Introducing Beale Street Cafe (or How does JBOLC measure success?)

How does JBOLC measure success? Can we measure it by the length of the line to our booth at last Sunday’s Fungus Fest?

Ok, ours was the only mushroom related food being offered at the event; still, we witnessed a long line at the Fungus Fest on Randall’s Island start to form as we began to set up. We were late on arrival but got right to work. We knew what we had to do – didn’t have time to think too much and before you know it, we were into “the zone.” Femi said I was moving like a robot – I’m sure he was as well - and indeed I was in that humming place – in a rhythm of joyful labor. The pizzas were coming out about every 3 minutes with rolling and stretching, dressing, and paddling pies in and out of the oven at a steady output. Sung at my side cutting and serving. Babafemi, Juju and Joyce had their own momentum and system in place and meanwhile Japanese TV is looking through a camera’s eye over our shoulders. A line of people began forming and because they were mushroom lovers – foragers – either aspiring or practicing walkers and observers of the forest floor - they were perfectly calm and patient – just like at a church service awaiting an offering – a blissful sight to behold. It all lasted about two hours, until we all ran out of dough! We are grateful to the New York Mycological Society for inviting us to the First Annual Fungus Fest and agreeing to produce our inaugural Beale Street Café banner – illustrated by my daughter Ahna Pultinas and displayed for the first time at the Fest. When you see it this weekend at the market hanging from our tent or near our Welcome Table it might appear small, but in my mind – it is an enormous step! With this banner we are also expressing our desire to take it further – we imagine the JBOLC Beale Street Café becoming a mobile food prep operation – a food truck! We dream of being able to pull up at the invitation of any community garden in New York City – to help gardeners and their community utilize their harvest for community suppers and gatherings. That’s roughly the concept and with the introduction of the Beale Street Café banner– another seed has been planted.

I also want to stress that the joy I feel from labor – whether it is cranking out pizzas or digging trenches in the garden or chopping food scraps to make compost – is part of who I am, my roots so to speak. As a child of Great Depression-era children who themselves were the children of Lithuanian immigrants, I grew up respecting labor. I had better. My father clearly prided in the accomplishment of laborious tasks: shoveling the driveway, building sheds and furniture, and what have you. He worked as a pressman for Eastern Color Printing Company for most of his life – remember the Sunday Funnies insert in your newspaper? Well, if you were on the East Coast, it most likely came hot off the press in the presence of my father. My mother and her sister were waitresses who eventually started their own successful catering business in Connecticut. I was working parties, washing dishes and serving hors d’oeuvres from age 13. That’s where the pleasure of serving food comes from in my background. My parents were working class through and through – neither went to college and my father’s only degree, an 8th grade diploma, was granted to him at 17 years old. His widowed mother had relied on all her 3 children – who would have had a better grasp on the English language - to help provide for their household. My mother’s parents were farmers, and my mother would often tell the tale of when, during the Great Depression, my grandfather could not find a single nickel to pay the milk man. It took 3 generations for our immigrant family to begin earning college educations. But then each of us six children went to college and my parents were exceptionally proud of that fact. Though, even after I graduated UCONN with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Fine Arts (Printmaking) my father still held out that I might finally choose a more practical occupation that paid well (something he himself dreamed of doing) – drive a truck! [br] Inspired by my Professor Maxine Greene in my days at Teachers College and her readings and teachings of her own professor and mentor, Hannah Arendt, I began to feel that for my life to be most fulfilling, I would aspire to lead an active life or “Vita Activa,” (as outlined in Arendt’s The Human Condition). Perhaps at that point in my life, in graduate school, I had been aiming towards a Vita Contempativa or Life of Contemplation. Nowadays, I don’t believe that an active life and a contemplative life are incompatible. Nonetheless, I aspired in my life to manage a perfect synchronization of the components of an active life: labor, work and action. I will elaborate more on what this means in a subsequent blog, but I will say for now that the Beale Street Café banner appears as a sign to me that a Vita Activa is once again within my grasp. Please share your comments

Thoughts on 63

Thoughts on 63 JBOLC – driven by joy! Indeed, No other motive. Surprises me that our reverence to and for our mother earth, our daily (if not hourly) practice might be seen by some humans, even today, as odd or misplaced. Most times, it feels like it’s all going to come about anyway, awaiting miraculous displays and flowering soon. What is resilience but willingness to Adjust, Adhere, Adapt, Love? Understand, you can’t hold it back. I could be hoping for rain to sprout the mushrooms in the forest and hope for no rain so the miller can come with his trailer and not sink in the mud. Hoping is what matters – happy rain will come again someday. Like at the market the other Saturday. There were no farmers - meant we had to make more food than usual and then donated so much more after. The way we run our market, no matter how much business, it’s always good. Thanks for the love my brothers and sisters, I have so much to be grateful for. Yet I still detect in me some aching and some lacking, benevolent patience, keep holding it all together. Please share your comments

Nothing Against Restaurants, but....

There is nothing like an occassional dining out - sharing a meal in a restaurant setting with family or friends, a bottle of wine and enjoying what someone else's hands have made. But, to be honest, the best restaurant I've ever been to, including the one that cost over $500 for two - where the chef sat at our table before preparing our meal to jot down our nuanced preferences - is our own home. Nothing beats the restaurant we call home and our home cooked meals. At home we sit on our terrace surrounded by cherished plants - including many that are native and wild - black swallow tail butterfly caterpillars nearby munching on the parsley and picking it clean - a praying mantis hopping on through - maybe carried here by the wind? Always plenty to see and witness - a lettuce plant completing its lifecycle is a beautiful and towering specimin to behold - clusters of downy white and yellow flowers leaning or is it yearning towards the sun and wind like a dancer.

Sung and I delight in our home cooked meals - stews, savory pies, lasagnas - the kind of meal planning that makes use of every last fresh vegetable and fruit we buy from the JBOLC Garden Community Farmers Market - there is a joy in leaving nothing in the refrigerator to spoil - and if that occassionally happens, though rarely - it is food scraps for the compost process. We sit on the floor, crosslegged or stretching our legs in the midst of a thriving garden - and we almost always lick our plates. That's something you can't do in restaurants! (Though we have begun to question that protocol - why shouldn't we be able to?) So, I walk into Joe's Italian Delicatessen on 187 near Arthur Avenue the other Saturday to get another pint of grated right in front of me Parmesian Cheese for the weekly corn roast, after picking up our order from Terranova Bread. A customer is telling Kurt how great a cook his wife is and says "it was so good, we could lick the plates." And I can't help myself but interject, "Why not lick the plates? My wife and I always lick our plates at home. In fact, I think we should all start licking our plates more often, why should dogs have all the fun? Licking plates should be a thing, I say we need to start a campaign to encourage people to lick their plates!" To which Kurt replies, "Maybe you're right, but not during Covid!" "I mean, licking our own plates! Not everybody else's!" As we have revealed and some of you may know this, we aspire to start a Vegan/Vegetarian slow food truck - we even have a name for it - Beale Street Cafe - named after one of James Baldwin's stellar novels and one that I taught as an English Teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School many times. One of the signs I'd like to see on our truck would read, "Feel Free to Lick Your Plate" or "Plate Licking Allowed Here!" That's how good we want the food to be at Beale Street Cafe! And yea, licking your plate is a sensual experience. It gets you the last taste of a great meal. We encourage you to try it! (At least at home, for now!) Please share your comments

Sensuality in the Garden and the Earthly Sexuality of Corn

It has been pointed out to us several times by several people that James Baldwin, though undoubtedly a great writer, essayist, poet, speaker, commentator and playwright - was not a gardener. He had a garden where he lived in St. Paul-de-Vence and while he most certainly enjoyed and relished in its beauty, he hired a gardener who watered and tended the plants. No where in his writing that I know of has he ever disclosed an ambition to garden or be a gardener. Nonetheless, I have found myself responding to those who have questioned naming an outdoor learning center in honor of James Baldwin that, if he were alive today during this time of unprecidented ecological peril when environmental disaster wreaks havoc especially among the poor and powerless, that he would approve of the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center and what we are attempting to achieve. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin dwells on an aspect of experience that he found supressed in his day and that I feel is still only emerging in our own. He wrote, “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” I think most gardeners would agree that gardening, growing, watering and caring for and nurturing plants is a sensual practice in the way Baldwin describes. Hence my delight and joy in reading about corn in Robin Wall Kimmerer's beautiful and wise book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants: "There is an earthly sexuality to a garden, and most of the students get drawn in to the revelation of fruit. I have them carefully open an ear of corn without disturbing the corn silk that plumes from the end. First the course outer husks are pulled away, then layer after layer of inner leaves, each thinner than the next until the last layer is exposed so thin and tightly pressed to the corn that the shape of the kerels show through it. As we draw aside the last layer, the sweet milky scent of corn rises from the exposed ear, rows upon rows of round yellow kernels. We look closely and follow an individual strand of corn silk. Outside the husk it is brown and curly, but inside it is colorless and crisply succulent, as if filled with water. Each little strand of silk connects a different kernel inside the husk to the world outside. A corncob is an ingenious sort of flower in which the silk is a greatly elongate flower pistil. One end of the silk waves in the breeze to collect pollen, while the other end attaches to the ovary. The silk is the water-filled conduit for sperm released from the pollen grains caught there. The corn sperm swim down the silken tube to the milky-white kernel - the ovary. Only when the corn kernels are so fertilized will they grow plump and yellow. A corncob is the mother of hundreds, as many children as there are kernels, each with potentially a different father. Is it any wonder she is called he Corn Mother?" Braiding Sweetgrass is filled with this kind of poetic description of plants and nature and is a book I would highly recommend to anyone seeking sensuality in nature and in gardens. It also reminds me of the pleasure that I receive from working in the garden, despite the heat, the sun, the sweat; I am happy to be one of James Baldwin's gardeners. And next time you bite into the luxuriously crisp sweetness, remember to enjoy the sensuality of this very generous flower we call corn.

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A New Era For JBOLC and Meg's Garden

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It is a new era for JBOLC and our gardening and our practice. As a concession to continue to be permitted use of the space on campus the entire front fence of Meg's Garden has been removed. After being unpermitted to garden there from March of 2021 to just this past month - it has been yet another awakening for sure. We knew full well that this was coming eventually - especially after there was an attempt to take down the fence during our Saturday market. However, imagine if what you felt was your protection for what you've been doing for the last 6 years has suddenly been removed. Kind of a naked feeling for sure. Not only are plants and trees exposed, but our market set up equipment, our seating and tables, childrens' learning materials - arts and crafts, paper, boards, everything now left to the good intentions of our neighbors to not steal or destroy. The timing of this removal means more work for us, more worry and concern and anxiety. My previous request for a postponement until after the growing and market season were completely ignored - not ever responded to. Having worked in these gardens and experienced needless destruction, time after time, I know enough that this is also about my own body's vulnerability. I feel it when the plants I have been caring for and observing as an expectant gardener are butchered. I have been writing like crazy because after all of the drama over this garden for over a year I need to let out my anger and disappointment in meaningful and constructive ways. I have experienced enough surprise attacks and threats on this garden for a lifetime, whether intentional or by default, it amounts to a kind of top down, hierarchical and abusive management protocol that places "cleanliness", order and ease of maintenance (ie. use of small gas engines presently banned in different parts of the country) above any concern for the actual natural ecosystems in place. I have witnessed, in this past month alone, two pollinator gardens - actual sites of citizen study - at the mercy of weedwackers and the men just doing their jobs wielding them like destroyers from another planet. As a career educator, I am appalled by this waste of opportunity. I have also seen our constructive and collaborative decision making and countless outdoor learning opportunities ignored or eliminated because of what's been decided by maintenance personnel and obnoxious administrators. And maybe this is all reaction on my part and people are merely acting out of ignorance (or what James Baldwin and others refer to as innocence) - but there is nothing more vicious to the environment than this kind of innocence or ignorance - and this is what I feel and care about. But the picture is not all that bleak either and it serves us no purpose, beyond stating our outrage, to dwell in our anger. The fact is that we have a garden back and, though we have real challenges, we can still operate as we have been with compassion for the earth and plants in our care and for our garden community. We can garden without fences! And we could address the unforeseen with inquiry, problem solving, collaboration and cooperation and truly make something new. We can continue to seed for a better and more just future. That's what JBOLC is all about. We're open to suggestions but sign making has already started.

Protest Speech against our Eviction - delivered opening day (5/15/2021) of JBOLC Garden Community Farmers Market

May 12, 2021- From this day, JBOLC is not permitted. "We are informing you that at no point can you or any member of the JBOLC enter on to, or invite anyone on to the grounds of DeWitt Clinton Campus." 

 

It feels so wonderful to be here and to be a part of the JBOLC organization

We stand for James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center  and just one of the beautiful things about this present state of adversity is how these beautiful people have come together and organized such a powerful and peaceful resistance.  Our board members, Sung, Dana, Eytan, Cedric, and Joél. Our interns: Annalicia, Paris, Imaam, Clementina, Shakil, and Thy and our partners, friends and neighbors.  We all are a community resource and we’re so honored to have earned your trust and respect. 

Sustainability and Outdoor Education prepare students for a better life and a better future.  We’re those students, each one of us

Sure we and I mean our volunteers have been allowed to tend these school grounds for the last 12 years and that has meant witnessing in front of many others the first signs of asparagus or the return of the goldfinch when the sesame goes to seed.

We were fortunate also to use our backs here to labor - a labor that reaches deep into the soul - common ancestry - Annalicia, one of our interns writes: “Back in Jamaica, my mother was a farmer and I learned a little about agriculture, fertilizing crops, and domesticating animals.

When I came to New York, which isn’t huge on agriculture, I felt that I wouldn’t have a chance to work in the outdoors as I did back home. As a Clinton student, I was introduced to the JBOLC garden which was beautiful with different variations of plants and vegetables. I felt like I found a

small place beside the Clinton building that reminded me of home.”

But I want to remind you that Nature is the teacher around here and We are all her students - if we want to be.

I want to say more about adversity: There is not a tree standing here, some big, some just starting that has not survived some adversity - wind, broken branches, trees split in half from lightening or by a careless knock down or accident or theft  - but adversity has made them stronger.  Trees grow stronger after facing adversity.

And James Baldwin had much to say about adversity.  And in one of the most famous episodes from his groundbreaking essays, Notes of a Native Son, that I taught regularly at this very school, he writes about the summer when he was a young man, barely out of his teens and working at an ammunition plant in New Jersey during the war.  He decided one night  that he would deliberately walk into a restaurant where he knew he would not be served.  But it is not the violence of this story I want to recall - some of you may remember that he threw a glass against a mirror behind the counter and it smashed and it was a real moment of awakening for him.  The point is not to break things and god forbid us never to consider this option - the point, I think, is about breaking the mirror.  What he broke was the way that they make you feel like somehow their hatred of you is our own fault.  

In these 3 weeks now that we’ve stopped working in this garden, because we did obey this awful order, we had plenty of time to write letters, I mean, listen, we’re farmers after all, we love to work hard, we get pleasure out of labor - it is a labor of love, but when we were kept from this beloved space we had to expend our energy and we wrote letters and organized like nobody’s business.  We felt hopeful and defiant, confident at times, but also sometimes pretty down.  Triggered in me personally were times in my life of loss and grieving. But from time to time I too was part of that mirror scene.  Somehow I felt I must have done something wrong, I must have not finished a project or left the woodpile there or didn’t finish painting the fence - and that somehow this eviction is my own fault.  That’s what I had to get past, that’s the mirror I had to smash.  

This sudden eviction of us from tending and loving and caring for hundreds of plant species in the middle of Spring, for no apparent reason, or at the whim of a school building council that has not one parent, one student, or one union representative, let alone community member: that is wrong and that is what has to be smashed.  We’ve done nothing wrong and we are protesting this rude and inconsiderate decision.  We’re defending the rights of this garden community to exist, we’re defending the rights of our students and our volunteers to be in this space - and continue to utilize this space to learn from nature how nature works!  

Thanks for joining us in this struggle.  It’s not our fault.

But finally, and this is the hardest part.  We need to be compassionate to those who made this decision - we can’t all of a sudden vilify these people.  We can thank them for providing the adversity necessary for us to be strong like trees.  Let’s in our actions today and every day moving forward, exhibit love and compassion  - after all, we are all brothers and sisters (including with these plants and trees, birds and squirrels and all).  

We’re not going to let them get away with this though.

 

 

May 12, 2021

 

 

 

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JBOLC Brings New Farmers Market to the Bronx while Compost Education is Threatened

The blog formerly known as Witt Seminar on Sustainability in Schools will now be called
James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center

Special shout out to Linda, Jose, Matt and Julia of Marpillero Pollak Architects for their wonderful and prompt help with drawings that we presented to CB 8 - professional all the way!!

    We are happy to share the news that the Traffic and Transportation Committee of Community Board 8 unanimously approved our SAPO (Street Activity Permit Office) application to operate a farmers market on the sidewalk and unused roadway adjacent to Meg’s Garden near the intersection of Goulden and Sedgwick Avenues and West Mosholu Parkway, So. (north side of DeWitt Clinton High School Campus).   The JBOLC (James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center) Garden Community Farmers Market will operate starting on August 8, 2020 and ending October 31, 2020 from 8:00 am to 3:30 pm (with the hours for market customers most likely from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm to allow for set up and break down).  Farmers and vendors from around the city and state will converge to sell their fresh, locally grown and produced fruit, vegetables, herbs and other garden and farm products.  Our mission starting now will be to gather the farmers and merchants to our market.  

I’ve always admired when forces converge to bring about meaningful and just change.  And as each person is a force in nature, it has been a network of friends, supporters and loyal day in and day out volunteers and, of course, the force of nature itself, plants and everything that grows that have converged to make this moment of change.  The time has come to bring more fresh healthy food to an area at a meeting place connecting Norwood, Kingsbridge and Van Cortlandt Village with Bedford Park close by.   Our site at the garden community hub of the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center on the DeWitt Clinton High School Campus seems perfect to foster a diverse, integrated and just community built around the access to, enjoyment and sharing of locally grown, fresh, nutritionally dense food at a time when our New York City communities need to recover, grow stronger and healthier.   

We are motivated by an unprecedented need to grow more food!  James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center is collaborating with Bronx Green Up and community gardens across the Bronx to establish a series of food hubs to help meet the urgent needs anticipated by everyone who wishes to stay healthier by eating more locally grown, fresh and nutritiously dense food.   Each "hub" will be comprised of a cluster of community gardens from different neighborhoods that will collectively grow food for a local community farm stand or emergency food provider.

Perennial herb harvest Spring 2020.

The uncertain times that we are experiencing demand greater resiliency.  The availability of healthy and nutritious food in a community with unequal access is an issue of justice.  As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it.”

What was once the patio in front of James Baldwin's study in his house in Saint-Paul de Vence, with his writing/reading table. Photo courtesy of Magdalena J. Zaborowska from Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France  (no copyright infringement intended)

In the midst of, and hopefully soon in the wake of this unprecedented global pandemic coupled with an unprecedented global demand for justice and freedom from institutional, authoritarian and militaristic racism and violence, it is time that we begin to eat bread again.  There is what has been called a slow violence that will never be as sensationalized in the news but that is enacted in every case of chronic, diet-related illness and diseases and their destruction in our communities.   There is and will be an increasing need to address underlying health issues that impact the health and welfare of our Bronx families making them more vulnerable.  There were more cases of Coronavirus in the Bronx than in any other borough of New York City.  Accessing fresh, local and affordable healthy vegetables and food products is a human right and a logical first step towards a better and just world.    

James Baldwin in the garden of his home in Saint-Paul de Vence.

If we are anything now, it is because community-based compost is at the root!

If we are anything now; if we are managing an exceptional and unique educational resource, a thriving, local paradise of bio-diversity, home to hundreds of species of plants, birds, animals and insects and stopping off point for hundreds more – yes, arrays of birds – goldfinches and killdeers - worthy of any far off country meadow, hawks, swallows and bats circling at their different times, a seemingly oblivious family of rabbits – all right outside of our school’s doors; if we are engaging sustainability and science students and student interns into the study of permaculture and sustainability – that is, the studied observation and design of landscapes that take best advantage of what nature does best: grow and produce abundance; if we are feeding community volunteers and their families local, fresh, organic and nutrition packed food and donating surplus to contribute healthy, fresh and nutritionally dense food to community kitchens and food pantries where canned goods and nonperishables reign; if  we started from a modest school garden and grew our garden community each and every year for ten years now to include Meg’s Garden and Edible Forest with over 50 fruit and nut trees and if we continue to reclaim grounds scourged by the school’s recently completed 5 year construction project; if we then, based upon our apparent success at transforming and beautifying our school grounds founded the viable 501 (c) 3 non profit organization called the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center named after the legendary American writer and icon and DeWitt Clinton High School alumnus and if our mission is to strive for inquiry and project-based solutions at the juncture of food, environmental and social justice; if we are at all at or approaching the forefront of an environmental education movement at a critical time in history when our entire global population is incentivized to reassess, revise and embrace a caring relationship with nature as our only true means of survival – we cannot live without what the natural world yields to us – oxygen, nourishment, sustenance; if we are what we say or just wanna be or should be (you decide!); If we are anything now, I can truthfully say, compost is at the root!

Ursula Chanse and Kadeesha Williams of Bronx Green-Up and NYBG bringing a load of compost to Meg's Garden and Edible Forest in May, 2020.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate, but it is true that NYC Compost forms the very foundation of our success, for a number of reasons:

First and foremost, compost, itself, contributes fertility to urban soils.   In other words, if it were not for soil made fertile with compost, we would not be able to grow abundantly - let alone produce a surplus - of healthy fresh fruits and vegetables to share with our garden community.  While rural farms have greater access to manure from animals, for city gardens and farms, compost is the most essential and available fertilizer.

While we are grow our edibles in raised beds and on soil that has been amended with compost for years, plants growing in soils that are acidic are more likely to absorb any toxins that might be present in the soil.  This is quite important when attempting to grow food in urban environments.  There are innumerable chances that any urban soil can contain toxins from the amounts of cars, trucks, and buildings discharging polluting exhaust, exacerbated by heat island effects and micro-climates.  Compost acts as a great purifier, as it helps neutralize acidic soils and lessening soil contamination wherever it is placed.  By widely using compost we are automatically helping to detoxify our urban soils, creating a balance in our environment and making our gardens and parks safer for not only our most vulnerable citizens but for every child, pet and creature.

Profile in herbs grown at Meg's Garden, Spring 2020.

Compost is not only the beginning point of fertile gardens and safer soils that produce healthy vegetables it is also the endpoint of a sustainable social practice.  Rather than throwing our food scraps in the garbage, where it will be hauled off (at the cost of emissions and a greater carbon footprint and thrown into landfills to further putrefy our earth and air with toxic sediment and methane, using food scraps to make compost is a win-win situation.  The Compost Project is one of the most coherent and effective means, already in action, not merely a plan, that helps meet the goals of PlaNYC 2030.  Diverting organic matter out of the waste stream and back to our communities where it brings soil fertility, enhanced growing operations, fresh healthy and nutritious food like we grow in our gardens is one of the most sensible city policies on the environment ever enacted.

We are an official Department of Sanitation food scrap drop off site, though our operation has had to be suspended because of the Coronavirus Pandemic.   We relied upon our neighbors and community volunteers to contribute to our compost system where we make compost to apply to our plants and trees and amend our soil.  But we also received deliveries of compost made and distributed by the Department of Sanitation.  We are essential partners with this city agency – we are in effect, the clients of a city program.  We rely on the Department of Sanitation and they rely on us.  Severing this relationship is also severing a vital relationship between the city and each and every community and school garden that supports its efforts to lessen the city’s carbon footprint.  We need so much compost to continue to function as a prosperous community food source!  

This year marks the 10 year anniversary of the beginning of our project - here, students of the Witt Seminar assemble on the empty ground of what was to become The Clinton Garden in late Winter 2010.

Literally, the New York City Compost Project is a part of our origin story.  When we first started our modest school garden, the Clinton Garden, on the campus of DeWitt Clinton High School in 2010, we knew we would provide a service to society by creating a demonstration garden to teach young people where real food comes from.  The Bronx was ranked as the least healthy borough of New York City with elevated rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other chronic illnesses that coincide with poor diets.  I was an English teacher leading a class project in an elective class on Activism.  Though I was born into a family that included my Uncle John, a small-scale dairy farmer in Connecticut, my days on the farm and in the family garden were a distant memory when I first committed myself to maintain and grow our school gardens.  I didn’t know where to start. 

 

Compost Guru Jodie Colon and Urban Farming Legend Karen Washington at the Opening Ceremony,
The Clinton Garden, Spring 2011. 

It was Jodie Colon and the New York City Compost Project in The Bronx that offered the kind of support that we needed.  It is the typical situation of teaching the villager to fish.  The New York City Compost Project offers the Master Composter Training Course that perhaps more than any other experience, propelled our project forward.  One might have thought that the first step I would take to hone my skills as a gardener would be gardening workshops, and sure enough I did take plenty of those offered by GrowNYC, GreenThumb, and Bronx GreenUp.   The Green Thumb Grow Together Conferences offered a valuable education each year and it was led by people I grew to identify with, community members who generously share their first hand knowledge and experience.  But it was Jodie’s Master Composting Class that first made me feel like an expert.  The Master Composter Course gave me a sense of purpose and professionalism, a deep respect for the work of the Sanitation Department and their efforts to think beyond the box – or the trash can!  The course inspired me to first think in terms of projects that were scalable and we’ve been scaling up ever since.   I also came to the basic understanding that before growing anything, we needed good soil and compost improves all soils.   

 
Clinton Garden Harvest (circa 2012)

What distinguishes things done for the public good rests in the word public, especially when contrasted with its opposite, personal.  What is done for the public or in public is visible.  One might even say that what is made public wants to be seen – it is done in public and so it is visible.  The NYC Compost Project and Grow NYC and other city partners provide to the public a service that results in greater health and beauty.   It is visible, it is evident, it is public.   It is visible in the health of our gardens and our citizens and all who rely on a more local source of well-being, our communities themselves.  Community Compost is a success story in a long struggle to transform the city we all love into a more green, sustainable and healthy home.   This is not the time to abandon such success or undermine what is so foundational a public resource!

We consider ourselves essential workers at JBOLC!  Please support our efforts to grow more food!  

 

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