Allan Appel Photo
College students who built a field of vegetable dreams with New Haven’s help came to Fair Haven to return the favor.
After their school abolished the football team last year Atsu Atakpa and his fellow students at Paul Quinn College in Dallas began to grow 100 yards of vegetables between the goal posts in what might be the country’s only school farm housed in a stadium. Yale’s Sustainable Food Project members helped them do it.
So the students decided to return the favor. Fourteen of the Texans showed up Monday afternoon to rebuild all the raised beds at Grand Acres community garden on Perkins Street.
Paul Quinn College is situated in a poor section of South Dallas. Director of Service Learning Elizabeth Wattley described it as a food desert.
“We didn’t have a grocery store within five miles of the school,” said Wattley. She was busy with junior Tajae Brown (at left in photo) connecting pieces of resin-treated pine to make 20 new beds at Grand Acres, one of 42 community gardens operated by the New Haven Land Trust.
In addition to all the labor, all that lumber has also been contributed to Grand Acres by Paul Quinn, the oldest historically black college west of the Mississippi, said New Haven Land Trust Executive Director Chris Randall.
Atakpa is a computer science major from Ghana, where his parents are college professors. He led one of three teams that the Paul Quinn students had divided into to see who could construct more beds.
The raised beds with fresh soil brought in are the way to go because much of New Haven’s soil is contaminated with junk from the city’s industrial past, Randall said.
From Touchdowns To Tomatoes
In January, after the students began a community garden with 16 beds, the entire field of the former Paul Quinn football Tigers was re-covered with three inches of topsoil. In May there was an official opening. In June officials decided they “wanted to learn from the best” how to get the most out of an environmentally sustainable and community-focused garden.
So they came for a week’s study at the Yale Sustainable Food Project.
The main take-away, in addition to technical help, was to be “mission-driven” in every decision, said Wattley.
As a result the food desert in South Dallas is less so. “We’re all crops,” said Wattley, with strawberries, mustard greens, sorrel, and lots of different kinds of beans growing in the southern soil. The chef of the Dallas Cowboys and his crew recently put in 600 pepper plants and 600 tomatoes.
Farm Manager Andrea Bithell (kneeling at left in photo) said future plans include bees — six hives arrived this week — and the development of vermicomposting, that is, red worm poop-based compost, among the richest there is. It will ultimately make a product sold to local gardeners. Looking farther into the future, she sees goats wandering across the former football field, trimming the grass through their grazing, and looking poetical as they munch near a future greenhouse and an orchard.
Wattley said she is impressed by how the Yale crew roasts vegetables on their farm out in the open in a grill built of local stones. She said her future plans include doing the same at Paul Quinn by recycling some of the old stones from the stadium to create a southern-style grill.
Monday the immediate work was to finish the raised beds of Fair Haven’s Grand Acres. The Paul Quinn team will be in town through Wednesday. If they finish the construction and the laying down of the new topsoil, they’ll move to do similar work at the community garden on Williams Street.
At about noon Monday, when the teams broke for lunch, Atakpa praised his team, which had already completed more beds than the others. And, he noted, his crew included more women.
pretty cool