NEWPORT — A new community garden in Newport wants to help people obtain fresh food and learn how to grow it themselves. The project is part of efforts across Vermont targeting food insecurity and self-sustainability amid Covid-19.
The garden is based at Bluffside Farm, just north of Prouty Beach along the shore of Lake Memphremagog, where workers have recently been harvesting cucumbers, cabbage, peppers and more.
“The idea … is to get as many folks directly involved in producing their own food as possible in order to decrease reliance on the charitable food donation system,” said Sammy Levine with ShiftMeals, one of three groups behind the Newport effort.
The charity system does incredible work, Levine said, “but just this season has been enormously inundated with the amount of pressure on them to feed people.”
The Skinny Pancake restaurant launched ShiftMeals in March as a way to provide meals to people in need during the pandemic. In May, it expanded into farmwork with its GrowTeam program, which Levine manages. That’s how Bluffside Farm — owned by the Vermont Land Trust — came into the frame.
The land trust has been working for three years with the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps to tend an acre of land at the conserved 180-acre farm.
The corps would normally send a team to the Newport farm to grow crops for its Health Care Share program, which sends produce to hospital patients and their families.
But the coronavirus limited the ability to do that, said Naomi Galimidi, development director at the conservation corps.
“When the pandemic hit, and we were recalibrating what programming we would be able to safely deliver, we were realizing it was going to be really difficult to safely engage young people at our usual scale,” Galimidi said.
The land trust and conservation corps began thinking about their options. “Maybe we’ll just, you know, put a cover crop on that acre and come back to it the following year, which given the food insecurity this year felt like such a bummer,” said Tracy Zschau, the land trust’s vice president of conservation.
Eventually, the conservation corps decided to plant three-quarters of the acre with low-maintenance crops: potatoes and a variety of squash provided through the Abenaki Land Link Project. And the organization turned Bluffside into a distribution location for its health care program, so about 130 households around the Kingdom can still get fresh produce.
That left a portion of the land unused — and available for ShiftMeals to open a community garden, as it has done in several spots around the state during the Covid crisis.
“There’s about a quarter of an acre planted out,” said Levine, the GrowTeam manager. “All of the plants were donated from different farms.”
People work the land
About a dozen people so far have signed on to work the land, Levine said. Someone is there each day to water crops.
The farmworkers take home much of the harvested food, Levine said, and some goes to an after-school program. Another portion of it is now headed to Northeast Kingdom Community Action, a social services organization.
ShiftMeals had initially sought to hire and help out displaced restaurant and food workers and directly address people who are food insecure, Levine said. But with the garden project, the group has broadened its mission.
“As these long-term effects of Covid are continuing, it changed,” Levine said. “More people growing food — and more people with access to land and the knowledge to grow this food — are going to make for more resilient communities in the future.”
The Bluffside Farm garden, one of seven statewide, is about giving people the ability to produce their own food.
The commitment for workers is loose, Zschau said. “People come when they can and contribute when they can, and then they take what they need and can,” she said.
Jess Laporte, community health program manager for the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, said she’s heartened by efforts statewide, like those at Bluffside, that have emerged during the pandemic.
“A lot of the traditional food-aid model is based on the industrial food complex that we operate off of,” she said.
It’s been encouraging, she said, to see renewed focus on local agriculture and deeper cooperation between restaurants, farms and aid groups.
That Covid-era work has built new muscles, she said. And if a crisis like this comes again, those will help.
