Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

By Samantha Rothman
President & Co-Founder
Grow It Green Morristown

One of the things I love about Morristown is that despite its population size (close to 20,000), it truly has a small town feel. It seems of late that whenever I’m out and about in town, I invariably run into parents of children who have been to the Urban Farm at Lafayette. It has been so heartwarming to hear their stories: how their children loved the farm, the chickens, etc. This is routinely followed with an anecdote about how the parent was then shocked to hear how much their child loved the [insert green, leafy vegetable name here].

The Urban Farm in September

I must say, there is magic to the Urban Farm that invites – dare I say tempts children – to try new foods. I’ve seen it with Logan, my own picky eater of 5 years old. If Farmer Shaun presents him with a fresh basil leaf, it is as if it had a chocolate coating! Yet, my basil at our home garden is only good enough after he’s learned to enjoy it at “the farm.” Go figure.

As the Urban Farm at Lafayette continues to expand its reach, so many more children in our community will have the opportunity to engage in healthy eating choices in a fun, child-centered environment. Our “pick a snack” program with the 140 children of the Lafayette Learning Center pre-school program has shown that when given the chance to try new, healthy choices, children not only will give it a nibble, they’ll devour their veggies before even getting a chance to give them a good rinse! (Thankfully, their teachers are on top of it—and the farm is organic). These first interactions with living, fresh vegetables set the foundation for a lifetime of making good nutritional choices.

Hundreds of school children visited the Urban Farm at Lafayette this summer. Their trips to the farm enrich their educational experience and enhance their classroom-based lessons.

Our produce from the Urban Farm is making its way on to the plates of the older children too. Working with the chef at the Morristown High School cafeteria and Chartwells, the food service provider of the Morris School District, our produce is being served up at MHS. Each week, the chef comes to the farm for a pick-up. Choosing from a wide variety of vegetables, nothing has been deemed too uncool for school. We hear the bean salad and collards have both been big hits.

During the height of summer when school is out of session, the Urban Farm at Lafayette has been making weekly donations to both the Interfaith Food Pantry and the Community Soup Kitchen. This summer over 2,000 lbs of produce were donated.

As our support for community food programs grows, we’ve learned that getting the food where it needs to go isn’t always that easy. So, we’re very excited about having been awarded a grant from the New Jersey Department of Agriculture to purchase a pick-up truck. Our new farm truck will support the delivery of our produce, but also enable us to deliver excess produce from other growers, as well as our community garden.

Often, children who attended a class at the Urban Farm at Lafayette with a school group come back on their own in summer months.

Speaking of the community garden, with over 40 families on our waiting list for space at the Early Street Community Garden, we took the leap and began working on the creation of a new community garden in Morristown. We anticipate opening the garden this May. Funding for this new project was made possible through a Franklin Parker Small Grant of $5,000 from Conservation Resources, Inc., a $5,000 award from Gran Fondo NJ and $3,500 from the Supau Family Trust.

In my mind, I can already see the gates of this new garden taking shape, with people bringing in their flats of tiny seedlings, children chasing each other with watering cans, and the first tomatoes being harvested.

While it is true that, on paper, we’re a small organization, but walking in Morristown you wouldn’t know it. People talk about the work of Grow it Green Morristown. Just this fall, we’ve been the recipient of both a Grassroots Award from the Daily Record and an Environmental Achievement award from Governor Chris Christie and the NJ Department of Environmental Protection. And while we are grateful for such recognition, the “organization” of GIGM is really just a vehicle for people in our community to come together to create change – without the people, there is no community garden, or educational farm. They would still just be lonely plots of land.

So, thank you to the people of Morristown. Thank you for being who you are and what you are. Thank you for your help, from shoving dirt, picking up trash, building new beds, and tilling new ground, to having faith in an idea that grew into an organization and supporting GIGM along the way.

Happy New Year!

Images by Carolle Huber / Grow It Green Morristown

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

You can probably see that there’s lettuce in the photo above. And perhaps you recognize the kohlrabi on the left, too. In fact, there are 76 pounds of lettuce, spinach, kohlrabi and radishes there – all of it harvested at the Urban Farm at Lafayette and immediately donated (I mean, within minutes of harvesting) to the Interfaith Food Pantry.

Last week, the Dodge staff put on its gardening gloves and headed over to Grow it Green Morristown‘s headquarters at the Urban Farm at Lafayette for a day of getting our hands dirty in service to our grantee and to our community of Morristown.

Founded by Samantha Rothman, Carolle Huber and Myra Bowie McCready, and directed by Farmer Tammy Toad Ryan,  Grow it Green Morristown is a creative, resourceful and inspiring organization which uses its gardening projects to promote the practices of sustainable communities: a commitment to fresh, local food; access to clean air and water; bike-friendly streets and safe, walkable neighborhoods.

The Urban Farm at Lafayette is a 1/3 acre of land behind the Lafayette Learning Center, which also houses the Morris School District (MSD) Board of Education offices. The Farm is a creative partnership with the school district: Grow it Green leases the land from them at an affordable rate; in exchange, Grow it Green teaches the joys of gardening and the principles of sustainability to MSD students while collaborating with the district on new curriculum.

As this new partnership develops, Grow it Green and MSD are discovering benefits they hadn’t anticipated. Field trips with buses are expensive when they leave the district, for example, but are inexpensive when visiting local places. Since May, 20 classes already have visited the farm 4 times each (yes! 4 times each!) to dig deep into the gardening and growing experience, helping to plant pumpkins, eggplant, brussel sprouts, kale, lettuce, radishes and many other vegetables and flowers – 18 beds in all so far. Furthermore, Grow it Green provides a permanent garden and learning space for MSD students, solving the district’s problem of trying to maintain separate gardens at the individual MSD schools.

Most importantly, in a community where the majority of the school children receive free or reduced lunch and where there is significant food insecurity, the Farm is able to donate fresh produce to the school district to help feed its students (in addition to donating it to the community at large).

Grow it Green Founders Samantha Rothman (right) Myra Bowie McCready (left)

Environmental consultant and Grow it Green Founder Samantha Rothman gave us a full tour of the garden, while sharing stories of generosity and community collaboration to get the land cleared and farm planted and maintained. Marty’s Reliable Cycles donated cardboard boxes, which were laid down on the paths between the garden beds as an eco-friendly way to suppress weeds before being covered by free mulch from the city of Morristown. Conservation Resources Inc. (another Dodge grantee) provided a grant for fencing, Lowe’s has provided lumber at cost, and Morris Brick & Stone donated brick pavers. The Sheriff’s Labor Assistance Program, Boy Scouts, school children, parents, and community members have volunteered hundreds of hours of their time. (See their full list of local businesses who have helped them).

As Samantha spoke, we were struck time and again by the enthusiastic response they’ve received from the community in such a short amount of time – this is only their first growing season at the Urban Farm. We were also impressed with the resourcefulness with which Grow it Green gets donations and maximizes its limited resources. This is clearly a labor of love for so many people.

After harvesting fresh produce to donate to Interfaith Food Pantry, which was our first order of the day, we got to work on our main task: building part of an herb garden designed by landscape architect (and Founding member) Carolle Huber.

The area around the path will be filled in with different beds of herbs; the design also includes an arbor to go over this part of the garden. We can’t wait to see what it looks like when Carolle’s vision comes to life.

In addition to her herb garden design, Carolle asked us to try our hand at building bamboo trellises. Imagine how beautiful this will be in the garden when covered with blooms:

While we were working, Carolle’s mother and sister had come to help finish painting the barn; Carolle’s sister then painted this cheerful rooster on the barn door and is working with her daughter to paint sunflowers on the side of the barn (which you can see in the photo above).

The Urban Farm is not just for school children; it’s a community space, and as we worked, we could see that the public has embraced it as such. Community members wandered in and out of the garden, some parents brought their children, and here was a class from the Lafayette Learning Center getting a lesson from Farmer Tammy (far left, in the purple shirt):

And here we are (most of us), at the end of a productive day at the Urban Farm:

For more information about Grow it Green Morristown, visit their website and watch a short movie about their first project, the community garden at Early Street. You can also read their blog, and if you feel inspired, donate your time or other resources to them. You can also see a terrific photo gallery of the farm in the Daily Record.

Special thanks to Sam, Carolle, Myra and Tammy for hosting the Dodge staff last week. We are inspired by your dedication to Morristown.