Thanks to support from you through this IOBY campaign, Feedback Farm within Myrtle Village Green is starting it second season!

We had a successful and busy season last year -

• We installed our garden beds at Myrtle Village Green, there is 1600 sq. ft. of growing space within this vibrant 18,000 sq. ft. green space on DEP property. We have a mix of sub-irrigated and traditional raised beds. Last season, we grew garlic, heirloom tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, kales, beets, carrots, garlic, herbs and lettuce mixes. Some of our favorite crops from last season were the French heirloom tomato, jaune flamme, and the Peruvian pepper, aji amarillo.
• We piloted a working share community supported agriculture program. Our hardworking members committed to working regular shifts on the farm, learning about small scale marker vegetable production. In exchange for their labor, they had lots of fun and received a basket of produce that they helped grow, every two weeks from July through the end of September.
• We partnered with The Doe Fund, a New York nonprofit organization helping formerly homeless men and women achieve independence and self-sufficiency. They are starting an urban agriculture job training program.
• We field-tested our modular and mobile planter design. The lots were our first space was located within A Small Green Patch community garden is slated for development. These beds were lifted with a small forklift, loaded in a truck and moved to The Doe Fund’s site in Bushwick.
• We published the results of our on-farm raised bed trial in a special issue on urban agriculture in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. It is the first evaluation of sub-irrigated planters for small scale growing and is a contribution to the sparse literature on best practices for urban agriculture. Check it out - http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FRAF%2FS1742170514000131a.pdf&code=3e315de15c92f02ed36eebf438633b36
• Throughout the season, we hosted workshops covering topics like seed starting, green manures and cover crops, subirrigated planters, low tunnels, and how to grow garlic.
• We participated in 5 Borough Farm’s Making the Measure project, which aims to use participatory methods to design metrics for measuring benefits in gardens. This is a citizen science project that builds off the work of Crop Count to understand the many activities happening in gardens citywide and whether they contribute health, social, economic, and ecological benefits, as well as to the goals of municipal agencies and elected officials.
• We worked with Bedford-Stuyvesant Campaign Against Hunger to build and distribute modular low-maintenance sub-irrigated planters for twenty of their food insecure constituents who had access to outdoor growing space.
• We partnered with Nightingale 9, a new Vietnamese restaurant on Smith St. to install a kitchen garden. Herbs play a big role in Vietnamese cuisine and they are growing specialty herbs like lemongrass, kinh gioi, and rau ram in the garden.

Thank you for making all of this possible!