Last week, on Friday, 14 November 2008, eight of us traveled to West Philadelphia to visit Mill Creek Urban Farm, run by Jo Rosen and Jade Walker. It was a total success (minus some sprinkling rain and some university van trouble, neither of which we let ruin our adventure)!
Jade and Jo showed us the farm, the community garden, and the composting toilet, as well as the bat house, bee hives, green roof, gray-water treatment plan, cob shed, mosaics, and much more. We discussed grant writing, community agriculture, and all of the other specific practicalities of running a farm, a market, and a non-profit organization. We learned how the city government is considering taking the lease from the farm and building housing on the land, which has been
proven unstable for that use in the past, since a creek (Mill Creek!) runs through it. Jo also told us about the City Harvest Program run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in which seedlings are cultivated by inmates of the Philadelphia Prison System and then transferred to community gardens and farms throughout the area. Through the program, SHARE's food cupboards are also provided with food grown from these plants.We are hoping to return to Mill Creek in the spring, maybe to do some work, and Dr. Chaone Mallory of the Philosophy Department at Villanova might even involve her students in next semester's Food, Sustainability, and Place course in the project, too. Dr. Mallory last week's trip as an extra credit opportunity for her Environmental Ethics classes, which provided us the good fortune to learn that a few new people were interested in sustainable agriculture, too!
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