among many that access to food will be disrupted, which should be a huge motivator for us to make more food available at the local level.

“I think, you know, this crisis is a tragedy, but it is also an opportunity to take stock of what’s important and to build a better future.”

He hopes that people will see how clean the air has become in their cities, with fewer cars on the roads, and “think about this not just as an aberration but as a sign of what kind of changes might be required if we’re actually going to deal with the climate crisis.”

Planting For Food Sovereignty The delicately balanced Cooperative Gardens Commission acknowledges that private grassroots organizations, local gardening clubs and more have paved the way in the fight for food sovereignty, Kleinman says.

One of the things the commission is focusing on is prioritizing communities that may have the largest food-security issues.

“The communities of color and Indigenous communities were some of the most food insecure before the pandemic, and if we’re not working now to address those long standing issues, then we’re not really addressing the problem,” Kleinman says.

The commission is donating at least half of its seeds to projects led by people of color and those that are based in communities of color, Kleinman explains.

“Our outreach working group is focusing efforts in communities where folks might not be very likely to find us on Instagram or Facebook but where the need for food and seeds is especially acute right now,” he says.

Extra effort is taken to support existing food-sovereignty projects and networks, especially in communities that were struggling before the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Penniman of Soul Fire puts it: the challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak exemplify the need for collective food sovereignty in all communities, but, as a result of our country’s systemic inequalities, some communities have more needs than others.

“Before, during and after the outbreak, food apartheid continues, and will continue, to disproportionately impact BIPOC communities, who face higher vulnerability to COVID-19 due to factors like shared housing, lack of access to health care, enviM AY 20 20

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We’re trying to build something lasting, something that’s going to be able to impact people’s lives well after this pandemic.” —nate kleinman, EFN cofounder ronmental racism, job layoffs, immigration status, employment in the wage economy without worker protections and more,” she explains. “This pandemic is presenting even more challenges to food access for our vulnerable communities.”

It’s a tall order, and with the overwhelming response to this plea gaining traction rapidly, this ecosystem of activism will need to be built conscientiously at a community level in order to truly thrive.

“We want people to get what they need to grow in their community,” Kleinman says.

One of the strategies of the Cooperative Gardens Commission is to get people to use the #CoopGardens hashtag when posting the resources they have on Craigslist or on Facebook to make it easy for anyone to find seeds, resources, knowledge and mentorship.

“Seeds are the thing that most people are requesting. They are also looking for soil.

They’re looking for lumber. They’re looking for volunteer labor. And a lot of people are looking for knowledge and mentorship.

And then, tools and equipment as well,” Kleinman says. “But without seeds, you can’t grow anything.”

The Need For Seed As “panic planting” supplements panic shopping in depleting nursery shelves and seed suppliers worldwide, some have had to pause or outright cease operations in order to catch up with hasty commercial orders, leaving many individuals and communities who most need these resources out in the cold.

As Taylor of Truelove Seeds says: “The fact that many seed companies have shut down their websites in response to overwhelming sales should make it clear that people would be wise to start saving their own seeds this year to be sure they can grow their favorite crops in the future.”

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expected to last for years, and suddenly seed saving and preservation is a hot topic for discussion.

“Saving seeds is an essential act of resilience and resistance,” Taylor explains.

“Resilience because it means we adapt our crops to our local ecosystems and because we hold onto our freedom to grow the foods that we love, the foods that taste like home.

Resistance because we hold onto the freedom to tell our own stories through the seeds that we choose to keep.”

At Truelove, growers in the company’s network keep seeds that were passed down from their ancestors, either directly or indirectly. They prioritize working with farmers who are doing healing and justice work in their communities, many of which have been experiencing food shortages and health crises long before this pandemic.

“We can learn a lot from Black and Brown farmers, healers and organizers working in communities experiencing food apartheid,” Taylor says. “For many of these growers, keeping seeds has long been a cornerstone to living a sovereign, holistic and healthful life.”

To address this seed-access inequality, seed donations are already pouring in from the CGC’s core of hundreds of volunteers.

Making Worlds Bookstore, a brand new collectively-owned and volunteer-run West Philadelphia bookstore shuttered by COVID-19, is now a central clearinghouse for processing, packaging and disseminating these seed donations.

“Since we have to be closed during this time, as a ‘non-essential business,’ the space is not being used and this project is completely aligned with our mission,” says Lucy Duncan, a worker-member of the co-op.

The bookstore promotes events and offerings that align with local social justice initiatives, particularly those that align with Black, Brown and indigenous traditions of liberation.

“We were totally excited about this as a way to continue to further our vision of supporting self-determined communities,” Duncan continues. “Several of us plan to start co-op gardens.”

An additional 40 seed hubs, or nodes, are in the process of being established nationwide to centralize collection and distribution for their areas, but more are needed.

Ever cognizant of the risks of COVID-19, a health-and-safety work group has created advisory guidelines that have been incorporated into the program’s official guide language.

Safe-space language was drafted in conjunction with Soul Fire Farm, who have been working with these frontline communities to address systemic inequalities before our country’s current crisis, and launched their own localized Soul Fire in the City initiative that assists members of the BIPOC community, survivors of mass incarceration, refugees, immigrant families with children, and others impacted by food apartheid.

“Much of the current language around home provisioning can be individualist and, at times, ableist,” states Penniman. The ultimate goal is that this ethically based, whole-systems design approach will help #CoopGardens continue as sustainable projects far into the post-pandemic future.

“We recognize that provision-garden initiatives must draw on community collaboration and mutual aid to support the needs and enable the participation of elders, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, and other folks for whom home gardening is typically inaccessible,” Penniman explains. “This project is about community resilience and collective food sovereignty, not about acting as ‘saviors’ for our community.”

Start Growing Now The commission knows that while food sovereignty has recently become a global problem and people are suddenly interested in urban and community gardens, the initiative will only truly work in the long term if people take the health of their communities into account as well.

“Growing your own nutritious fruits, vegetables and herbs at home or for your community instantly increases access to quality food,” says Foran of Vepo Farms.

“Those who consume it will now be providing themselves with better health care, as what you eat is the first medicine that you can put in your body.”

Amping up local food production chains would create more employment opportunities, stimulate local economies and improve the environment, Foran explains.

“If everyone were to start growing a lot of the food that they consume, there would be less greenhouse gas emissions produced from industrial agricultural practices,” he says.

He thinks it might help people on a human level, too.

“I believe that you would see a world where countries now have much higher quality of life and gross national happiness scores,” he says.

What can you do?

As interest, volunteers and donations steadily roll in, the CGC begins the admi-

rable undertaking of matching the excess to the need on a national level.

Fundraising committees have been formed. Regional seed-distribution hubs, lumber, labor and critical space to grow are all needed nationwide. Anyone with resources to share is encouraged to post using the #CoopGardens hashtag.

Volunteers are being called upon to grow seedlings for distribution. Policy and governance subgroups are working on making land accessible in parks and public spaces, rescuing shuttered school and community gardens, and reviewing policies on how to relax laws prohibiting food growing.

With so many of the workers who grow, harvest, cook and serve our food affected by this global crisis, the CGC’s Work and Livelihoods committee is hard at work

generating ideas such as sourcing on-farm worker housing and creating gardening mentorships and potential paid work opportunities.

A centralized Google Voice number—a CGC hotline—has been launched, at 202709-6225, and volunteers and expert growers are needed to staff the phone lines.

All of these ideas are being conceptualized, fleshed out and put into action in real time by this decentralized group in an ongoing communal process to get people to START GROWING FOOD. For more information on the CGC or to join its organizing efforts—and for critical health-and-safety information to prevent the spread of the virus while gardening or sharing resources—visit www.CoopGardens.org

#GROWWITHGRID An absolute beginner joins the growing revolution

Grid has challenged our staff and readers to start their own gardens this spring, and post it online using the hashtag #GrowWithGrid. As the resident new guy here, and with very little gardening experience under my belt, I have attempted to undertake this challenge.

Follow along with my journey at @gridmagazine on Instagram and share your own tips and tricks so that they can be posted on our story. There’s no better time to build an online community of local food growers than while we’re all social distancing. story by aaron salsbury

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’m not much of a gardener. Up until mid-March, I was the resident events planner at Decibel Magazine, a heavy metal publication owned by Grid’s parent company Red Flag Media. When it became clear we wouldn’t be planning any metal and beer fests for a while, they brought me over to Grid to lead the #GrowWithGrid campaign and try my hand at growing my own food.

Inspired by the communal call to action of the #CoopGardens movement, I decided to source some expertise in my surrounding community before approaching this task.

I was blown away by how many people on my friend list have already been growing food at home. As luck would have it, one of my online acquaintances recently launched an agricultureeducation video series for novices like myself. I had my very own gardening guru: Matt Foran of North Philly’s Vepo farms (@rootedwithVepo).

My next step was sourcing seeds. I wanted something that I could start growing inside immediately and that would eventually grow well outdoors. I have a large windowsill facing east and a small plot of land available in my side yard.

After a quick consultation with Matt to determine what would grow well together in my little indoor space, I landed on basil, tomatoes and peppers. My Italian mother would be so proud! I purchased my seeds from Truelove Seeds (the subject of Grid’s cover story in our March 2020 issue) and was able to grab all three packets for around $10.

Starting a project under stay-at-home orders is no easy feat: supplies are limited. My mentor Matt’s favorite Teddy Roosevelt quote comes to mind: “Do what you can, with what you have, I stepped up my egg carton game for my next round of plantwhere you are.” ing and ordered a 72-cell seed starter greenhouse (read: plastic I fished an egg carton out of the trash to get my seeds going, tray) to go with my mix. You can find these at Home Depot for poking a drainage hole in each of the cups. Now I was ready to under $10 and they come with a waterproof dome to maintain humidity and warmth during the germination period. get planting.

Matt recommended I use a seed starting mix I reached out to my gardening guru for some to strengthen the roots of my little seedlings, so I complementary seeds to accompany my fledgling Need soil? Consider a peppers, tomatoes and basil. Matt carefully curated ordered one online. To get moving quickly, I dug home soil delivery companion plants that would grow well with and up loose soil from the yard to get my seeds startfrom Bennett Compost. ed while I waited for the mix. I’ll transplant my provide natural benefits to my existing seedlings.

You can also sign up seedlings into a solo cup with the good stuff later.

Beets and broccoli for my basil; marigolds and to have your food waste I’m lucky to have a windowsill that faces east to nasturtiums to attract pollinators, plus beans that picked up weekly in your very own Bennett start growing my vegetables in, as they will benare ready to eat within 50 days. It’s very important Compost bucket! efit from the unblocked morning sun. Southern to not only pick things to grow that will work well bennettcompost.com facing windows are preferable, with northern within your natural conditions, but that will also facing windows being the least desirable. thrive together.

If you don’t have a place to start indoors where Some of these seeds required soaking overyour plants will receive 4-6 hours of direct (not filtered) sunnight, so I set my beets and beans out in tepid water and my light daily, you’ll need to purchase a light for your little buddies. nasturtiums in warm water per Matt’s instructions—24 hours Sadly, that regular incandescent lightbulb won’t do: plants need later, they were moist, plump and ready to go into the cells with UV rays to photosynthesize. There are a wide range of options the mix. available, but if you’re trying to go the cheapest DIY route like Each seed comes with slight nuances, like requiring soaking me then GE makes grow lights for under $10 that work well or nicking open seed casings, so make sure to read the back for high-light plants (like tomatoes and peppers) and low-light of each packet and follow the instructions to make sure you’re plants (like leafy greens and herbs). getting the best chance for germination.

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Some of you may not be able to take the step to growing outbe choosers and I thought Theodore would approve of my path. doors, so you’ll have to pay extra attention to the size of your There are a million great how-to videos for assembling a raised garden bed on YouTube, and the basic gist of it is simplants to make sure they aren’t outgrowing their containers and stressing themselves out. Think of your new plant buddies ple: you’re building a platform for your babies that raises them much like yourself in quarantine: if you don’t have ample room off the ground and allows you to maintain more control over your garden. to stretch yourself out, you’re going to be sad!

This brings us to the next step in our DIY home gardening One big thing to consider when choosing the height of your project: building your own raised garden bed. Having a raised raised bed: how much soil it’s going to take to fill it. The more bed for your garden to grow in is highly beneficial: they keep you add, the more the sides will bow, especially when wet. I pathway weeds from your garden soil, provide good drainage added simple cross supports to the corners of my bed with 1.5and serve as a barrier to pests and insects. inch wood screws.

I wanted to maximize the amount of direct light my garden The last step was transplanting my baby seedlings from their would receive, so I picked the Eastern corner of the yard for my cups and cartons into my finished bed. It’s important to do this bed. After clearing the grass and weeds, it’s advised to dig down very carefully to avoid transplant shock. Luckily, Matt Foran twice the height of your bed to remove any rocks or debris that was on hand to help me.

Gardening is a lot of hard work, and I’m looking forward to might inhibit root growth.

True to the DIY nature of this project, I was able to find some the prospect of eating something I’ve grown with my own hands discarded wood to build my bed. Far from ideal, and sharing my harvest with those around me. I these yellow pine planks absorb a lot of moisture hope my efforts inspire you to start growing at Would you like help with and will eventually rot. However, they’re free and home and to share your stories with us on social a personally curated selection of since I will only be using this bed for a couple of media using the #GrowWithGrid hashtag. companion plants? seasons I’m willing to roll the dice.

I look forward to seeing what you grow!

Vepo Farms offers Ideal wood for this project would be cedar, this service. Contact spruce, anything rot-resistant, but beggars can’t Matt@vepofarms.com to get started. Both seeds and seedlings are currently available.

M AY 20 20

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23

PICK- T ME-UP South Philly’s vegan grocer works hard to pack orders and lift up the community

story by alexandra w. jones — photography by albert yee 24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 20

hings didn’t go as planned on V Marks the Shop’s first anniversary.

Instead of enjoying a laidback gathering with customers, vegan corner store owners Carmella Lanni and Carlo Giardina found themselves caught in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of March, busily filling customer orders, managing their rapidly changing inventory selection and hustling boxed deliveries out their shop’s front window.

They saw their first spike in orders the week of March 15 when Pennsylvania issued social distancing orders. Since then, it has been crazy, Lanni says.

“We’re in no position to be as organized

We like the term convenience.

We make being vegan convenient for people .”

—carmella lanni, Co-owner of V Marks the Shop

Carmella Lanni and Carlo Giardina of V Marks the Shop have been busily filling orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

as we usually are right now just because of the rate that orders are coming in,” she explains.

Clad in black balaclavas and blue plastic gloves, and disinfecting surfaces as frequently as possible, the pair jokes that the store has become V Marks the Warehouse since they shifted to a delivery- and pickup-only system. Boxes sit where product display tables used to be and pickup orders chill in frozen display cases. The mom-andpop grocers pack all orders by hand.

“For a two-person operation, to knock out 30 orders a day is a lot,” Lanni says.

There’ve been a lot of early mornings and late evenings. Customers have been booking

deliveries, mostly via Mercato[.com], for up to a week in advance.

“I have to design reports and figure out how much bread we’re going to need 48 hours from now,” she says. “It’s really hard for me to forecast what we’ll need because everything’s changing so quickly.”

She has been running numbers to determine what inventory shipments she might need to adjust almost every day. They’ve been in constant communication with suppliers to fill depleting shelves.

“I’ve had to order more tofu than I ever imagined I would need,” she laughs. The week Pennsylvania ordered all non-essential businesses to close, the shop sold around 200 units, she says.

Overall, sales have spiked for the shop.

“But,” Lanni says, “it’s not the way I would prefer to make them.”

Two weeks before the state issued its first covid-19 orders, Giardina and Lanni were sitting comfortably in their store’s backroom “events area,” recalling their journey onto the vegan grocer scene.

“We started off as bloggers,” Giardina explains, under the name “The Food Duo.” Over the years, as their diets shifted from omnivorous to vegetarian to vegan, the content of their blog followed suit.

The blog led them on quests to try new vegan products, restaurants and recipes, Carlo says. Along the way, they stumbled into several all-vegan grocery stores like Rabbit Food in Austin, Texas, and Food Fight! in Portland, Oregon.

The trips left an impact.

“It was terrific that you would be able to walk into the store and not have to think,

and get whatever you want,” Giardina recalls. “Versus going to three, four or five different stores to do your shopping.”

Soon they found themselves talking about starting up a place of their own.

“We just thought it would be great if we had our own business and, you know, we could do something we’re passionate about,” he says. “Something we love.”

In 2015, they announced they were taking the dive at a vegan bloggers conference called Vida Vegan Con—it was the conference’s last year, Giardina explains.

“Anybody and everybody who was vegan went to this. This was, like, the thing,” he says. “I felt so inspired because Carmella and I were already talking about starting the store. So at the very last panel, which got a little maudlin because everybody was like, ‘this is the last one, we’re not going to do it anymore,’ they said: ‘Anyone want to say anything?’ And I said, ‘We’re gonna miss it and by the way, we’re gonna open up a vegan store in Philadelphia!’”

“And I said, ‘We’re opening up a vegan store in Philadelphia?’ ” Lanni chimes in.

“But you were okay with it,” Giardina quickly turns to Lanni to clarify.

“I was,” she laughs. “I was just shocked that he said it.”

Giardina has no regrets.

“I figured you have to do that,” he explains, “because then you can’t turn back.”

A few blocks off Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia, V has the feel of an old-school neighborhood corner store.

The shopping area is packed with hundreds of locally made treats. Everything from vegan roasts and specialty cheeses to M AY 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 25

locally made vegan soaps and zero-waste dishwashing blocks. It walks the line between a convenience store and a grocery store, Lanni says, although she prefers to be referred to as the former.

“We like the term convenience,” she explains. “We make being vegan convenient for people.”

Lanni knows every product they carry inside and out. She points to some products in one of their refrigerator cases.

“Philly Tempeh is a relatively new company,” she says. “The owner does a soybased tempeh, but what he’s known for is the non-commercial tempeh, which is done with chickpeas. A few restaurants in the area have started using it. It’s really good stuff,” she says.

She likes to learn about the companies they work with because they communicate with some of the vendors directly.

“There’s Eat Nice from Mount Airy.

They do vegan ravioli—they use walnuts to replicate meat. It’s a really good product,” she continues, moving through the rows. “Amira’s Delights—she’s out of West Philly—she is a science teacher and teaches a baking-with-science program at the Free Library. She has a line of vegan cookies and is really cool to talk to.”

Lanni went vegan for health reasons, she says. Afterward, she and Giardina began to explore the world of plant-based eating options.

The two met in 2005 in an AOL chatroom.

Back when people put their interests and hobbies in their profiles, Lanni says.

“He liked the same music, he liked a lot of the same art that I liked, he had a cool picture,” she remembers. “Even his username was cool.”

She sent him a quick message, but he was getting offline and asked if she’d like to chat on the phone instead.

“We ended up talking for, like, three hours,” she says.

They met in-person a week later and have been together ever since.

They came to Philly to get away from New York City. Lanni was a lifelong New Yorker, and Giardina had spent about half his life there.

They started operating the store online in 2017, but their South Philly storefront only officially opened last year. They ended up there, Lanni says, because local community association leaders took them out for drinks 26 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 20

after they posted a Kickstarter video.

“We liked Philly. We used to come down here on weekends,” Giardina says. “Over time, we just figured this would be a good city to do this in—it’s ready for it.”

When pandemic restrictions aren’t in place, Giardina and Lanni are also regarded by many locals as the king and queen of vegan gatherings in Philly.

The pair hosted their first vegan gathering in Philly in 2016, a year before starting V, because they wanted to figure out how they could become a part of the community in Philly. They hosted a Philly mac-andcheese-making contest.

“And then we started doing the pop fleas,” Giardina remembers.

They hadn’t seen anything like Vegan Shop-Up, an all-vegan pop-up market in Brooklyn, around town, and they thought that Philly Pop Fleas could fill the niche.

At the end of 2019, they rebranded Philly Vegan Pop Fleas to be Philly Vegan Events, which not only allows them to host their own events but also to share what other vendors are doing.

“It was never our intent to be the people who do vegan events in town—we just wanted to meet people,” Lanni says, “and help small businesses get in front of customers.”

“They’re not involved in an unethical capitalist kind of system,” she says. “They’re just trying to make a living off of something that they love to do.”

According to Alana Ratliff-Johnson, vending with Philly Vegan Events has been great for her artisanal soap business, Soap

by Alana.

“They exposed my business to an entire market of individuals that needed my products,” she says. While some soaps can include animal-derived ingredients like tallow, silk and beeswax, Ratliff-Johnson’s earn the “vegan seal of approval.”

“My soaps and body butters were plantbased from the beginning, and I hadn’t thought that it would be a necessity to an entire group of people until I came across Carmella, Carlo and V Marks the Shop,” she says. “There was one product, my lip butters, that were not vegan in the beginning, but after being exposed to this community, I was motivated to change my formula and swap my wax to a vegan-safe wax—it works much better, too.”

Jonay Prailow, an entrepreneur who runs a vegan Caribbean soul food catering business called Nourishing Our Mind, says working with V Marks the Shop not only exposed her to new customers but to new friends and mentors.

“I’ve personally learned a lot from both Carlo and Carmella from both a business and personal perspective,” she explains.

“They’re very knowledgeable about what I like to call ‘vegan culture.’ ” They’ve been her personal taste testers for the past two years she’s been in business.

“I can count on them to give me honest feedback to help me hone my skills,” Prailow says.

Both business owners say the shop owners’ personalities give the events they host a leg-up.

“Carmella and Carlo are the perfect fusion of business and fun,” Ratliff-Johnson says. “They understand what it means to highlight their vendors, and they truly want to see everyone win.”

Usually, V tries to host an event every weekend in the back room of the shop, Lanni says—they’ve done cooking demos, drag queen and drag king story time, and arts and crafts days. They’ve also hosted parties in the store celebrating the Jewish holidays of Hanukkah and Purim.

Customer Allison Covey, a Center City resident, enjoys the effort Giardina and Lanni put into lifting up all the different sectors of the vegan community.

“It is wonderful to see the diversity of the vegan movement and to be able to connect with folks of different backgrounds through our shared interest in plant-based foods,” she says.

Off-site, V also hosts the Power of Color Market, which celebrates the contributions of vegans of color, and a monthly vegan Quizzo night at the board game shop Queen and Rook, which took place via Zoom in April in order to help raise money for employee wages while the shop was closed.

Typically, they try to put a charitable spin on all of their events.

“Everything we do, we try to incorporate some sort of fundraiser or community activism,” Lanni explains.

Now rescheduled for the fall of 2020, $5 of every ticket to Philly Mac-Down will go to William Way LGBT Community Center.

They also do a monthly tips for change initiative, wherein they pick an organization

to give the tips to. The tips they raised in March went to PAWS. In mid-April, they were planning on sending their tips to a business affected by the shutdown.

“We try to give back where we can,” Lanni says, “to connect people and bring awareness.”

For many customers, this is what makes V so special.

“They’re not just lifting themselves up, but they’re lifting up a lot of other local small businesses as well,” says LJ Steinig, a customer of the store since 2017. “I really love that.”

They exposed my business to an entire market of individuals that needed my products.”

—alana ratliff-johns on, Owner of Soap by Alana

Steinig’s husband, Bart Everts, has been placing orders for pickup for their household for the last few weeks since the shutdown began.

“It’s a weird time,” he acknowledges.

Usually they like to go in and chat as they shop, but that’s not an option these days.

“I don’t really get to talk to them or anything,” he says. “But it’s good to see their faces.”

Lanni says many regular customers, like Steinig and Everts, have continued shopping with them since social distancing orders went into effect. She’s seen many customers placing orders for neighbors, and thanking the duo for staying open.

As she noted weeks before the pandemic shut down the city, Lanni says the vegan community in Philly is very vocal and very strong.

“I think people come together more here than I may have seen in other parts of the country,” she says. “Philly being a major city, it still has that small-town kind of vibe to it. People here are just willing to come together because they want to eat something vegan or be a part of something vegan. It’s been pretty amazing to see that.”

Ultimately, she says, it’s customer support that has kept her and Giardina going in these uncertain times.

“Ninety-nine percent of the customers have been amazing,” she says. One customer asked how she could support the shop and bought multiple gift cards. Others have been promoting the store on social media. Friends have been calling just to talk about what they’re feeling, offering a support network.

“It’s people like that encouraging us. If we didn’t have that local support, I don’t think we would be open,” she says.

M AY 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

Bucks County museum to install all-female art exhibit on the effects of climate change on our waters story by francesca furey

W

ith looming fears and anxieties brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak, concerns about climate change or the health of local watersheds might seem secondary. That is an illusion. As Thomas Fuller, a 17th-century physician, wrote, “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.”

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April, Laura Igoe, the Michener Museum’s curator of American Art, and her team gathered artists from the greater Philadelphia region to produce Rising Tides: Contemporary Art and the Ecology of Water, an exhibit designed to highlight the intercon28 GRID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 20

nectedness of water and humanity.

When Igoe searched for artists to feature in Rising Tides, she decided that a local connection was necessary.

“I wanted to make sure someone was looking at what was happening locally,” Igoe says. “I think that brings deep issues home for our visitors from the greater Philadelphia region, and it makes these issues more tangible and something they can connect with their daily lives.”

Though Earth Day will be long gone once museums’ doors open again—the Michener Museum is closed until further notice due to COVID-19—the celebration of the planet, and this exhibit, will continue to resonate.

N A D I N E R OV N E R

THE TIDE IS NIGH

“Water is fundamental to life,” says Igoe.

“It’s everywhere. I think in a lot of ways we tend to overlook or not think too hard about it.”

Featured artist Marguerita Hagan believes the pandemic emphasizes that now is the optimal time to take action in the climate crisis.

“It’s really time to wake up and work together,” she says. “The virus outbreak really hit hard after all these plans. But, it’s also driving home the absolute necessity of us changing our systems and how we interact and how we work together.”

The Rising Tides exhibit prioritizes ecological storytelling through the lens of seven local artists. It brings attention to the reality that as sea levels rise and global warming continues its course, we’ll be confronted with the fact that water can be both our savior and our destroyer.

“What I found as I started talking to people in the community … is that many artists that were concerned with the environment are specifically looking at water and water

• Opposite: Diane Burko working in her studio.

Center: Her “NOAA Study A” visualizes deteriorating conditions affecting the globe.

Right: haunting, tangled fishnets float on the water’s surface in Pat Martin’s “Floating Reef.”

Below: “As the Sea Rises—Blue Crystals Revisited no. 9” by Janet Filomeno highlights our troubled waters with red boxes and lines and bold, blue streaks.

themes,” Igoe says.

The storytellers of the exhibition are all women—tying in the centennial of women’s suffrage.

Being able to connect meaningful works of art with milestones such as this adds to the impact of the exhibit, Igoe says.

“I love that it’s an all-female show. There’s seven women in the show. And I just thought it was a beautiful, perfect way to be honoring Mother Earth,” Hagan says.

Hagan’s sculptures capture the complexity and beauty of the microorganisms of our oceans.

Though they can’t be seen by the naked eye, organisms such as Radiolaria and dinoflagellates form “exquisite colony networks and systems,” she added.

Her delicate ceramic pieces, like “Daughter Cells” and “Frustule Flower,” give context and enlighten visitors on Earth’s primary producers. Combining a love for art and a love for the world that surrounds us is fulfilling, Hagan says.

“It’s really rewarding to be in a playground like this, to be sharing with other artists that are passionate about this, too,” she says.

Hagan, along with other featured artists such as Stacy Levy and Emily Brown, use their art to inspire. Whether it be an installation detailing the worrisome ebb and flow of flooding in Philadelphia’s Delaware River or charcoal sketches of a watersource’s surface, there is a call for change.

“Art connects people. Both the artists and the viewer can recognize their own experiences through a work of art and understand

that they’re connected to other people,” says Brown. “It’s a sense of sharing a value or sharing an experience or a fear or feeling that bonds us.”

Brown’s aquatic drawings on paper highlight the transience of water and its infinite presence. “I have loved water for a long time as a subject because it’s something that’s always changing while it stays the same, kind of like a fire in a fireplace,” Brown says.

She also has ethereal pieces on display, like “Water Surface, Quiet” and masterful painted glass in “Underwater.”

Levy spent her childhood admiring the trees of Fairmount Park and the winding waters of the Wissahickon. Being neighbors with a natural forest was a big deal, and hours of adventuring were logged right in Levy’s backyard.

The “natural” and “urban” forests of Philadelphia, as Levy calls them, stuck with her while in college. They were her saving

grace at Yale University. She was fed up with drawing, and she couldn’t escape the “tyranny of art history,” she says.

“There was an incredibly narrow definition of what art was … I was tired of arms and legs. I wanted something else,” Levy recalls. When she began to experiment with landscapes, rivers and forestry on paper, she found her passion.

“When I realized I could depict subjects other than bodies and food on the table, it was really a thrill to me,” she says. And the thrill wasn’t just from branching out in drawing topics. The rise of installation work and land art was an inspiration to Levy; eventually, it became her life’s work.

“Flood River (The Slower Tide)” is a massive installation featured in Rising Tides.

With about 1,000 glass bottles swirling around the hall’s hardwood floor, visitors will see a powerful rendition of a section of the Delaware River.

Levy’s installation represents the inhale and exhale of the river, and how flooding can upend its natural state.

As it swells from an overabundance of rain, bottles that were once empty will be soon full; the viewer will see the impact of an overwhelming rain—a rain that isn’t so natural.

“When we think about climate change, the first thing we think of is the sea level rising,” Levy says. “But there’s another kind of tide thriving out there. And that is the changing regime of rain.”

In the past, cities like Philadelphia had a nice balance of rain, Levy explains. But with M AY 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

• Marguerita Hagan inspects a coral reef-inspired sculpture (left); her piece “Perpetual Lophelia Pertusa” shows the extending tentacles of a coral pom-pom found in a millennia-old reef off the coast of South Carolina (right).

seem disconnected from our everyday lives, but Levy argues that’s not the case.

“Some of my work is about making what people find invisible visible,” she says. “They can say, ‘Oh, wait, nature is happening here, too.

It’s happening in the air in my apartment, it’s happening in my backyard, it’s happening in both the suburbs and the city.’

It’s important to feel a sense of connec— marguerita hagan, featured artist tivity with nature by knowing that it exists everywhere.” hard to decipher, even for ecologists.

Rising Tides aims to break down the bar“I believe that science has closed a lot of riers between the living: humans and the people out of understanding it, because it environment. We can easily forget about the aquatic world around us, Igoe and Levy speaks its own language,” Levy says. She argue we need constant reminders. “Artists equates science with law: you have to be trained in that language in order to calcucan help visualize the abstract idea of global late the outcome. warming in a very profound way by providing new perspectives on our local and “Art has a really strong role as a translator of ecology,” she says. global environment,” Igoe says. “It brings The piece at the Michener is one of many climate change’s effects on water to the installations under Levy’s artistic belt. forefront of people’s minds.”

“Water is going to touch you in every asIn the past, Levy constructed sculptures, walkways and gardens across the country pect of what you do in your life. I don’t think to connect nature with visual experience. In we think about it that way. I don’t think we 2018, she partnered with Mural Arts Philsee how interconnected we are,” Levy says. adelphia to create a floating installation Witnessing the clear skies, the clean air and the drop in carbon emissions due to soat Bartram’s Garden that visualized the Schuylkill River’s cyclical tides. cial distancing and stay-at-home orders is Earlier this year, Levy installed “ Collectinspiring. But it raises the question: What ed Watershed” at Towson University’s Cenwill happen when things return to “norter for the Arts Gallery. Similar to her work mal?” at the Michener, this installation used 8,500 Will we forget the lessons of the pandemglass jars and 1,000 gallons of stream water ic, or will we finally understand the worth to re-create an interactive map of Towson’s of water before the well runs dry and the watershed. floods arrive?

Over the years, Levy has constructed pieces that embody Earth’s natural flow—things Updates for the opening day of Rising Tides: like wind, rain, growth and decay, and even Contemporary Art and the Ecology of Water rising tides. At first glance, these themes can be found at www.michenerartmuseum.org.

climate change, this balance has gone off-kilter. Philadelphia recorded approximately 61 inches of rain in 2018, just three inches shy of the level recorded in 2011, a year hammered

by Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

As the atmosphere’s temperature rises, water evaporates in larger quantities, allowing for more precipitation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. With more rain comes more flooding, which can damage watershed ecosystems that aren’t prepared for a rise in water levels.

Levy’s installation visualizes the chaos and inconsistency of the flooding of the Delaware. Some days, the bottles will remain untouched. Other days, volunteers may fill and empty them consistently.

“Flooding is guaranteed at some point.

When it floods, you’ll actually be able to see how far the river will spread beyond the regular level,” Igoe explains. “Some bottles won’t be full until it floods. It’ll be an installation that’ll change for visitors over time.”

Seeing the vulnerable state of the river through art can influence a visitor much more than hearing about it through conversation. Levy conceptualized “Flood River” as a way to speak to people through a means that’s easy to understand. Science can be 30 GRID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 20

PIERRE TROMBERT

The virus outbreak really hit hard after all these plans. But, it’s also driving home the absolute necessity of us changing our systems and how we interact and how we work together.”

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M AY 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 31

A NDRE W A B B OT T A LON A BRA MSON CH A RLES A DZ EMA CA RINA A HR EN G REGORY ALOI A VICTORIA AQU I LON E CH RIS A RG ERA KI S

Dear readers: Like many other small businesses, Grid has been adversely and dramatically affected by the economic fallout caused by the coronavirus. We will continue to post COVID-19 related resources online at gridphilly.com, and to devote the pages of our print publication to sustainability, which has never felt more relevant. I’d like to thank all of our subscribers for supporting us, and I’d like to invite anyone who has considered subscribing—$2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 a month—to do so. Thank you.

—alex mulcahy, publisher

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ALB E RT YE E J E N YUAN H I LLE L ZARE M BA BARBARA ZARSKY JACLYN Z E AL CURTI S Z I M M E RMANN

This moment of nature ‌

brought to you by Natural Lands, which has been preserving our region’s open space for six decades.

Our preserves and public garden are open free of charge to all. Plan your visit at natlands.org.

land for life. nature for all.

Stroud Preserve, West Chester, PA | 571 acres Photo by Owen Mundth