Watching Vegetables and Community Grow

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on June 18, 2007

In the past, I have written about the community garden by Greenvale Park Elementary School, I provided organizational support, translation work and the water tanks currently installed at the garden by the school. While all of this was going on, I received a call from Lee Runzheimer, until recently, the director of the Northfield Enterprise Center. He had a friend with land behind Benjamin Bus on the Northeast side of Northfield and wanted to provide it to families interested in gardening.
I called Erick Dee, the land manager, and asked him for four plots, large enough to grow vegetables to feed a family. Not only did Erick provide the land, he has also hauled cow’s manure, and hauls a large tank from the garden to his house, fills it with water, and then parks it at the garden for use by the families tending the plots. In the picture, besides the families who manage the gardens (some did not want their names used) you see Joey Robison, from Just Food Community Coop in Northfield. She came to check the gardens as we look into organizing these Latino families to grow food more formally next year. This will not only improve their own diets, but also generate income by selling the produce at the local cooperative, the farmers market and other outlets in the cities.

This has been an amazing experience, in less than three months, we have gone from talking about better diets, gardening, and ideas for building a more cohesive community, to having four families gardening at Erick’s place, planted 2 acres of black turtle beans at my neighbor’s land, and we are now busy weeding 10,000 onions that I am growing with another family on land behind my house. All in all, there are six Latino families growing vegetables and 6 High School youth involved with the black turtle bean project. We have inquiries already piling up for the gardening projects next year, it looks like we are getting close to having to have a business plan to manage the growth, and maybe a foundation or two to get interested in this work.

With the recent rains, it looks as if we are headed for a good harvest of vegetables, beans, onions, a healthier diet, a better community, and as the picture shows, kids who will now know that food does not come from the store, it is grown by hard working farmers. Last week,IrmaPeralta , (the women in the picture with the more gray hairs) came to the onion patch with her granddaughter (the younger women in the picture with the child) and said to my wife “I come here with my daughter to weed the onions because then we get to talk and it is a good therapy to get rid of stress”. Irma and her husband used to grow vegetables back in Mexico, this is a chance for her to share her life with her granddaughter, and judging from her good health, she will probably be teaching gardening to her greatgranddaughter as well (the baby in the picture).