“Aren’t these beauuutiful?” Rachel Cohen asks, brandishing three bright purple, glistening “Bull’s Blood” beets, each about the size of a fist, with thick leafy stalks that look like chard (and can be used like so in recipes). Cohen supervises the Homeless Garden Project’s Natural Bridges Farm, and the beets she’s just pulled from the ground are part of a cornucopia—carrots, strawberries, dandelion greens, a micro greens mix, leaf lettuce, sage, chard and flowers, and that’s just this week—available at the farm’s new U-Pick CSA.
The acronym CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture: a household buys a season-long subscription to a farm, and in return, once a week gets a box full of fresh produce. It’s a central idea in the farm-to-table movement, but with the addition of the U-Pick option (call it dirt-to-table), Natural Bridges Farm raises the stakes, eliminating another link in the food supply chain—the delivery and pick-up of the weekly box at a predetermined location—and allowing consumers to get that much closer to their food.
CSA members get a list of the different fruits and vegetable available that week, along with the letter of each vegetable bed and how much they are allowed to pick. “They get to do a little scavenger hunt, go find the letter [of the bed] and find that actual item,” says Janet O’Brien, a trainee in the Homeless Garden Project who was running the CSA pick-up on a recent Friday. “Each bed is labeled, and they’ll pick their five stems of sage or 10 leaves of chard, they get to do their strawberries.” A whole U-Pick CSA share for the 23-week season (May to the end of October) started at $434, compared with the farm’s traditional pick-up CSA, which started at $566. (The prices of both are pro-rated as the season wears on.)
O’Brien had known about the Homeless Garden Project for years while she was living in Santa Cruz, working at a private school and helping take care of her grandchildren. A year ago she lost her full-time job when the school closed its doors, and not long after that she lost her housing as well.
Now she is two and a half months into a two-year program that offers 15 homeless and housing-insecure trainees a daily meal, 20 hours a week of paid work, general job skills and agricultural education. Which is why it might be more appropriate to call what Natural Bridges Farm does ASC, or Agriculture Supporting Community.
Part of the trainees’ time is spent on farm chores like planting, and part is spent in classes that might focus on soil, native plants or the care of tools. Trainees, Cohen says, “learn all about horticulture, but they also are learning just kind of regular job skills like coming on time, how to do tasks, how to work together.” It is a transitional program that helps people get on their feet and connects them with resources and a community in the meantime.
“They are down on their luck and they don’t have housing and they don’t have work,” farm manager Forrest Cook says of the trainees, “but if you give them work, my experience has been that there is an enormous amount of dignity and goodness, and the garden really is the place to bring that out.”
“For a two-year program, someone comes here and eats really the bomb organic food, exercises, is out in the sun, is part of a community—all these things really fight the depression that accompanies this situation often. That’s really how it kind of gets transformational,” Cooks says.
Transformational, and sustainable—the Homeless Garden Project has proven it has lasting power in the two decades since it began the first CSA in Santa Cruz County. Since its inception in 1990, an estimated 500 trainees have been involved with the program, and last year alone 335 volunteers from the community also helped out at the farm or the store.
Back when it started, the Homeless Garden Project operated a farm on Pelton Avenue near Lighthouse Field. Today it makes its home at the end of Delaware Avenue near Natural Bridges State Beach where, in the five years on and off that she has been picking up her produce there, CSA member Flora Zulli has watched the farm grow.
Zulli’s 5-year-old son is now old enough to help pick out their food with his mom. “It’s really cool for kids to see where the food is coming from,” Zulli says. Simple as it sounds, that is the thing—the community and the farm seeing and knowing one another and growing together—that allows each to support the other.
THE HOMELESS GARDEN PROJECT is at Delaware Avenue and Shaffer Road on the Westside of Santa Cruz. For information on half or whole CSA shares call 831.426.3609.
