LYNN — Teen gardeners from The Food Project gathered in the large community garden behind Ingalls Elementary School Wednesday to dine on a buffet of home-grown vegetables at this year’s Farm to Table Lunch.
The Lynn-based nonprofit, which focuses on engaging teenagers in Northeast Massachusetts with urban farming, grows and distributes around 200,000 pounds of fresh food every year. Lynn Urban Farms Manager Andres Bolanos said the garden behind Ingalls has produced 7,000 pounds of vegetables and herbs at this point in the growing season.
“In this land, we strive to grow around 19,000 pounds of food. We are currently at around 7,000 pounds, and last year, we grew about 15,000 pounds,” Bolanos said. “The reason why is, we started growing a lot of herbs and greens that don’t really weigh that much, but are really nice to bring to the community because they’re super fresh and it makes a very big difference to have a five-minute commute instead of a full-day commute coming from elsewhere in the country.”
Bolanos said that the Lynn garden dealt with dryness problems due to the drought this summer, but that drip irrigation systems have helped the garden remain bountiful.
“It’s definitely been a very challenging season in terms of dryness, we definitely have a lot of problems with germination of different crops and seeds that are growing on the ground. I feel very very lucky because it’s a small enough farm where I have drip irrigation on all of the crops and even though it’s been a challenging year, we’ve been able to manage,” he said.
The lunch, attended by various donors and community members, kicked off with a land acknowledgment, which preceded an ice-breaking exercise in which attendees debated whether it would be better to fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck.
Before those in attendance sat down to eat the vegetables, which were catered and prepared by the Blue Ox restaurant in Lynn, Food Project Executive Director Anne Hayes made a brief speech outlining the nonprofit’s goals following her decision to step down.
“Our goal is to deepen and lengthen the youth engagement of The Food Project,” Hayes said.
Hayes said that the nonprofit’s Build a Garden program, which aimed at establishing 75 gardens in Lynn and 75 gardens in Boston this year, has exceeded her goals.
“The second thing is about food and expanding opportunities for food access and providing better food access, so what we’re looking at there is really increasing our build a garden program,” Hayes said. “We set the goal over the next five years to build it up to 75 [gardens] in each [city], and we’re at like 160 this year so far, so that’s real food sovereignty, people growing their own food, so it’s wonderful to see that happening.”
The Lynn Senior Center was one of The Food Project’s garden building sites this year, according to Council on Aging Program Manager Tania Freedman, who said that Food Project gardeners donated seedlings and built raised beds for Lynn seniors to plant in their own gardens.
“The Senior Center in Lynn has a very nice partnership with The Food Project. Andres [Bolanos] was kind enough to provide us with donations of small germinating crops, which we have since planted into garden beds, and we were actually able to build two raised beds that were high enough for our seniors to actually transplant the germinating crops into the raised garden beds themselves, so we’re having our first tasting this Friday with our basil,” Freedman said.
Lynn Food Security Task Force Leader and Coordinator of Public Health Norris Guscott said that the city is lucky to have organizations like The Food Project, which, he said, bring solidarity between the city and its residents.
“It’s important that the community knows that there are organizations that are there to support them in whatever they need. When folks think of [The Food Project] they think of food and education around that,” Guscott said. “Lynn is very fortunate to have a bunch of community partners and organizations and events like this, just a way to showcase them and show solidarity with the city. It’s a way to tell them that they’re here and they’ve got their backs.”
Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at [email protected].