Self-Organizing at Woodbine to Share Food and Seeds
By Anna Gelb and Zef Egan
Woodbine has started a seed library, open to all. We are building a collection of vegetable, fruit, herb, and flower seeds, which you can view here.
February 21 is sunny after a week of snow. The chalk sign outside Woodbine reads Seed Exchange. A founding member takes emails and temperatures by the door. At a table to the left, the organizers of the event Anna, Hester and Caroline accept seed donations and field questions.
Folks explore tables full of seed envelopes. The seeds are sorted by herbs, vegetables and flowering annuals and perennials. Their careful arrangement places, for example, Atomic Red Carrot by Rainbow Carrot. A few envelopes are hand illustrated. An unlabeled Lunar New Year envelope contains mystery seeds. Spearmint seeds appear minuscule in a translucent zip-lock.
Woodbine moved to a larger space this year. The layout welcomes multiple uses. A few sacks of potatoes lean against the donated industrial fridge by the entrance. This is where volunteers store and package goods for the farm share and food bank. In the back of the space, a wall-length library ranges from Kropotkin to cookbooks to IV and V of Oxford’s History of Technology. There is a mural in oils, a pastoral of goats and shepherds loafing. A co-working space and communal kitchen beckon to the promise of life post-pandemic.
Anna shows us around the space which used to be a sewing factory. A scissor lift operates between the cellar and the first floor. Pipes run from the boiler along the ceiling. It looks like a do-it-yourself building. Tools and benches signal a nascent wood shop. In the corner there is a plywood recliner, bare-bones but comfortable.
Upstairs, among the seeds, gardeners and a couple of puppies, Hester, who works at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, hands my friend Daniel blank envelopes. Daniel fills them with seeds to plant this spring with his preschoolers and kindergartners. We learn from Caroline about her favorite seeds.
“This my favorite onion of all time: Tropea onions, an Italian onion, somewhere between a shallot and a red onion. It’s really flavorful. Close to shallots but a little stronger. They are smaller so you don’t have to worry about them getting too big for your plot. You can grow them at home and they taste better.
The black zebra grows like a cherry tomato but it has these green stripes on it and it’s like hundreds of fruits on one plant so you get a lot of tomatoes out of it. My favorite herb is Roman chamomile. It smells amazing. It doesn’t die. It multiplies. You can make tea with it. It comes back every year stronger than ever. And the little flowers smell amazing.
I love borage. Imagine a bright purple flower that smells like cucumbers. But the most important thing about borage is that bees and hummingbirds love it. It attracts pollinators to your garden. Which is why I started growing it but then it was this really nice color so I grew as much as I could fit. I mean I love everything here. But these are probably by favs.”
Here is my conversation with Anna about mutual aid at Woodbine, and organizing around growing and eating food.
Zef Egan
Could you tell me about your involvement with Woodbine, and the mutual aid work happening there?
Anna
I’ve been involved with Woodbine for a little over two years, and more involved since the beginning of the pandemic. I am one of the co-coordinators of the CSA. I started doing that last season and we’re gearing up for the summer CSA that’ll start in June as well. And during COVID I also started something called the Ridgewood Kitchen CSA with a friend of mine that originally was meant to be like a supplement to the vegetable CSA.
Before COVID Woodbine was more of a cultural center hosting lectures and workshops and weekly Sunday night dinners that anybody could sign up to cook and anybody could attend. We had a lot of indoor, hands on programming. When the pandemic started, we were in a position of do we shut this down entirely? Or can we think of a way to provide something for the neighborhood and keep it going?
Pretty quickly, Woodbine linked up with Hungry Monks, a food rescue organization that is based in Ridgewood. We became an outpost for the food pantries that they were running out of their space. There were different opportunities for people around the neighborhood to become involved, working shifts at the pantry, distributing food, packing groceries, or roles that are more behind the scenes like mine. We get regular donations, grants, and one off donations like from restaurants that may have excess produce, that keeps the food pantry going.
Donations definitely expand and contract. When the pantry first got up and running, we were getting most of our food through Hungry Monks. And they were getting most of their food through City Harvest or a couple of other city run programs. But the availability of food really varies from week to week. We started looking into our own sources to help supplement what we were getting from them, especially as administrations change and money allocated to specific federal programs or citywide programs dry up.
We’ve been working with an organization called Cafe Forsaken. They prepare meals out of Honey’s Restaurant in Bushwick. They distribute around 50 prepared meals every week to us. I come from a food background, and I have a pretty expansive network of relationships with chefs. And a lot of chefs have either closed their restaurant or converted a portion of their efforts into food relief work during the pandemic. There’s a really great org called the Food Issue Group, or FIG for short. They do their own sort of food relief work. When they get donations that don’t necessarily work for what they’re doing, or just more than what they need, they’ll hit us up. We’ve created a slack network of people that we know have cars, who could go pick up a donation at the drop of a hat. A lot of times it’s hard to plan for this stuff in advance. It just comes up as it comes up. There’s definitely restaurants who have given us things for a few weeks, but then can’t anymore. But there’s a lot of people that we can call upon, or that will hit us up if they have extra stuff. People really like packing the food and distributing the food.
Zef
How do you relate food and gardening to organizing?
Anna
I’ve always been a gardener since I was young. I was volunteering at farms and trying to learn a little bit more about how food grows, and simultaneously working in restaurants. And then I took a position with this organization that brought everything together. For my first two years, I was basically on tour like seven months out of the year. We went around the country and we would do these pop up dinners on farms that would feature a bunch of different local participants. We’d always bring a local chef and a local winemaker. I’ve never been a farmer myself. But I became very sort of acquainted with, like farming practices, and like, the struggles of being a small farm and the disconnect between the consumer and the farmer.
In 2015, Woodbine started a community garden originally in the little lot behind their space. They were growing food there for about a year and then they got kicked out of that space. They found another lot and helped start a community garden in the neighborhood. It’s definitely been part of Woodbine’s mission to have a place where people from the community could grow their own food. And now that garden stands alone as ‘the Ridgewood Community Garden.”
There’s a lot of overlap between people who garden there and who are pretty actively involved in Woodbine. I put on a little seed exchange at Woodbine, basically exactly a year ago. Just because I feel like I know a lot of gardeners scattered around the city who don’t necessarily have access to backyard space, or maybe aren’t even part of community gardens but who have a lot of interest in growing food or even like houseplants and sort of spitballing with each other about how to keep things alive.
During the pandemic just like everyone started baking sourdough bread or obsessing about some hobby that maybe they like didn’t care about before or didn’t necessarily have the time to devote to, I think I’ve definitely started getting more interested in gardening or even just the idea of like “How can I be more like self sufficient and sustainable without relying on other forces.”
Being a member of a community garden is definitely a way to learn about how people want to organize. It’s a real learning process. Everybody has their own opinion on how it should run, or investments in running the space, or personal squabbles. You’re working together to create a space that works for everybody.
I’ve been in apartments in New York that had their own yard, and I was able to garden independently. And I always thought I would be so excited to have a house that had a yard and be able to just plan everything out for myself and grow only what I like to eat are the types of flowers that I like. But when I did have that space, I really craved being a part of a more collective community garden.
Being able to hear the perspective or opinion of other people and learn about plants that I didn’t necessarily know about and be able to share my knowledge in a way that creates this collective space that functions for more people than just myself or myself and whoever I happen to live with, you know?
Organizing community gardens is definitely never going to be completely smooth going. But it integrates you into the city in a way that to me feels really good. So many people, I felt, move to New York and just have their insular existence. It’s a nice way to just come together, and, this sounds cheesy, learn about other people and different perspectives in this small space that you’re all helping with.
Zef
Could you tell me about organizing the seed exchange and what you envision for this year?
Anna
As far as organizing the seed exchange, from doing it last year, we tried to keep it pretty like no frills and simple. My friend Caroline, who’s a gardener who has a yard in Glendale will be there. And my friend Hester, who is actually like a gardener professionally, she works at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, she’s going to be there. And she collected a lot of cool seeds from different co-workers and members of the botanical garden that they’ve collected over the years. And she’s also just a real, like wealth of knowledge about anybody’s garden in question. So I think like, we plan to both be kind of helping run it and make sure it feels safe and good. But also the three of us can be resources, if anybody has specific questions about starting seeds under grow lights, or just anything really around gardening in small spaces.
Last year, it was cool, because we were like, Oh, it’s just gonna be like, community gardeners from our neighborhood. And we’ll kind of know everyone, but there ended up being like quite a few people who showed up who lived all over the city. We had an herbalist come who was a seed saver, but she brought all these like really cool seeds that she had saved from her own herbal plant collection that she uses to make medicine and she hung out with everybody for a long time. Definitely I feel like it brings together some really cool people who have knowledge that’s hard to come by when you just have a rooftop and want to plant tomatoes. You realize there’s so much knowledge to spread around.
Woodbine has started a seed library, open to all. We are building a collection of vegetable, fruit, herb, and flower seeds, which you can view here: https://bit.ly/3u5EMmR
To access the library, please get in touch to make an appointment. We have empty seed envelopes, and you can take what you need. We are also accepting seed donations to continue to grow our library. And if anyone has any questions about gardening in the city, let us know.
Anna Gelb is a gardener, event planner and organizer, based in Ridgewood, Queens. She has programmed events based around agricultural education in 47 states and 9 countries, and organized workshops and pop up food events around New York City. She is the co-founder of the Ridgewood Kitchen CSA, a subscription-based monthly distribution of kitchen pantry items and recipe zines for home cooks.
Zef Egan is a writer and teacher, and the managing editor of Resilience Quarterly.
