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Coming into this week felt unavoidably bittersweet. While I always looked forward to working in the gardens and farms each week, knowing that this would be the last for this internship made me want to cherish every moment I shared with the people I had been working with all summer. At the same time, though, there were several exciting events this week that I was looking forward to, making the week feel even shorter as each day came and passed. In a way, though, while the majority of the rest of the week was busy with routine garden and farm maintenance tasks, I’m glad that there wasn’t any large fanfare or major events signifying the end of the summer since this is only the end of my summer internship, but not my involvement with these gardens and farms!

For instance, at Kelly Street Garden on Monday, the other garden volunteers and I primarily continued our work from last week of spreading the New York Department of Sanitation’s compost on all of the beds. As well, we also worked on repotting some plants such as a Christmas cactus.

During this time, though, I was finally able to learn more about the history of Kelly Street Garden. The land is owned by the housing development, and while the original plan was to use the space as a community garden for residents, due to a lack of engagement, Sheryll and Renee were able to instead transform the space into a public community garden. I’ve always been so fascinated by Kelly Street Garden’s location. Like a hidden oasis, the garden is only accessible by a staircase leading underneath one of the many apartment buildings on its street, such that only those who knew what to look for could find it. Because of this, it’s even more exciting to hear about Kelly Street Garden’s origins since, with such an out-of-the-way location, the space could have easily become a forgotten piece of land relegated to only the weeds and trash thrown from nearby buildings.

Through this story, I feel like the lens through which I typically viewed the city has shifted; just how many other hidden plots of land are there that could be cleaned up into a community garden? As well, how can we better connect those who want to start community gardens with the knowledge and resources to make their ideas into a reality? Beyond this, too, is the question of spreading awareness of what community gardens are and the feasibility of creating them. In many cases, it’s often difficult to envision something new if you’ve never seen an example of it in action. Thus, while I have learned so much about the forms and functions of existing community gardens and urban farms, I am also still so curious about larger issues of public education surrounding food sovereignty and urban farming. Working with Cornell Cooperative Extension this summer and being able to attend workshops and meet extension workers has given me a glimpse into how agricultural extension is approaching the issue of knowledge gaps among garden and farm managers in order to enhance their operations, but I can’t help but continue to wonder who is being left out of these exchanges. Of course, I don’t think that this is intentional but rather an existing problem, as once again, it will always be difficult to envision a solution or a problem if it remains elusive. As a major tenet of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s mission is outreach, as I continue to work in the field of agricultural extension, I am curious to discover which groups in New York City are often invisible, and what can be done about this.

One way that I was able to take beginning steps to address this concern was in reaching out to meet with the Red Hook Community Farm youth interns on Wednesday. The questions of visibility, access, and outreach have been especially relevant questions that Kendra and I have contended with throughout the summer, and hadn’t found adequate avenues to address them until last week when we were able to meet with Brendan, Red Hook’s farm manager, and Koron, Red Hook’s farm assistant, and formally propose a meeting with the youth interns to both introduce VR technology as a concept and our project, as well as giving them the opportunity to contribute their own experiences and ideas about how the technology would be useful for them.  While Kendra was unable to join the meeting as her internship period had already concluded, I was able to meet with Perl, who has extensive experience developing critical participatory action research (CPAR) projects as well as a close relationship with Red Hook Initiative having worked with them in the past.

During the meeting, I was consistently surprised and invigorated by the comments and suggestions the youth interns made. In an early exercise where we asked the interns to take pictures of things at the farm that held meaning or importance to them, I hadn’t expected to see that so many of the interns took pictures of different structures at the farm. What was more surprising, though, were the rationales the interns gave explaining their choices. Rather than the structures themselves, what they valued most were the stories and memories associated with those structures, whether they had housed playful moments between each other during their internships, or stood as a testament to the work the interns had done in building the structures. In the past, whenever Kendra and I had talked with Tapan about what the VR model of the farm would look like at its completion, we had always danced around the topics of what we should feature at the farm, and much of our work this summer had been focusing on scanning the largest objects at the farm as we believed that those monuments would best represent the farm. But, as I realized through this meeting, our decision to focus on what we thought represented the farm was always going to be different from what those who actually work at the farm believed. No matter how passionate we are about this project, enthusiasm cannot translate to the weeks and months of experience that those who live within the community possess. For instance, several of the interns had expressed that they’ve worked at Red Hook for over three years, and have thus seen the farm change throughout the seasons and throughout the years. Their insight is wholly unique and their stories are what truly enrich and define the farm. While I was relieved and grateful to have had the opportunity to facilitate this meeting and hear from and collect the interns’ ideas about the next stages of the project, what I walked away with most was the realization that as an outsider, my job moving forward is to ensure that these voices are heard and tangibly inform the decision-making process throughout the remainder of the project’s development.

It is this understanding in an even broader sense that is truly the largest lesson that I’ve learned this past summer. As I spent my Thursday at New Roots Community Garden in Woodside speaking with young children, and neighbors, or my Friday at New Roots Community Farm in the Bronx conversing with local residents and volunteers, I realized that with so much still to learn about community gardening and urban farming, there is such an incredible wealth of knowledge to learn from all of the people that I meet in these spaces, regardless of age or national origin or any variety of external difference. While a fundamental facet for developing greater human empathy, the recognition of the necessity for lifelong humility doesn’t come easily. On Friday, during a conversation I had with Shari, a communications specialist who works with my supervisor, Jenny, whom I was able to meet for the first time that day, it dawned on me that without the people that I met, both professors and students, from my classes my major, I might not have realized the critical importance and value that humility has, not only in my line of work but in my approach to life overall.

Currently, I try to center community voices and needs in all aspects of what I do, as I’ve seen and heard before the disastrous outcomes that failing to do so can have, ranging from the monetary losses associated with failed development projects to actively harming the community by worsening their existing problems. However, not everyone is able to attend classes or meet people who have studied and understand this nuance in humanitarianism. Once again, this raises the question of education, and who is being left out. In this case, though, the question extends not only to who is unable to receive education, but who is unable to share their knowledge. Whose voices from which communities are forgotten in the building of modern curriculums. From what I’ve learned this summer, it is truly from people that knowledge is co-created and communities are born. While my summer internship comes to a close, this is hardly an end as I plan to continue engaging with these questions while also maintaining contact with many of the farm managers and volunteers I’ve met this summer. Even more concretely, I will also continue to work on the VR project by building more models and taking the opportunity to put into practice what I’ve learned by helping to develop many of the ideas that the youth interns I had met had suggested. This was undoubtedly an unforgettable summer, and the experiences that I had have shaped me into a better gardener, farmer, and person, and I already know that I will be carrying the lessons that I’ve learned throughout the rest of my time at Cornell and through everywhere else.

Week In Review:

Perhaps because of the heatwave that passed through the city this week, each day felt a bit slower than usual. Nevertheless, Kendra and I still managed to get a lot of important work done during her last week. Across the farms and gardens we worked at, there seemed to have been a large compost delivery from the Department of Sanitation during the past weekend, so much of our work this week focused on spreading compost on the raised beds at both Kelly Street Garden and New Roots Community Garden at Woodside.

As Kendra and I were able to get our hands dirty, I felt as if I finally understood the motto of Kelly Street for promoting “soil therapy,” or encouraging residents to reconnect with the Earth by working with and playing in the soil! As well, being able to work across all of the beds was a nice way to learn about all of the different plants and herbs being grown in the garden. I learned that in the farthest corner of the garden, there were such specialized herbs as Bolivian Coriander or Quilquina, Skullcap, and Lemon Sorrel, which looks almost like common clover! This quick tour reminded me of how wide the breadth of knowledge is in agriculture and how there will always be so much more to learn. While I was able to learn a bit about some of the medicinal remedies the herbs can provide such as Lemon Sorrel as a way to relieve dehydration, I am still so fascinated about the entire field of medicinal herbs and will undoubtedly continue my learning in the future.

Of course, like any other week at Kelly Street Garden, there is always a myriad of different activities occurring at the same time, so halfway through the day, Kendra, Rachel, and I were able to help Bruce with creating a basil pesto to use up the different varieties of basil growing in the garden. Besides being a nice way to break up the day, I also learned a lot about how to make pesto from Kendra, as I had only ever made pesto once using a mortar and pestle.

At Red Hook Community Farm this week, Kendra and I had the opportunity to attend a formal meeting with Brendan and Koron, the farm manager and farm assistant at Red Hook, along with our supervisors Jenny, Perl, Tapan, and Bryan to have an open conversation about the future of the VR project and what sorts of features the farm would like us to develop moving forward. While Kendra and I agreed that the meeting could have occurred a bit earlier in the summer, we were happy to have had the chance to hear from Brendan and Koron about what they see as important for the farm to present as well as what kinds of elements could be developed to support the farm and its missions in promoting social and environmental justice. This was an incredibly important conversation, and after debriefing a bit with Brendan after the meeting, I felt relieved that everyone was left feeling like they were on the same page for the first time in regards to this project.

As well, it was quite exciting for me to hear about some of the features Kendra and I could be working on developing over the next fall semester as we continue working on this project. According to Brendan and Koron, some educational content that we could develop included cooking demos, composting activities, tomato pruning, as well as lessons about chicken management! While we originally started entered this meeting with a bit of confusion and apprehension about what the project looked like at the end of the summer, I was left feeling especially optimistic about the possibilities of the VR model, and particularly because the future development was directly informed by the farm staff. Of course, while hearing from RHI staff is undeniably valuable in shaping this project, as Kendra and I had been able to discuss with both Perl and Brendan, hearing from other voices such as the youth interns at the farm is also necessary for ensuring that this project is able to benefit and support everyone at the farm. Thus, during my last week with the internship next week, I am looking forward to working with Perl in helping to facilitate a meeting with the youth interns to introduce them to this project and VR/AR technology, as well as giving them the space to talk about what they see as important to highlight at the farm and what gaps in resources this technology can provide.

This meeting solidified for me the importance of something I had been grappling with all summer: centering the voices and experiences of the community members first in all of the work that I do. This is especially crucial when working with agricultural extension and research, as it is all too easy to enter a community as an overbearing force and present an independently designed project or resource for the community, essentially assuming their needs and gaps in knowledge. Not only can this approach be harmful by damaging the relationships and perspectives of each other between farmers and extension agents, but this can also simply prove costly in time, effort, and funds, as providing resources that a community doesn’t need is ineffective at best and potentially damaging at worst. Therefore, I was beyond content that I was able to have a role in holding such a meeting this summer and assure that when Kendra and I continue to work on this project away from the physical farm space, the project is on a path that is well-aligned with the visions and goals of the urban farm and the community behind it.

 

Weekly Highlights:

Following from last week, at Kelly Street Garden on Monday, much of our tasks continued to revolve around setting up the garden’s mushroom cultivation systems. Once again, Kendra and I got the opportunity to help out with three different forms of mushroom cultivation: within the raised beds, on fresh logs, as well as in empty buckets. We started off helping to set up a tarp over the raised beds to deter any birds from feeding on the mushroom spawn as they grow throughout the remainder of the season. During this time, Kendra was able to spot a few mushrooms that had already started fruiting! I had been expecting the first fruits to only start showing next summer, so I was pleasantly surprised to make this discovery.

Afterward, Kendra, Rachel, Pepper, Jane, and I helped to set up two different varieties of mushrooms that will be able to fruit in only two weeks (specifically pink oyster mushrooms and Pohu mushrooms!). After watching a quick tutorial from Field and Forest, we followed the instructions by drilling alternating holes into several buckets and layering them with wood shavings and mushroom spawn.

As for the logs, after transferring them from Red Hook Community Farm over the weekend, we helped Renee set them up by placing them in the adjacent apartment’s bathtubs! According to what I had learned from Steve from the Cornell Small Farm’s workshop on Saturday, the logs typically require a 24-hour soak in order to stimulate mushroom growth by imitating the conditions of a large rainfall event. Still, it was quite entertaining to see how this advice was followed at Kelly Street Garden!

Thursday at New Roots Community Garden in Woodside was equally as educational. When we arrived at the garden, Kendra and I quickly discovered that the garden had begun reconfiguring all of their tomato trellising to a much more effective overhead crossbeam, and much of our day was spent helping to tie up all of the overgrown tomato plants. As well, we also had the opportunity to try our hand at a simple woodworking project: building the garden’s compost bin. Using only scrap and recovered wood, after struggling with challenges like crooked wood panels and building on uneven land, we managed to finish the day with the fully constructed bin!

However, the highlight of the week for me was in the cooking demo that Kendra and I managed to put together for Kelly Street Garden’s weekly food distribution on Friday! While Kendra and I had been discussing the possibility of putting together a cooking demo with Jenny throughout the summer, we hadn’t truly begun taking concrete steps to organize this event until last week. Furthermore, it wasn’t until this Monday that Kendra and I even began to think about what we wanted to make. While we had been planning with Jenny to use the special breeds of kale bred at Cornell, they were unfortunately still too young to be used. Yet, as I reflect on our experience, I now think that this was perhaps a blessing in disguise as this allowed us the opportunity to be creative and learn about all of the other crops and herbs that are typically harvested at this time at Kelly Street Garden. This thread of creativity even encouraged us to look within our own cultures for potential dishes to make, and we eventually arrived at a decision: nasturtium dumplings and cilantro garlic soy sauce accompanied by blackberry mint tea.

I had been excited to find ways to use nasturtium flowers and leaves ever since learning that they were edible, and found the perfect opportunity by incorporating the leaves into the dumplings for the cooking demo and using the flowers as a garnish in our drink. Still, while I had constructed an entire vision for this dish, what remained was still the execution. Much of the recipe development I had done in the past pertained to baking desserts, and as such, creating a recipe for a meal was new territory for me. Additionally, since I had proposed to use a dish native to my Chinese culture, I felt an added responsibility to represent this dish as accurately as I could, even if the ingredients that I chose were non-traditional. As a result, I took it upon myself to specifically try out a version of the recipe at home before Kendra and my live demonstration! Nevertheless, despite the quick turnaround in the planning of the event and the learning curve associated with creating the recipe and figuring out the steps for the dish, I was relieved that the demo managed to be a huge success with the local residents attending the distribution as well as all of the volunteers working that day. As well, while I had started the day feeling nervous anticipation, I found myself enjoying the process of teaching and walking through the steps in the recipe, and felt immense gratitude towards Renee and everyone at Kelly Street Garden that had accepted us into their space and allowed us to showcase our recipe with everyone. While Kendra and I regularly work in the garden and support the garden’s general maintenance, it was incredibly meaningful to me that we were able to use our talents to provide something valuable to all of the garden staff and volunteers. While I still have two weeks left with this internship to continue working with everyone, I will cherish these types of moments I’ve experienced this summer regardless.

Feel free to view a copy of our recipe and try out the dish yourselves at home!:  Nasturtium Dumplings and Blackberry Mint Tea

 

(Other) Weekly Highlights:

Much to my surprise, it just so happened that this week I was able to help with spreading mushroom spawn to set up mushroom cultivation at three different farm sites in all different forms. Starting the week at Kelly Street Garden, Renee showed us a brief tutorial about mushroom farming before Kendra and I were able to get our hands dirty and try applying what we just learned.

Because mushroom cultivation overall was new to me, it was fascinating to see how this process can specifically be adapted to urban settings in which depending on the variety of mushrooms, the mushroom spawn can be deftly incorporated into existing structures in the garden. In particular, I saw how mushrooms can act as both an added-value product to areas like walkways or along the shaded perimeter of the garden, as well as serving to complement crops by growing alongside them in raised beds while contributing nutrients at the same time. In this way, I began to understand the growing demand for mushroom cultivation as a way to elevate the potential of urban garden and farm spaces which due to space constraints, naturally demand more creativity to achieve their desired products. In the past, I’ve already seen how the gardens and farms I’ve visited have integrated honeybees or utilized techniques like intercropping to benefit the ecosystem and maximize the variety of products the garden or farm can offer. Still, it was exciting to be able to partake in what felt like a grand experiment, especially when Kendra and I helped set up some oyster mushroom spawn in laundry hampers!

It also coincidentally lined up that this week New Roots Community Garden at Woodside received their shipment of woodchips for one side of the garden. As we removed the existing tarp that had been acting as a temporary weed suppression measure with the new woodchips, we also similarly crushed up and distributed the mushroom spawn within the new ground cover, allowing the mushrooms to act as further weed suppression and producing another valuable product for the garden. After having just learned about how to set up mushroom cultivation and the beneficial functions the mycelium can serve depending on its location, it was exhilarating to be able to work with mushroom spawn again on a much larger scale. Hopefully, Kendra and I will be able to revisit both sites in a year’s time to see the mushrooms fruit!

This week, Kendra and I also had the opportunity to meet with another CCE intern, Ileana, who we previously met when she visited us at both New Roots Community Garden at Woodside and at New Roots Community Farm in the Bronx earlier in the summer. We specifically coordinated a visit to Pink Houses Community Farm, located within the courtyard of the NYCHA Pink Houses development, to learn about the pest biocontrol project that Ileana is working on. She reported that through the use of simple traps such as buried containers of water and dishes soap and colorful plates containing the same solution, she was able to collect baseline data on the specific species and numbers of pests and beneficial insects at the farm. This data collection, this will serve to inform future integrated pest management (IPM) strategies as the farm will thus be able to better choose appropriate IPM techniques in order to target the specific pests plaguing the farm.

As well, as we met with Kelly who manages the farm, we learned that since the farm opened in 2015, it has served to grow many culturally significant crops as requested by the local residents, similarly to the mission behind the Woodside New Roots Community Garden. I was most pleasantly surprised to see bittermelon in the garden, which in my experience is a particularly influential dish in Chinese cuisine. While I was growing up, my parents would often tell us children that only after growing up and experiencing the bitterness of life will we be able to appreciate the bitterness of the bittermelon. However, because of its unsavory taste, I don’t often see bittermelon purposely grown in local gardens, so this find was particularly meaningful to me.

Kendra and I were able to end the day with a quick visit to Pink Houses Community Farm’s sister farm, the UCC Youth Farm which is located right underneath a raised train line! Stopping by to introduce ourselves to the farm manager, Jeremy, we were able to get a sense of the impact that paid youth programming can have as we got to see the community forming between all of the young interns  Additionally, we got to see how the kitchen space at the farm is being used to encourage the interns to learn more about cooking and equipping them with the skills to do their own exploration on their own time, which is what Kendra and I are hoping to achieve through our own cooking demos that we are planning to hold at Kelly Street Garden next week.

 

Weekly Highlights:

 

 

This week I truly got a taste of just how widespread community gardening and urban farming is becoming in New York City, and all seemingly developing without New Yorkers even realizing! For instance, on Monday, I struck up a conversation with Jane at Kelly Street Garden (one of the volunteers and also our resident yoga instructor) about her work with Brooklyn Grange Urban Farms. She specifically works at the Long Island City site, which I was immediately excited about visiting since it wouldn’t be too far of a trip from my neighborhood in Corona, Queens. Yet, to my surprise, when I typed in the address on Google Maps, all I saw was an industrial building and a busy street. The farm that Jane was referring to wasn’t like the typical farms I had been working with all summer such as at Red Hook or New Roots. In fact, this farm was on the building’s roof! What’s more, Jane spoke about how the farm still manages to hold weekly farmer’s markets as well as yoga classes and similar community events. While I had known that rooftop gardening was popping up more frequently across the city, I had never imagined that this idea had spread from simple residential gardens to full commercial operations, where even a farmer’s market can be held!

I had another similar surprise when Kendra and I met with CCE’s Urban Gardens Specialist, Kwesi Joseph, on Wednesday for a tour of Oko Farms, which I had heard was NYC’s first and only outdoor aquaponics urban farm. We met at the newly built site in Williamsburg, which was tucked away behind ongoing construction and located right on the shore of the East River. With such a unique location, I truly would never have expected to find an urban farm here, much less one with such an array of diverse operations. After introducing ourselves to Yemi, the farm director, as well as many of the other staff members and volunteers, we slowly learned that the space was not only home to Oko Farm’s aquaponics system, but provides space for a composting company, the Island Bee Project’s hives, and a small vegetable plot owned by the local developers in the area. In other words, it appears that as in true New York fashion, not only are the locations of these farms and gardens creative but the spaces themselves are maximized to include as many beneficial projects as possible!

After a brief tour,  we also were able to learn more about the schematics of an aquaponics system. Greg, one of the staff members at the farm, explained how all of the water in the system is a closed-loop, in which all of the water housing the fish is also eventually used in the artificial ponds where the plants grow. Because of this, though, it is especially important for adequate filtration, with careful attention placed on nutrient and oxygen levels as the water moves to different areas. Greg pointed out the large barrels beside each fish tank which serve to catch any large solids including sediment and fish waste to eventually be recycled as fertilizer. Additionally, he told us that nutrient level tests can often be performed in-house with generic aquarium equipment. However, the difficulty comes in when trying to ensure that there is sufficient dissolved oxygen in the system, as a lack of dissolved oxygen can prove both fatal to the fish as well as the plants, which can become more susceptible to algae and mold as a result. Without any reliable methods to test dissolved oxygen, there is thus a greater emphasis placed on the farm staff’s knowledge base of plant health indicators to identify any issues before they can cause greater damage to the farm. As such, even with novel innovations made in agriculture, it is still ultimately the intersection of technology with human wisdom that produces the greatest and most sustainable outcomes.

While the New Roots Community Garden at Woodside is, too, an example of the resilience of community gardens due to its location and segmentation, we met with a local resident, Lu Meng, on Thursday who showed us a newly opened community farm behind a church a couple of streets away from our site. There, we found PVC pipes hung up as makeshift trellises and even large buckets filled with water that were used to grow large grassy shoots (which were possibly a type of bamboo). As we learned about the origin story behind this community garden, we were even more amazed to find that the entire area used to be wooded, and had been cleared and left without any use before the church decided to start a community garden in the remaining space. In even the most unexpected places, from rooftops to waterfronts to overpasses to forests, the desire to grow urban gardens and farms always manages to overcome all of the odds and initial challenges, and persevere as beacons of hope and a testament of the strength of their respective communities.

Outside of our hands-on gardening and farm work, Kendra and I were also able to meet with Tapan this week to discuss updates on our VR project. As we move forward for the remainder of the summer, Kendra and I will shift from model-building to focus more on photographing larger components at the farm, such as distinctive picnic tables or frequently used equipment such as wheelbarrows. In this way, we will be able to maximize our time while we are at the farm, and spend time refining models during our work during the upcoming fall semester on campus. Despite some shifts in project priorities, we are nevertheless making exciting progress and will reconvene next week to meet with Maya, Red Hook’s community chef to discuss collaborating on cooking demos with the youth interns at the farm. Until next time!

 

Weekly Highlights:

After an unexpected long weekend as last week’s thunderstorm had caused flooding at New Roots Community Farm, I was excited to get back to work starting at Kelly Street Garden on Monday. I had been eyeing the new compost bins ever since Renee had first told us that they had only just been implemented at the garden and were in the process of transferring the previous composting system to this one. The issue was that the old bins they had were surrounded by wire mesh on all sides, meaning that any wind or movement to the compost piles caused small amounts to slowly be lost, creating a concerning source of waste for the garden. Thus, the new bins used canvas cloth to line the floor and walls and help mitigate any compost that could potentially fall out. While chopping and transferring the compost was laborious and the smell from the compost materials that had started to spoil was quite strong, the work was nevertheless rewarding, and I learned a lot about compost management from this task!

We also had the opportunity to meet one of our field mentors, Sam Anderson, who gave us a brief demonstration of a low-budget way for farmers to easily determine the bulk density of their soils. He told us that this is especially important for community gardeners and urban farmers since their soil tends to have a much lower bulk density than traditional rural farms, which has significant implications in soil nutrient tests. Specifically, due to this difference, results for urban farms will often incorrectly recommend farmers not to add nutrients to their soils even when the opposite is true. Thus, while work is needed to provide soil nutrient tests calibrated to urban soils, teaching urban gardeners and farmers how to perform their own bulk density tests to adjust their results themselves is invaluable.

On Wednesday, we met at the cafe at Cornell Tech’s campus on Roosevelt Island again (as we did last week) in order to load the models of objects we photographed on Tuesday, as well as to finish writing a grant that we’re applying to through Engage Cornell to hopefully obtain funding for rain barrels for the newly established New Roots Community Garden in Woodside. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that most of my photos got corrupted during the transfer from the day before, but we were still able to successfully submit our grant application, and look forward to hearing back in the next two weeks!

Since last week’s realization that I needed to push myself to become more involved with gardens and farms we visited, I found that as I chatted with all of the volunteers at Friday’s weekly food distribution at New Roots Community Farm, I started to better understand not only the individuals that I met but the community as a whole. For one, I was constantly impressed by the passion of the volunteers that I talked to. For example, one farm member, Arnold, told me about how he comes almost every day to help with general farm upkeep. Additionally, I began to get a sense of just how diverse this community is. I learned of volunteers who were professional dancers, professors, or farm managers at different sites themselves. Finally, I also got a glimpse at how tightly connected this network of community gardens and urban farms are in the city, as I heard from another volunteer, Pamela, tell me how dozens of gardens and farms had rallied together and petitioned to prevent a local community garden from eviction. I don’t think I had ever expected this depth of commitment and support from all of the volunteers and community members, and as I heard of all of these stories, I started to better understand just how deeply rooted and intertwined these types of spaces are in the lives of the communities that they’re in. Moving forward, I want to continue to engage with all of the volunteers and staff at the different gardens and farms we’ll work with this summer, and to continue hearing the stories that make community gardens and urban farms what they are.

 

Weekly Highlights:

Without realizing it, 3 weeks of this internship have already passed by! And with our long 4th of July weekend, this week felt even shorter than normal. Nevertheless, it seems like all of the projects and work that we’ve been doing is finally beginning to take off. After our initial struggles with photogrammetry as we practiced using different types of equipment and software, we were at last able to formally construct and upload our first models. Our advisors for the project, Bryan Yi and Tapan Parikh from Cornell Tech, suggested that our first few models could simply be used as practice since we’re still getting the hang of the modeling software. Still, being able to fully load a model I made of a pair of gloves from Red Hook was an incredibly exciting moment!

Additionally, it seems that all of my thoughts about the goals I had for this internship and what I want to learn throughout the summer are also becoming more and more clear. Especially working at the Woodside New Roots Community Garden, I’m realizing that simply being able to interact with the actual surrounding community as well as the farm managers and learning from the people who are actually impacted by these farms and gardens, is in itself a major component of this internship. Specifically, while I am enjoying working on the VR project and am aware of its future potential, working on our own independent project while using the space at Red Hook was starting to feel a bit distanced from the actual community at the farm, including all of the staff, volunteers, and residents who frequent the farm. With this in mind, as the rest of the summer progresses, I will be looking to push myself to make more time in our days to actually help out at Red Hook with daily tasks, as well as spending more time talking with and learning from all of the people at each of our sites.

 

Weekly Highlights:

Despite the heat wave that swept across New York City this past week, I was able to remain in high spirits each day. Perhaps a major contributing factor was the fact that I was able to participate in a volunteer-led yoga class on Monday! Much to my pleasant surprise, on Monday, I quickly learned that Kelly Street is in fact far from just a garden. Rather, it serves as a gathering space for community building through frequent workshops ranging from dance classes to cooking tutorials. While I had arrived in this space with the mindset of gardening, I left with my perspective of the importance of urban gardens and farms dramatically shifted. While there is the undeniable role that urban gardens and farms play in addressing food insecurity and strengthening nutritional education for their surrounding neighborhoods, the creation of such spaces also serve as cultural and creative oases where residents are not only given the freedom to explore and share their varied interests and identities but provides physical meeting space to do so as well. I’ve already been able to witness this sense of coming-togetherness from working at the New Roots Community Garden site at Woodside, where I’ve started noticing more and more residents of various ethnic backgrounds and heritages simply meeting up at the garden to learn about different crops that are either foreign or familiar to them. Even while helping out during the food distributions at the New Roots Community Farm in the Bronx, it is a heartening sight to watch people’s eyes light up when they recognize certain vegetables in their bags or from their tours around the garden. This further cemented my realizations of the weight of the work that I’m doing, as well as how necessary conversations about the preservation of urban gardens and farms are beyond just this internship.

In regards to the virtual reality and photogrammetry project that I’m also working on with my fellow intern, Kendra, I was very pleased to note that we’ve made a major breakthrough this week as we were able to start forming our first models! After taking almost 100 pictures for some of the specific objects we wanted to scan, it was incredibly exciting to see all of the textures and colors accurately reflected in the programs that we were using. As we continue working on the models and improving on our skills and familiarity with the program, I am confident that we will soon be able to produce many more models and begin populating the virtual scale of the farm!

 

Weekly Highlights:

 

Right from the first week, I can already tell that this will be an incredibly educational and fruitful summer. From the very first day, walking through Kelly Street garden with garden head, Renee, I learned just how much planning and knowledge goes into a community garden. For instance, she walked us through various companion plants and how, when this relationship is known, this can help maximize the productive capacity of both plants. On the other hand, there were relationships where plants actively harmed one another, requiring an aspiring gardener to take heed to these relationships in order to avoid failed crops. While I had some experience working in a community garden before, I had never heard such an in-depth summary of all of the elements that went into ensuring the success of the garden. As we continued to tour the garden, I also learned about many of the ways in which Kelly Street was maximizing the space that it was in; from large rain collection barrels to compost piles driven by locally sourced food scraps, it was inspiring to see just how adaptable the garden was in pursuing closed loops to utilize all of the resources that it had at its disposable. It was also at this garden that I learned more about the precarious situation facing many urban gardens and farms, in which due to a lack of permanent property rights, the land is often forcefully seized by developers after the careful stewardship of urban gardeners and farmers, leading to a crisis where the number of urban gardens and farms will slowly decrease. It was this realization that deepened my understanding of the weight of the work I was doing and the importance of creating greater awareness to cement the value of these spaces in their communities.

For example, the project that I started working on with Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn was precisely to increase awareness about urban farms in the city. Through photogrammetry techniques, our objective is to slowly scan and build models of different plants and components on the farm to construct a virtual reality model of the farm. The hope is that eventually, this model can be used to educate students, city residents, and even policymakers about the form and function of community farms, and serve as a teaching tool to explain the role that urban farms and gardens play in reducing food insecurity, among other issues.

While I had entered this internship fully aware of the rotating schedule of farms that I’d be able to visit, I didn’t realize just how striking the differences would be until my first day at the new New Roots Community Garden site in Woodside, Queens. Situated directly above a large overpass, split into two parts across a street, this was certainly the most unique site I had ever seen for a community garden, and yet, the garden persevered. Despite being told that the garden had only started official work a few months ago, I already saw entire beds covered in saplings. I was fascinated to learn that a large component of the mission of this farm was to serve as a space for local immigrant and refugee families to plant culturally significant crops from their home countries, such as specific types of squashes or beans. This truly fulfilled the “community” aspect of a community garden, and I can’t wait to help build up this garden in the coming weeks and achieve this vision!

The last farm that I visited this week was a similarly named New Roots Community Farm, although this one was located in the Bronx. Similar to that in Queens, this farm also worked with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and on the day we arrived, it was the weekly day for food distribution for local residents. As I was in charge of helping sign people in to keep track of the number of people passing by for the day, I had the unique opportunity to witness just how diverse this neighborhood was, as I found myself helping to translate instructions for people who didn’t speak English, even serving as a scribe for those who didn’t know how to write in English. As an International Agriculture major, a large part of my passion for this field of study is working with people from different backgrounds, and immediately on this day, I recognized that there might be additional work to be done to help facilitate the communication between residents not only in terms of translating instructions but helping them to understand what crops are grown in the garden or how to use them. One project that I hope to develop through this internship moving forward is to create cooking videos with culturally significant crops to serve as learning tools for those interested in using new vegetables, and this experience has invigorated my excitement in working towards increasing the connection between communities and what is grown in their local gardens and farms.

 

Weekly Highlights: