by Carissa Heine, sophomore nutrition major and Student Farm Club member
I think I’ve found a new hobby: volunteering at urban farms. Since I’ve done it twice in the past month, I could easily see it becoming a serial habit. My first experience was at the Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh; my urban farming adventures took me next to the Joshua Farm in Harrisburg through a service trip arranged by Students Engaging Students, a Penn State club dedicated to giving students the opportunity to develop leadership through service experiences. We met at 8am on Saturday, December 5, slept our way to Harrisburg, and climbed out of the vans ready to get our hands (and feet and knees) dirty.
Students removed dead tomato vines from the high tunnel at Joshua Farm in Harrisburg.
In the brief introduction we were given to the Joshua Farm by some of its directors and a heavily involved local student, we learned that the Joshua Farm is part of the community non-profit organization called Joshua Group. Joshua Group is centered in Allison Hill neighborhood, a low-income neighborhood with high high-school dropout rates. It provides after-school services, academic mentoring programs, and financial assistance for students to attend a local private school. It also runs an urban farm, giving students and community members employment opportunities and making fresh, local produce more accessible to the residents of Harrisburg. We learned about their financial challenges and things they’ve had to do to keep the farm afloat. Hearing directly from them about their struggles, joys, and needs prepared me for the next few hours of work and made our simple contributions seem more meaningful.
Penn State students posed for a picture after a day’s work at Joshua Farm. Source: Joshua Farm Facebook page
So what did we actually do? I was excited to be part of the group that planted four rows of garlic. I’ve wanted to try growing my own garlic sometime, so learning how deep to plant the cloves, which end should point up, and how far away they should be from one another, were very practical lessons that were easy to learn. Tilling the weeds and grass from the soil was the most physically demanding part, and I definitely tried my hand at it, but thankfully the guys in my group took care of most of it. Other farm chores included spreading leaves over a field to insulate and eventually nourish the soil, ripping out dead tomato plants, weeding in the green house, and transplanting herb plants from an outdoor bed into the greenhouse, as an experiment to increase their chances of surviving the winter.
It is so easy for me to idealize the ‘urban farm’ fantasy that is culturally ‘trendy’ and ‘hip’ right now. However, these past two service trips that I’ve had the pleasure of participating in are teaching me how basic urban farming still is. It still involves growing things. It still means putting a seed in the ground and letting the sun, soil, and rain work their magic. It is still hard work; it is still dirty work. We can glorify the endeavor all we want with rhetorically choice words and progressive concepts, but it is still an age-old practice that has sustained life for thousands of years. We’re not reinventing the wheel of a waning art. Maybe we’re just rediscovering it.
Student volunteers worked up existing sod and measured rows for planting garlic at Joshua Farm.