PFP is pleased to announce that we are considering adding a fruit share to our CSA offerings! The fruit would come from a local orchard and would be a mix of peaches, plums, pears, nectarines, apples and grapes. Before jumping into it, we need to gauge serious interest among our current CSA Shareholders.
***Edit*** We did it! There was enough interest and from now until July 1st, you can sign up for a Fruit Share by clicking here.
After taking PFP’s “Using Gardens to Teach” Summer Institute for Educators in 2014, third grade teacher Mrs. Suzi Sullivan was intent on starting a school garden at Clinton School. Since then, she has written and been awarded three grants in order to purchase the fence, garden, beds, soil, and hand tools that have made her vision a reality. Her students have been busy planting seedlings donated by Poughkeepsie Farm Project. School principal, Mr. David Scott said, "I am extremely appreciative of the support of our partners: Lowe’s Toolbox for Education, Whole Kids Foundation, Tractor Supply Company’s Dig-It Program, and Poughkeepsie Farm Project." Clinton students now have the opportunity to experience an outdoor classroom setting that fosters the learning of various topics including science, social studies, math, literacy, and nutrition.
One of the main goals of the school’s garden is to provide educational lessons that incorporate meaningful messages about nutrition. According to Poughkeepsie Farm Project’s education director, Jamie Levato, “taking part in garden-based learning encourages healthful eating and connects students to academic subjects in engaging ways.” Not only does the exposure to fresh fruits and vegetables allow students to develop healthy eating behaviors and food choices, but the involvement in their growth, maintenance, and harvest establishes a more purposeful connection that will follow students as they move into adolescence and adulthood. Mrs. Sullivan says, “the garden will play a critical role in establishing an environment that supports healthy behaviors while providing opportunities for students to learn about and practice healthy eating and physical activity.” Research shows that nurturing students’ interest in eating fruits and vegetables and improving their knowledge of nutrition can lead to improvements in eating habits, and thus academic performance, social skills and behavior.
Clinton School will have classes decide what to grow in the garden and spend one 40-minute period each week for garden bed maintenance or other educational activities like reading in the garden. Mr. Scott, says he knows that the garden “will promote healthy eating behaviors by providing our students with direct, hands-on learning experiences in the school garden.” Additionally, students will be able to harvest and taste fresh produce. The success of the school garden program will be measured by student reports of their gardening experiences, including what activities they enjoyed, new fruits and vegetables they were able to taste, and what messages they took away from it.
On June 10th, 2016, there will be an outdoor, full-school assembly at 12:45pm followed by a ribbon cutting ceremony at 1:30pm. This event will celebrate the importance of promoting health and well-being through student, faculty, and family participation in building and maintaining the school’s garden.
Katherine grew up in an Ohio suburb surrounded by cornfields, but she cultivated her love for farming in New York City. While working in nonprofit marketing and communications, she fell in love with community gardening and with the Union Square farmers market near her office, where she quickly learned how to locate the “ugly bags” and end-of-day deals (on that aforementioned nonprofit salary) while also forming relationships with the folks behind her food.
The lure of working outdoors, supporting a community-based project, and immersing herself in another language led Katherine to a children’s home in La Paz, Bolivia, where she worked with resident children to build their own community garden. “One of the kids told me the soup they’d made for dinner one evening was especially tasty because they had grown the radishes that were in it,” she recalls, “while another kid kept his radishes in the ground all season. He told me they couldn’t be pulled up until at least the following year!” Their enthusiasm for growing food and strong sense of food sovereignty stuck with her, and back in NYC, she dove further into urban agriculture, helping to develop urban farms and community gardens with the New York Botanical Garden's Bronx Green-Up, managing educational apiaries with NYC Beekeeping, and tending chickens in Brook Park while learning with neighbors about the history and significance of this South Bronx community garden.
Though she felt strong ties to her neighborhood and New York City, she also found herself more and more frequently traveling across and beyond the five boroughs to visit and work on various farms. Last year she moved up to Dutchess County to apprentice at Sisters Hill Farm, a five-acre, 250-member vegetable CSA farm, where she received training in efficient farm systems, tractor operation, and farm management. She also graduated last winter from Farm School NYC’s urban agriculture and food justice certificate program, which shaped her understanding of a fair food system as one that is anchored in environmental, social, and racial justice.
Katherine is thrilled to be farming this season at Poughkeepsie Farm Project and to be working alongside an awesome farm crew and staff, both in the field and in her role as Food Share program manager, through which she will be coordinating donations of fresh produce throughout the season to local community organizations. She looks forward to collaborating with PFP’s Food Share partner organizations, and she is equally excited to meet and work with our CSA shareholders. Keep your eyes and ears peeled around the farm; if you spy someone in the fields snacking on edible weeds or hear a loud burst of laughter, that might be Katherine!
We are excited to offer our annual Using Gardens to Teach Summer Institute for Educators again this coming August 23-25. Below is a letter from Nicole Cardish, one of our 2015 participants, to a colleague. We just saw Nicole a few days ago when she picked up seedlings that PFP donated to the Mill Road School Garden that she manages in Red Hook. She was thrilled to be planting with the students and teaching in the garden.
As suggested by her note, Nicole has started a vermiculture bin and has just initiated classroom composting for snack time and the kids are loving it! She and the students are also growing a wide range of vegetables in the garden for tastings and preparing simple snacks.
From left to right: Susan and Nicole collect and process seeds from Glacier Tomatoes; Nicole and Stacy prepare a healthy garden-fresh snack; Nicole and Isaac find the area and perimeter of a garden bed; Nicole picks up PFP-grown seedlings for the Mill Road School Garden.
The annual PFP Plant Sale is a great public and member event. Come to Poughkeepsie Farm Project on May 7th and 14th, from 9am to 2pm, when we will be selling nearly 100 varieties of vegetables, flowers and herbs raised in our greenhouse, as well as beautiful PFP merchandise. Please bring containers/boxes to put 4 inch pots and plugs into.
These plant sale days are also Open Farm Days, where you can join us on a tour of the farm, meet the staff and board, learn about our programs and activities, and find out how to sign up for shareholder work hours on our new system. Our farm managers will also lead a new CSA member orientation at noon. Don’t forget to stop by the Membership Booth to see if you are eligible to receive free plants!
Poughkeepsie Farm Project is located on the Vassar Farm and Ecological Preserve at the intersection of Hooker and Raymond Avenues in Poughkeepsie, New York. Follow the driveway down past the red barn to the parking lot.
Proceeds from the Plant Sale support upgrades to farm operations and equipment. Proceeds from merchandise sales and membership donations support our education and food access programs.
I apprenticed at PFP, under farmers Asher and Wendy, for two transformative seasons in 2010 and 2011. I moved on to manage Huguenot Street Farm for a few years, a 12 acre vegetable CSA in New Paltz. In need of some inspiration and a new challenge, I accepted the flower grower position at Sol Flower Farm in Millerton and built their cut flower operation from the ground up. Sol Flower decided to shift focus last fall, and the veggie grower and I were presented with the opportunity to purchase the equipment and CSA membership list. Not able to pass up the opportunity, I teamed up with two amazing human beings and highly skilled farmers, Maggie Cheney and D. Rooney, to start Rock Steady Farm & Flowers in Millerton!
Rock Steady Farm & Flowers is a vegetable and professional cut flower farm with a growing CSA membership, that sells to farmer’s markets, wholesale accounts locally and in NYC, and direct to brides and grooms who want DIY wedding flowers. We are a small farm with a big vision! We are deeply rooted in social justice and have a strong commitment to making sure all of our community members have access to the food we grow. In addition, we hope to create a cooperatively owned business that empowers its workers, provides stable employment and a living wage.
Part of what inspired me to take the big leap and start a farm was our ever expanding community of support, both here in Poughkeepsie (where my partner and I still live) and in Millerton. Getting Rock Steady Farm & Flowers off the ground isn’t just about us three owners working our tails off and pouring over budgets until wee hours of the night. It’s also about the people and organizations that have stepped in and stepped up because they believe in what we are trying to do in the community.
This winter and spring our CSA members stepped up in true ‘Community Supported Agriculture’ style. They stuck with us through the farm transition and their commitment allowed us to purchase our first seeds, to buy the first tank of propane for the greenhouse, and pay the electric bills. They helped bridge that gap, which literally made all the difference. Although I’ve been working on, and managing, CSA farms for many years, it’s been in the last few months that the power of a committed CSA has actually started to settle in.
As a start up farm, I’m particularly proud of the fact that Rock Steady has been able to launch our low income CSA share program in our first year, with the goal of serving 88 families in 2016. This was possible through two important non-profit partnerships. The first, started three years ago, and is sponsored by the North East Community Center. Through this partnership we will provide vegetable boxes to 70 families in the Millerton area. We are also actively fundraising with Neighbors Helping Neighbors and The Watershed Center, to expand our program to reach an additional 18 families in Ancramdale. Our goal is to raise $12K by May 1st. Learn more about our low income CSA program and how to donate here!
The Watershed Center (WC), is a social and environmental justice retreat center, that shares the farm property with us. The energy and community around the WC were a big draw in choosing to farm in Millerton. The founders and staff have been working with us from day one and we are excited to expand our impact through integrated programming. They introduced us to The Working World, a non-extractive investment fund that supports worker owned businesses, which provided Rock Steady with the financing needed to purchase equipment, infrastructure, supplies, and the working capital to run the farm. We’re proud to be the first business to receive a loan through their new “local community fund” that’s developing!!
With all of this community support, starting Rock Steady has been both an empowering and humbling experience. It calls me back to my time at the PFP as an apprentice - having so much to learn, relying so heavily on my mentors (yes, Asher is still on speed dial) and impatiently looking forward to the first harvest! What I learned at PFP, both in the fields and through my involvement with the sponsored share program, informs my work every single day. It’s grounding to carry forward the work of PFP, and I’m thrilled to have Rock Steady join the local network of individuals, organizations, and businesses that are committed to social and economic justice.
Follow Rock Steady’s adventures this season by following us on Instagram and Facebook, and visit our website to learn more about the farm and contribute to our low income CSA program!!
With much gratitude,
Angela Defelice
Merle, as any Hudson Valley resident will recognize by her accent, was born and raised in neighboring Estonia County, about 3000 miles northeast of Poughkeepsie. She learned farming the hard way; digging the always frozen ground for potatoes and rutabagas in her family’s backyard and working summers picking hops as a“Daughter of Lenin” in Soviet Hungary. As she will eagerly tell you, “it was either that or Gulag”.
Merle received a degree in Nutritional Science with a minor in Kalashnikov Assembly from Tartu University. Upon graduating she was quickly appointed Quality Kontrol Director for Kalev Kandy Koncern, the giant Estonian confectionary and maker of high quality imitation chocolates. While there she yearned to be working outdoors, to be "in nature with plants" as she puts it. She came to the realization that her love of plants stemmed from the fact that they don’t talk back. Likewise, her strong desire to feed the hungry was because “People don’t talk when they’re mouths are full”, adding “at least they shouldn’t”. In order to pursue that dream she left Estonia, eventually settling in Poughkeepsie in 2011.
As luck would have it, in 2014 the PFP hired her mid-season to replace an ailing crew member. She felt immediately at home with the PFP’s collective spirit, long hours and rock bottom wages. Farm Manager Leon quickly assessed her superpower quality- O.C.D., assigning her the position of Greenhouse and Plant Sale Manager. Soon, the coop and greenhouse were clean and orderly as never before, everything in its proper place. While it did take a while for the rest of the crew to learn those places everyone agrees there's a lot less of tripping over things. As she stares resolutely ahead to her 2nd full season, Merle looks forward to the opportunity of admonishing all members, staff and crew who may cross her garden path.
In thinking about complex sustainable agricultural techniques, it is easy to think only of modern innovations. In fact, many traditional agricultural communities have developed extremely resilient, efficient, and sustainable techniques. One such technique is companion planting, an agricultural technique where two or more crops are planted together in a single plot.
The farm crew has been back at work since March 1st, and we feel like we’re way ahead of the game! This time last year there was still a foot of snow on the fields, and we were sorting screws and nails in the Coop (our main storage building) and chomping at the bit to get on the tractor. This year, we’ve spread compost on almost all the fields and tilled all the sections we’ll be planting in the next month.
Patrick Lang is returning to the PFP for a second full season, farming, managing the wholesale program, and coordinating shareholder work hours. Patrick first came to the PFP in 2013 between semesters teaching at City Colleges of Chicago. As a farm intern with minimal growing experience, he brought infectious energy and an aptitude for learning, and quickly demonstrated his commitment to the PFP (sometimes too much commitment, for instance weeding carrots on hands and knees for two days while nursing a foot injury).
