Over fresh cantaloupe and warmed bitter gourd, Grow Food Northampton staff spent an evening in July introducing community members to their new project on Meadow Street in Florence, the Living History Garden. Sitting at the edge of the GFN Community Farm, the garden is a thoughtful curation of 17 different crops.
Food Access Manager Erin Ferrentino said, “The Living History Garden is a community-created space that honors culturally significant and diasporic crops and the powerful stories they carry. Each seed reflects histories of resilience, displacement, survival and celebration.”
Among these crops are an heirloom tomato grown from seeds shared with a white woman named Aunt Lou by a man escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad; fijil abiyad, a self-seeding white radish preserved by farmers despite the destruction of Iraq’s national seed bank during the U.S. invasion; sugar beets and flax that were planted and harvested locally in the 1840s during the “Free Produce Movement” as an alternative to enslaved-grown sugarcane and cotton; and green pigeon pea, the small but well-traveled legume that is the center of many traditional dishes in South Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America.
The GFN staff invite us to take a walk through the resource garden to read posted information about the blooming plants and scan QR codes to hear family stories from fellow community members. We enter the space through the vine-adorned wooden archway at the edge of the plot.
Erin explains, “The archway entrance was designed as a portal — an intentional threshold marking the shift from the everyday into a space of reflection, inviting visitors to engage with the deep legacies rooted in this land and the plants that grow here.”
GFN has been curating and cultivating this portal and these crops for two years now as part of their ongoing community educational programing.
At John F. Kennedy Middle School in Florence, GFN has created a different kind of portal. One for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in the Stir it Up! after-school cooking and food-justice club. Led by GFN’s Education Manager Molly Aronson, students get the chance to experiment with new flavors and try basic cooking techniques, while also learning more about where their food comes from, local organic farming and the history of food in social movements through time.
In one session, Molly leads the group in making pesto pasta with locally grown basil, along with sautéed Palestinian kousa squash freshly picked from the Living History Garden. The kids get excited to participate in the food prep volunteering to chop, blend and boil various ingredients.
Molly said, “In this club, we come to understand that food is an essential part of everyone’s existence and culture, and that all people on this planet have a right to control their own food sources — that means a right to grow their own food, access food that is culturally important to them, and a right to eat delicious, nutritious food. Parents often tell me that their kids become far more adventurous eaters by participating in this club!
The next week, I meet Molly at Crimson and Clover Farm, the “anchor farm” on the GFN Community Farm, where third-graders from Northampton Public Schools break into groups to harvest kale and forage for seed pods in an end-of-season field with GFN staff members leading the way. The children proudly wave their kale stems in the air and learn the life cycles from seed to plant to food.
In a greenhouse filled with boxes and boxes of freshly picked squash, Molly tells the group the history of the “three sisters” that make up succotash (squash, beans and corn), which were grown together by the Narragansett tribe and cooked into what they called “msikwatash.” A strong study in companion planting and sustainable farming, the dish is one way that third-graders learn the history of Indigenous people in Massachusetts.
After the kids prepare the vegetables for cooking, small bowls of warm samples are eaten quickly, as the parent chaperones chuckle in astonishment. One mother asks if she should make this at home, with her son emphatically replying, “Yes!”
This educational discovery is, in part, what GFN strives for when making the farm into a classroom. Last year, their educational programming reached more than 2,200 individuals. Among these events offered throughout the year, farmers and educators offered 20 community workshops, 12 family programs and 25 after-school classes.
Executive Director Alisa Klein said, “This foundational approach, to offer resources and education inviting active participation in our local food system, will cultivate the next generations of local food champions.”
Back on Meadow Street, as the season draws to a close, GFN staff and volunteers were still hard at work this week planting the first batch of apple, pear, plum, peach, paw paw and mulberry trees as part of their new Community Orchard. New seeds sown on preserved farmland telling future stories to every one who will listen, making food and farm more accessible to all community participants, no matter what age.
Laura Spencer is writer in residence at Grow Food Northampton.