Nourishing more than minds
It began slowly. Two years ago, the land behind the Boston Day and Evening Academy was a mess, a neglected stretch of weeds and patchy grass. But teachers at the charter school saw promise, and set out to reclaim the land as a food source and as a student learning experience.
For the first year and a half, the project went slowly, kept alive by a collective volunteer effort. Then, this year, Gabriel Erde-Cohen, a 24-year-old, self-styled urban farmer from Jamaica Plain, burst upon the scene, and the project blossomed.
Working with the help of seven students for the past three months, Erde-Cohen has essentially farmed the school's land. He has raised a healthy crop of eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, greens, and squash.
Today, the garden is a point of pride for the school, said Andrea Kunst, the school's director of institutional advancement.
The patchy grass has been replaced with a set of tidy raised beds bursting with a pageant of vegetables. Persistent weeds have given way to a harvest of produce.
"It's been a remarkable and natural way to involve everybody in the health of the student body," Kunst said.
Vegetables grown at the school are distributed to students, staff, neighbors, and nearby Haley House Bakery Café.
Erde-Cohen is hoping the success he and the teachers have shared will appeal to other city schools. He's launched Green City Growers, an organization that aims to build and maintain similar plots in schoolyards.
Creating a connection for young people with their food, or, as Erde-Cohen calls it, "expanding their ecological literacy," is one of his personal missions. Cultivating urban food systems in the Boston area is another.
"You can really grow organic food right here, in these unused spaces, and eat good food for a lot less than what you pay at Whole Foods," he said. "Once you demonstrate that for people, their whole world opens up."
Erde-Cohen, a Brookline native, studied farming and sustainable design at Hampshire College. He went on to work as a farmer and educator with Common Vision, a group in California that planted fruit trees in urban areas along the West Coast.
There, he got a taste for bringing rural farming principles to kids in the city and came up with the Green City Growers idea. This year he returned to Boston to give it a try.
He's working on proposals for a handful of schools, based on the work he's done in Roxbury, and is also looking to secure outside funding for school officials who are interested in establishing a garden.
Green City Growers may already have one school secured. Kunst, at the Day and Evening Academy, said teachers have proposed reclaiming another vacant plot across the street from the school. They're hoping to plant fruit trees and flowers.
"It's been not only nourishing to have the garden," Kunst said. "It's beautiful to look at, too." 