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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