Brian Slattery photo
Adam Matlock.
Adam Matlock, executive director of the nonprofit Winnett Food Forest in Hamden, was moving from garden bed to garden bed with an empty bin. Soon, that bin and another one like it would be filled with fresh greens and a few tomatoes — part of the week’s harvest from a new approach to growing food that leans hard on community and sustainability.
As Winnett describes it on its website, “a food forest is an edible garden designed to imitate the interactions, density, and resilience of forested ecosystems.” Last year the nascent nonprofit began the transformation of a lot on the corner of Winnett Street and Putnam Avenue, from an expanse of grass with a couple garden boxes and a mulberry tree to an area full of a variety of perennial and annual plants, “to demonstrate the concept on a smaller scale, and show alternative possibilities for lawns and municipal green spaces.” It also hoped to show, in a very tangible way, that such an approach could actually grow food, enough to be able to donate produce regularly to local food pantries.
A year into its existence, Winnett is making good on that goal, as it has been donating food regularly to the food pantry at Keefe Community Center in southern Hamden. “Part of the idea of creating abundance is that everyone deserves fresh and local food,” said Winnett board member Cormac Levenson last June at Winnett’s grand opening. Levenson owned the plot of land that Winnett is on, and has since transferred ownership to the nonprofit. “I’m so excited that this could potentially be a model to make abundance more available to everybody. It’s possible. Food is easier than we think it is,” he said at the time.
Matlock — who is also an occasional arts writer for the Independent – got to work removing some invasive species, such as ailanthus, and planting perennials that will, in a few years, produce food for humans and create habitat and food for birds and insects that, in turn, helps with human food production. Among those are elderberries, hazelnuts, highbush cranberries, strawberries, marjoram, rosemary, sage, thyme, coneflowers, milkweed, salvia, yarrow, chokeberries, and winterberries. Part of the goal is “diversity” of plant and animal life. “It can be easy to lose sight of that when we’re thinking only from the human perspective,” Matlock said. But “it is very much a delight to go into a garden” and see animal and insect activity “everywhere you look.”
Collards at Winnett Food Forest.
He also created beds of leafy greens — lettuce, a few varieties of collards, and kale — that have proven resilient to very different weather patterns from last year to this year. “We had a lot of drought last year,” Matlock said. “We’ve had the opposite problem this year, where there has almost not been enough sun, but at the very least that keeps plants alive, even if it makes them look anemic.” The drought last year killed some crops, like squash and beans. “This year we’ve had the chance to do things a little bit better,” Matlock said.
He got seedlings from CT Seedlings in Bethany and Paradise Nursery in Hamden as well as individual donors. The collards have come from both first-year and second-year plants. Possibly in an indication of how the state’s climate is changing, collards used to not survive a Connecticut winter, but are beginning to. Matlock has also managed to harvest tomatoes and kallaloo, a staple green in Caribbean dishes. A variety of amaranth, “it often grows as a weed in this climate,” Matlock said, “where it is known as pigweed.” But “these varieties are edible,” both leaves and seeds. “If you eat any Jamaican food,” kallaloo “is the flavor.”
Matlock described last year’s work as a “huge learning curve,” but he still managed to bring a half-dozen harvests to Keefe, in his estimation totaling about 100 pounds of food, mostly leafy greens. This year he has managed a harvest each week of both greens and tomatoes, totaling about 300 pounds.
AnneMarie Karavas.
Winnett’s donations are a small part of the large net Keefe Community Center casts to run its food pantry, but as AnneMarie Karavas, program specialist at Keefe, points out, the small donations all matter.
Keefe’s food pantry is open five days a week and provides food for 25 to 30 families a day. It’s set up like a grocery store, with choices of breakfast and lunch foods, rice, pasta, bread, produce, juices, and meats and cheese. Stocking the pantry is about balancing donations over each day and over time. “Today we have a lot of eggs,” Karavas said. “Sometimes we’ll be filled with butter,” or cheese. “It all depends on what our distributors have, and what we get in — what people donate.”
Karavas makes sure that the people who come to the pantry get a balance, which is “tricky,” she said. “We make sure you’re picking healthy,” Karavas said, but also wants to make sure that people enjoy the food they get.
The food pantry at Keefe Community Center.
A lot of Keefe’s food comes from Connecticut Food Bank. Keefe also gets monetary donations, which lets Karavas purchase additional food from local grocery stores and restaurant suppliers. But area gardens make up a steady supply of food as well. “We have our own community garden here,” Karavas said. “We also have Brooksvale’s community garden.” At this time of year, individuals with community garden plots also drop off produce they themselves can’t eat. Karavas also noted that people want fresh produce in the summer. In colder months, people want soups, “something to keep them warm.”
“The beauty,” she said, “is that we have so many different people in the community that want to work with us.” Hamden Hall supplies food and hygiene supplies. Churches “come every month and say ‘what do you need?’ ” Whatever Keefe requests, “they put in their newsletters and collect for us,” from cereal to soup. “It’s really amazing.”
The produce “is a whole section on its own” at the pantry, and the staff encourages patrons to explore how they can incorporate it into their diet. The pantry also has snacks for kids. “Every kid deserves a cupcake,” she said.
Karavas is already looking ahead to Thanksgiving, when the pantry will make about 750 baskets. “So once the schools start getting into session and asking what we need,” she said, she will request about 750 turkeys, “so every family goes home with a turkey. And we try to do all the trimmings that go with it. It’s rewarding.”
Karavas stressed that the numerous small donations they get, of food and hygiene products, are an important part of keeping the pantry running, especially in the summer, when donations tend to wane. She motioned to a few bags of diapers in the corner in her office, which an individual had dropped off. “We have a diaper bank where we give out 100 free diapers once a month. So right now there is just two clients. But that’s two clients that went home with 100 diapers. So when someone brings me a even small bag of food, it still is helpful.”
Winnett Food Forest.
While most of the greens Winnett produces go to Keefe, Matlock has also been encouraging people to try the fruit that Winnett has produced, like the berries from the mulberry tree on the property, which Matlock guesses began life as a weed, “went unchecked for a while, and is now a 25-foot-tall and growing” tree. That’s part of the overall strategy for the project. “We’re doing the annual vegetables now while the shrubs are coming into place and the perennials are getting established,” Matlock said. In time, most of the food should come from perennials. But “there will probably always be a sunny spot on this lot to grow some vegetables, and we will probably always keep doing that, because it’s such a recognizable thing.” He is hoping both that people come by to pick food for themselves. He’s also hoping that people see, in Winnett, how they can establish plants in their own yards that produce food year after year.
With Winnett, it’s not just about how much food they’re producing, but about the concept, about “the way that we’re conducting ourselves while doing it” and “how we’re trying to make an example for what can be done with this kind of space. We’re working with what we have and doing our best to engage with the community and the neighborhood.”
“Replication is the big angle,” he added. He cited the work of Australian environmental designer David Holmgren, who has pointed out that in food production, “when you start to scale up instead of replicate, you’re dealing with more centralization and the increased complexities and problems that come with operating a larger machine” of production. “If there are a bunch of little machines that all do the same thing in people’s back yards and corner lots, there’s less chance of the whole thing failing. That’s worth considering at this point. There’s so much to juggle in what is on our public consciousness, but the thing it always comes back to, for me, is climate.” Last year was a notable drought. This year saw record rainfall. Our food systems must learn to accept and deal with these changes. “That’s the thing that seems most inescapable,” Matlock said.
Thank you to all the volunteers and donors working in community gardens and donating the harvest to food pantries and other organizations helping to combat food insecurity and healthy food deserts.