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This season, we have partnered with Oasis Development to start a new farm site in downtown Lynn. The new land is located on Munroe Street, which also houses The Food Project North Shore office.
The 1/4 acre lot is highly visible and is already starting to bring more excitement to downtown Lynn. We will be working on this project throughout the season and will be growing more food for our Lynn Central Square Farmers Market & Hunger Relief donations and we will be providing more community garden space for residents of the downtown Lynn area.
Additionally, we would like to highlight Brick Ends Farm for their compost donation & Eastern Tree Services for the woodchips! Pictured are volunteers from General Electric, preparing beds for planting.
We are excited about this new project and invite you to come visit us the next time you are in the North Shore!
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This a conference that a former TFP farmer is holding on his farm outside Halifax, Nova Scotia. If you are at all interested in farming and will be in the area, you should make a plan to go to this gathering.
This fun-filled weekend features good learning, good food and great people.
Check out this website or e-mail for more information.
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Yes, we farmers do work some in the winter. Now it is care for the inanimate object on the farm, not the vegetables, that occupies our time. Coming home from a day of wrenches and repairs I found an old essay by E. B. White that summed up how I was feeling: “farming is about twenty per cent agriculture and eighty per cent mending something that has got busted. Farming is a sort of glorified repair job.“ That is certainly how it seems at this time of year when our hands are more likely to be smeared with tractor grease than creased with soil. Fix-it projects vie for our attention before the season begins- the water hydrant that dribbles when it should gush, the door that swings at an awkward angle, the green house heater that stubbornly refuses to fire up, the tractor tire that goes flat as soon as it awakens from its winter slumber. Fluids need changing and filters need cleaning. We are becoming quite fond of our liquid wrench, sledgehammers and ratchets. Sometimes the problems require a much softer touch. That heater malfunction turned out to be more of a zoning than a mechanical issue. Generations of birds had squeezed through the narrow grate meant to keep them out and taken up residence in the chimney, eventually cutting our heater off from the oxygen supply required for combustion. A tall ladder and a long stick were all it took to evict the tenants and their nests, allowing the heater to rumble to life again. Luckily, just as we were beginning to feel more like mechanics than farmers, seeding time arrived and now the neon green of emergent onions brightens our lives. Once again we have living things to care for, vegetables to cultivate, dinner to grow.
By Kate Mrozicki, Farm CSA Manager
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I park the car on what seems to be solid ground and walk the length of the farm to the greenhouse. The road is all mud and ice. Some brussels sprouts that didn’t get harvested poke through the many inches of snow still on the fields. It’s a quiet Saturday morning on the Lincoln farm until I get inside.
Then it’s all hustle and bustle.
Teenagers from the D.I.R.T. Crew (Dynamic Intelligent Responsible Teenagers) are planting over 11,000 onions this morning. Onions are the longest growing crop we grow here at The Food Project. There are about twelve youth here and they are rotating through various tasks:
Shoveling soil for mixing
Mixing soil to put in the trays
Washing trays
Planting the seeds and covering them with vermiculite
Finished trays
This is their first time back on the farm since late fall. Since November, these teenagers have been learning about hunger and homelessness, service, diversity and going on a retreat, where the public speaking training was a hit. Now they’re back on the farm, starting the first of many crops that will grow on our farms in Lincoln and Boston.
In the late fall, when the last of the food is harvested from this land, we often refer to the farm as resting. So, this first Saturday of having youth back on the land, often feels like the beginning of a new season. As I left the farm that morning, I came across Richard and a group of friends, who had just tapped the maple trees that ring the farm. What I realized, standing there on a cold, clear morning, is that this farm never rests. There’s always something growing, getting ready to produce. It’s our job to take care of this land and to teach young people to do the same.
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It can take a lot of soil and compost to create an urban farming site. This is Jess Liborio, one of our urban growers watching a truck unload its gold onto the Ingalls School farm site of The Food Project. I am posting this picture because of the largeness of it. While you may see a lot of soil, I see a lot of work and a lot of hands coming together to do that work. On this site alone, we will work with hundreds of volunteers to make food grow. Those helpers will be schoolchildren, adults from corporations, folks who want to farm, and neighbors who stop by to lend a hand (or two!). Thanks to all of you who help The Food Project do what it does best–growing and distributing food to those in need.
Learn more about volunteering at The Food Project.
