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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Finding a place for a garden at DeWitt Clinton

Background

This past school year, the Witt Seminar has succeeded at one of its most ambitious and visionary projects to date: the creation and establishment of a vegetable garden on the beautifully verdant campus of DeWitt Clinton High School. The garden was conceived as one component in a much larger effort to raise awareness especially among students in the Clinton community about food.

Inspired by films like Food, Inc. and Supersize Me, we wanted to engage our fellow students with some of the issues related to food production and consumption in our country and help expose them to the dangers and consequences of accepting and participating in a food industry that privileges profit over the health. In other words, we wanted students to be aware that much of the food they normally eat, even in our school cafeteria, is unhealthy. While there is much to criticize about fast food corporations and their ability to manipulate consumers into unhealthy eating habits, we felt it equally vital to provide and promote healthy slow food alternatives. What better way than to grow our own. Therefore, our main goal for last year's class was to start a garden.

We should mention at the outset that our plan to start a garden was enthusiastically embraced by the late Megan Charlop who served as Director of the Division of Community Health at Montefiore's School Health Program and envisioned an edible school garden in each of the 16 Bronx schools that house school-based health centers. With Megan’s encouragement, the Witt Seminar decided to devote the entire 2009/2010 school year to promoting healthy school food and eating habits among our students rather than holding what had become our annual Witt Seminar Conference on Activism, a conference that Megan along with numerous community activists participated in from 2005 through 2009. In subsequent blogs, we will outline our considerable success thus far in helping to raise food awareness at DeWitt Clinton.

Why not the courtyards?

Ours was not the first recent attempt to start a garden at DeWitt Clinton and like others before us we were first drawn to the school’s inner courtyards. After all, the courtyards can easily be perceived as the two-chambered heart of our school and therefore an enviable location for a school garden. Imagine our building: a large hollow rectangle, three stories of classrooms high that face into two large courtyards on either side of the central auditorium/library building. The two courtyards are a splash of green at the very center of the school building in a space shared only by structures that gather and house large numbers of students in assembly, study, or research. Perhaps in its original intention, the courtyards were envisioned to be a space where students in a school garden could be captivated by the working of sunlight and rain on growing plants. Just as the auditorium was designed to nourish our social being and the library designed to enrich our minds in culture and knowledge from books, the garden would sustain and nourish our bodies. Imagine the possibilities of an education in such a space!

The north courtyard already has splendid trees, especially an immense flowering dogwood. Just as students are about to graduate in the spring, the tree explodes in color. This courtyard is also home to the school’s only livestock: a lonely chicken that was allegedly rescued from the front of the building by one of the custodians. Who knows from whose dinner table or rooftop it escaped? There is also a greenhouse, no longer in use. When Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, visited our Witt Seminar, we dreamed of creating a "chicken run" in this courtyard. Perhaps this still could become a reality someday.

The south courtyard, by contrast is almost completely empty except for a collection of dwarf evergreens that were planted by Clinton students who participated in the One Million Trees project. It is still, by most accounts, a neglected space often littered with paper, pens, abandoned notebooks and discarded textbooks. What a perfect space to reclaim!

Initially, it was our hope to place our garden in either or both of these courtyards and so we spent considerable time measuring and dreaming of how we might work to transform these spaces into their full potential. Just being within these enclosed environments was both thrilling and empowering. There is an eerie hush as sounds of students and teachers carrying on their business could be only faintly heard. When in the courtyards we are essentially inside the school but we are also outside as well, under the sun and sky.

The problem with the courtyards, however, resides in their accessibility. In order to access the north courtyard, a custodian must lead us down the circular stairs of the records office and through the custodian’s locker room. Perhaps there is a way to avoid the records office, but not the custodian’s space. At least this courtyard had a door. The south courtyard is presently accessible only through a supply room window. A ramp has been built to accommodate the opening, but it would not be a place to bring any large group of students on a regular basis.

We still feel that the courtyards are ideal places in our school to garden, but until major structural changes are made to allow access from, say the cafeteria, or at the very least through available and accessible doors, the spaces are too cumbersome to reach.

Discovering the ideal location to get our garden started

It is unusual for teachers or students to have much interaction with custodians and groundkeepers but from the moment we started planning the garden we have had to rely upon the custodians to open doors, turn on the water, and provide keys. Not only have the custodians helped us with whatever we have needed, they have also expressed a great deal of support for what we are doing. We have learned that the custodians of DeWitt Clinton are the greatest and, in the near future, we will dedicate an entire posting to sing their praises.

Jim Rafferty, the head custodian, first suggested the location for what we think is the perfect garden spot. A narrow bit of lawn, 96’ x 10’ that runs along the south side of the gym building. There is almost full sunlight except for the morning before the sun rises over the building. Beside the four evenly spaced ornamental cherry trees the spot is empty. The best part of the emptiness is that there is room for the garden to grow. Beside the lawn itself there is a wide sidewalk (for potted plants, tables, benches?) and a twenty foot fence separating the space on the south side from the faculty parking lot and on the west side from the track and football field. We envision the possibility of potted vines that will reach to the top of the fences to provide not only shade but some sense of privacy and enclosure for the garden.

On June 18 and 21 2010, the very last two days of school, Witt Seminar students Jorge, Gabriel, Karissa and Elizabeth along with Community Health Organizer for Montefiore Medical Center Jessica Moorman, student teacher Caroline Shephard and Witt Seminar teacher Ray Pultinas were able to plant the garden. Montefiore Hospital generously donated soil, raised beds, bags of peat and manure but it took time for the supplies to be delivered and the garden boxes to be built. Nonetheless we used the lasagna method of layering to prepare our garden beds.

Throughout this summer, Ray Pultinas, with help from his family, have been watering and tending the garden. It is presently abundant with squash, tomato, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, basil, and peppers and we expect a plentiful harvest by the time students return for the fall semester.