The Youth Farm Summer Program enters its second week (July 5th-July 8th)

This Tuesday kicked off our first full week working at the farm! As of friday last week we assembled into five crews in order to assign each crew to different tasks on the farm and also to provide a close setting where crew leaders could provide instruction/feedback on what people are doing awesome on and what they could work on. For me, Joseph Amsili, working with so many youth has been an amazing experience. The comparison from working before the program began to now working with almost 20 youth has been incredible. The work goes much quicker, it's much more fun, and I'm getting to know awesome new people. This week we prepped numerous beds, weeded/scuffle hoed/mulched many pathways, and we planted a considerable amount of vegetables: 2 beds of winterbor kale, a bed of carrots, beans,  5 rows of pumpkins, and more. On Wednesday we spent the day at the Lehman Alternative Community School to do our development session, an opportunity to learn about the context of the work on the farm. This Wednesday we began with the umbrella concepts: Social Justice, Sustainable Agriculture, Health, and youth involvement in the food movement using selected scenes from the film DIRT. The film begins with a geologic/reverential story of soil, and then we transitioned to industrial agriculture and its effects on the natural world and communities worldwide, and then we transitioned to the way people are addressing these grave injustices through their unique approaches of what sustainability means to them. Three of those leaders featured were Wes Jackson, Majora Carter, and Vandana Shiva. An interesting activity we did as a segway from the clip that said good soil-->good food we did a taste test of berries from Westhaven and Walmart. After the morning discussion we headed into the kitchen to be mentored by Katie Church in cooking a gourmet meal with many components. Crews split up to tackle each component of the meal: A Summer Pasta dish with squash and swiss chard, pork that had been raised at Three Swallows years before, boiled garlic scapes, and an amazing salad with raspberry vinaigrette dressing. What an amazing week!