The Chester Garden Project

We’ve been hard at work at the Back of the Bennett lately, building new beds and planting new crops. We recently planted sweet potatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, watermelon, eggplant, okra, and tomatoes in our newly constructed beds – more crops that we’ve ever planted before, which means we’ll have plenty to sell and distribute by the time our produce stand is constructed. Everyone’s already excited to harvest the watermelons, and some kids will taste blackberries and the raspberries for the first time at the end of the summer.

We also learned recently that berry bushes require long, narrow beds – 16×2, instead of the 16×4 beds we’d been building for everything else. Last weekend, new and old garden visitors joined in to fill our newly constructed narrow beds with dirt, and help plant tomatoes and blackberry bushes. We realized that these blackberries may have originated in Chester! They’re a special variety of heirloom blackberries historically from southeastern Pennsylvania, which means our bushes are about as local as it gets. All the kids were excited to taste fruit that’s originally from Chester.

Yesterday evening, everyone joined in to water all our crops before today’s heat wave descended. Some kids constructed a beautiful mud pie with the fallen unripe tomatoes, and we discussed the usefulness of composting for creating nutrition-rich soil before dumping the mud pie into our new compost pile.

Everyone’s excited about our newly arrived shipping containers, and we’re getting ready to plant almost 200 more berry bushes as soon as they’re delivered! It’s great to see the garden growing so fast, and all the kids are really excited to see how quickly new beds and new plants are springing up, thanks to their hard work.

The Back of the Bennett gained a surprising new addition last week – two large, 40 ft, recycled steel shipping containers.

After 10-20 years of use, a shipping container would typically be scrapped as industrial waste. But there’s been a growing trend to reuse and retrofit these giant rectangular steel blocks – transforming them into restaurants, hotels, homes, and maybe, urban farms. Aprisa Mexican Cuisine in Portland, Oregon is operating out of a recycled shipping container – it’s easily transportable, semi-permanent, and not too costly to retrofit. Podponics, a company based in Atlanta, is remaking old shipping containers into mini hydroponic farms. And here in Chester, at the back of the Bennett, we’re getting ready to transform our recently obtained shipping containers. 

Unlike our recently constructed wooden beds, they may not immediately hold dirt, seedlings, and water (although a rooftop garden remains a strong possibility). But as we cut out windows and doors, link the two together, and increase the ventilation, we’ll gain a multiuse indoor space just beside our growing community farm.

By linking together our two parallel, 40-ft structures, we can form one large indoor, insulated space, which has already proved useful as a larger storage space (much more durable than our shed). We intend to add windows and doors, a staircase to the roof, and a produce stand to sell our own fresh produce from. The inside will become a bike storage and repair space, while also offering us indoor space protected from the sun and rain, that we can use to hold community gatherings.

The roofs may soon hold an elevated garden bed, but could also serve as a stage – perfectly located for viewers seated on the hill behind the community farm. We also might install solar panels we can use to power our sound system and power tools.

Beyond retrofitting and insulating, we’re excited to redesign and repaint these giant steel blocks together. The burnt orange sides offer a perfect space for a community mural. And it’ll be great to have a space to relax and escape the sun this summer, especially once windows, doors, and produce stands provide some well-needed cross-ventilation.

So far, there’s been some confusion and a lot of excitement – no one’s accustomed to talking about shipping in the garden, but everyone’s enthusiastic about exploring our new space, constructing a produce stand, and maybe doing some painting!

This past week has been full of garden activity – building even more beds, watering our newly planted watermelon, and getting ready for our soon-to-be delivered shipping containers! We just ordered two 40-ft shipping containers, so we’ve been preparing the ground just outside the garden fence for them. That meant leveling the ground, and constructing concrete posts for the containers to stand on. We have plans to add windows and doors, possibly experiment with a rooftop garden, and turn one of the containers into a produce stand.

We also spent a lot of time last week (with help from some first-time garden visitors!) leveling our new beds, filling them with dirt, and then planting sweet peppers, okra, eggplant, and watermelon. We had another open gardening afternoon on Friday. Highlights: Akirah gave a tour of the garden to her cousins and we all helped plant a few small potted herbs – parsley, mint, and oregano.

We also just got a new delivery of wood, and we’re excited to begin constructing special, narrow beds for our raspberry plants, and then doing some more planting. We’ve been in the garden just about every day, so stop by whenever you can to join in, and check back here soon for more photos!

The past few weeks at the garden have been beautiful and busy – we’ve built 6 new beds already, and are getting ready to build some more!

We had open garden work parties last Thursday and Friday, and adults and kids joined in to help build new beds, fill them with dirt, and begin planting our new crop – tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and basil so far. We’re getting ready to plant some sweet potatoes and raspberries, too. The garden was overflowing with people and new plants, and we got in a few games of freeze tag as well as a lot of hard work constructing all those new beds.

We dealt with the heat last week by taking turns watering the plants (and one another). The storms this Friday came just in time to help water our newly planted tomatoes.We did a ton of work this weekend too – taking apart the old cinderblock beds, constructing new ones from wood, filling them with wheelbarrows full of dirt, and finally, starting the next round of planting.

We’ve also been busy harvesting all the greens we planted earlier this spring. Almost everyone who came to the garden to help out left with a bag full of kale, lettuce, cabbage, or collards. And of course, greens are excellent for camouflaging with.

After long days of building, planting, and shoveling on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, we snacked on some delicious watermelon to celebrate. Later this summer, we’ll be eating watermelon we grew ourselves.  We’re excited for a busy new growing season and all of our new planting space, so check back for updates soon!

We’ve recently returned to the garden to start our 2012 season! Over the past few weeks we’ve taken advantage of the unusually warm weather to do some garden clean-up.

Our garden shed finally got a thorough reorganization. It was really amazing to see how much equipment we’ve accumulated over the past few years- including an impressive collection of wheelbarrows and hoses, which we piled on the grass so we could hose down the shed.

Ramon helped us use our new circular saw to build some shelves for the inside of the shed, too.

The raised beds have also been getting their pre-planting preparation: pulling up grass, turning over cover crop, weed-whacking, and admiring our fine garden worms, of course!

Next up is getting some plants and seeds in the ground! We’re also excited to start working with some older (high-school aged) members of the community in a new youth cooperative this season, thanks to the Project Pericles grant from the Lang Center of Swarthmore College. Updates to come soon!

Happy spring from the Chester Garden Project!