Join Cate and Sarah during their volunteer hours: Tuesdays from 9-12 and Wednesdays 11-2 all summer long behind the Wysocki House at 911 North Pleasant St., Amherst, MA.

By DEBRA SCHERBAN in the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Amherst Bulletin –  August 14, 2014

It was a grim task, pulling up 400 tomato plants tainted by blight’s black, contagious lesions. Seven 20-something men and women at a garden at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst were untying the strings holding the fruit-laden vines to their stakes and stuffing them into big plastic bags.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Sarah Berquist, as she watched one of her co-workers close up a full bag. “But it’s pretty prominent around here.” Blight, which spreads through the air, can wipe out acres of tomatoes. Protocol dictates that infected plants be removed and discarded as soon as the condition is detected. “We don’t want to be in incubator for the disease,” she said.

The tomatoes are just one of a number of crops UMass students Berquist and Cate Elliott, managers of the one-acre plot, are growing to donate to Amherst’s Survival Center and the Not Bread Alone soup kitchen in town. So, they were taking the task philosophically — more room now for fall beets, carrots and cabbage. They were out that recent Tuesday morning with five members of the UMass permaculture team tending the crops during a time slot reserved for community members to pitch in, too. None, though, had shown up that day.

The project is called Food For All, and Berquist and Elliott had already turned over kale, basil, lettuce, celery, broccoli and cucumbers to the two programs which provide free community meals, as well as groceries, to those in need. They also have spinach, beans, corn, squash, onions, beets, potatoes, herbs — medicinal and culinary — and pumpkins growing.

They are proud of the step they’ve in the effort to promote local crops.

“It’s rare to be growing food specifically for donation centers, so it’s kind of an innovative twist,” said Elliott.

She and Berquist met with folks from the Survival Center and Not Bread Alone at the beginning of the growing season to make their plans. Knowing both places get donations from various sources, they asked where the gaps were: why grow turnips if they already get plenty?

Tracey Levy, program director for the Amherst Survival Center, is pleased with the results.

“It’s been great,” she said in a telephone interview. “We’ve received some incredible produce.”

But there is a second part to the project that she likes just as much.

“It gives people who have an interest in growing a chance to garden with others,” she said. “They might not have the land or the skills, but this gives them an incredible opportunity.”

There are hours set aside each week, like that Tuesday morning slot, for volunteers to come to the garden behind the former Wysocki farmhouse at 911 North Pleasant St., and work alongside Berquist and Elliott. Or they can just sit at a table shaded by an umbrella and watch.

“You can see it’s beautiful here,” said Berquist, her blond hair pulled back under a beige ball cap. “Two red hawks live here,” she said squinting up at one flying over head.

Elliott, dressed in blue shorts, a green T-shirt and sneakers with purple laces agreed. “We always tell volunteers that they are welcome to work in the fields, but they are just as warmly invited to sit under the umbrella and enjoy the garden.”

Visitors can park in the lot there near the farmhouse, now used for office and meeting space, and walk up a short gravel path which leads to the lush fields known as the UMass Agricultural Learning Center.

There are experimental gardens — one USDA project on Japanese Knotweed is on the right. Displays for urban gardening are on the left side where vegetables grow in blue plastic wading pools and ceramic containers. In the distance you can see a UMass student garden, a large plot of vegetables which are sold at a campus farmers market.

The Food For All garden is on the right and visitors are greeted by a sign which posts the volunteer hours — Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9 a.m. to noon and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. But Berquist and Elliott say they are glad to try to arrange alternative hours, too.

“Anybody can come,” said Berquist. “The hands-on piece is the most fun.”

Elliott, 21, a senior in the sustainable food and farming program that Berquist, 25, finished before starting graduate studies, got college credit to design the garden.

It was the idea of John Gerber, a professor at the UMass Stockbridge School of Agriculture, and Shelly Beck, pantry coordinator at the Survival Center, took part in the planning, said Berquist. Beck was involved in a similar garden in Greenfield.

Aside from Food For All, UMass has five campus permaculture gardens — plots of crops that thrive off one another in a variety of ways — supplying the dining commonses, and the idea was to create one aimed at the broader community.

Helping to stock programs like the Survival Center and Not Bread Alone also gives students a chance to see a side of the food system that is new to them, said Berquist. “You can be at the university for four years and never set food in the community that you are a part of,” said Berquist, who also works in educational gardens at two of Amherst’s elementary schools — Wildwood and Fort River.

“I think it’s the coolest thing that Stockbridge is reaching out.”

The Food For All project includes free workshops and events for the public. There was a kick-off celebration July 27, when about 20 people showed up on a rainy Sunday to tour the garden and help plant late-season eggplant and peppers. On July 30 there was a potluck supper at the Hitchcock Center for the Environment in Amherst during which a panel of educators, farmers and community organizers discussed local food sources. Next up is a session on food preservation at the kitchen used by Not Bread Alone at 165 Main St., Amherst Aug. 18 from 5 to 7 p.m.

Berquist and Elliott brim with enthusiasm when they talk about piquing public interest. They point out that people can help themselves to produce when they come — they urged me to do a half-dozen times: “Take some kale. Take cucumbers. We have some yummy basil, too.”

“We just want people to take advantage of the opportunity to come together and grow food and share food,” said Berquist.

And that means everybody.

The garden that Elliott designed has an 8-foot wide path, covered with woodchips, running down the middle. It’s wide enough for two wheelchairs to pass one another. Lined by a thick border of sunflowers, it leads to three folding tables on one side that contain pots filled with onion, thyme, basil, squash and cherry tomato plants for people to tend without having to walk or bend over.

“Our mission was to make this as accessible as possible,” said Elliott. “We want people of all abilities to enjoy the garden.”

As Berquist and Elliott gave me the tour, Lilly Israel, Sammi Gay, Sara Hopps, Nathan Aldrich, Eric Pepperell, Erik Cullen and Matt Lee loaded the bags filled with uprooted tomato plants into a pickup truck for safe disposal. Then they turned their attention to weeding cucumber and pumpkin patches. Israel was leading a cluster of voices in a rendition of the song “Do, Re, Mi” from the “Sound of Music.”

“Gotta sing while you work,” she said, the sides of her head shaved with a pile of blond hair pulled up on top. “Keeps the morale up.”

The workers had been at it since 9 a.m. and shortly after 11, Berquist called them to the side of the garden for a stretching break and then a snack of pomegranate and black pepper chips. The chips got mixed reviews, but spirits were high.

“This is a beautiful office. I love being here,” said Berquist as I said goodbye. “Take some kale with you. We have plenty.”

Debra Scherban can be reached at DScherban@Gazettenet.com.

Source URL:http://www.gazettenet.com/home/13144451-95/growing-together-harvests-from-food-for-all-plots-in-amherst-take-novel-route-to

By RICHIE DAVIS – Recorder Staff – Sunday, August 3, 2014

SOUTH DEERFIELD — Pigs and bumblebees were there, as were biochar, solar collectors and energy- saving coolers.

Agricultural field day at the University of Massachusetts Crop and Animal Research Farm is an annual chance for farmers to see the latest innovations in crop research, and the event last Tuesday event drew more than 60 people to view 18 ongoing trials, including one that integrated pig and vegetable production.

With an increased demand for locally raised meat and a growing demand by vegetable growers for manure, the strategy of having a test crew of 10 pigs eat hairy vetch and winter rye as cover crops before letting them loose in a harvested squash field was what Frank Mangan, a vegetable researcher, was looking into.

“Working with vegetables for 30 years, I wanted to work with a crop that you can actually harvest year-round,” Mangan told onlookers as an assistant whistled to 10 four-month-old pigs that come running across what had been “a very lush field of vetch and rye” that they continue to trample and eat.

The farm is going through the process of applying for certification from the federal Good Agricultural Practices and state Commonwealth Quality programs, under which manure is becoming heavily regulated.

“We’re trying to make the case that manure is an important part of our system here in New England, with smaller farms, and we want to encourage that kind of rotation,” he said. Current GAP rules require a 120-day wait period from the time manure is applied until a vegetable crop that “touches the ground” can be harvested. “They’re still negotiating this, and we want to make the case that this is a viable system, and we can do it safely.”

The pigs are scheduled to be slaughtered in late September, at about 200 pounds each, to provide one dinner for one of UMass’s four dining commons.

“We serve 45,000 meals a day,” he said. “I hear that and I think ‘market,’” especially since the Amherst campus is signed up for the Real Food Challenge to serve 30 percent of its meals with local, non-genetically- modified foods.

Feasting on the cover crop, he said, the pigs are eating half their normal volume of grain as part of a diversified, low-labor system providing a vegetable as well as meat.

Years ago, when farmers were encouraged to plant cover crops, they said the land was too valuable to be used for that purpose, Mangan said. “Here instead of just raising pigs on an acre or growing a vegetable, we split it in half, so the full acre is ‘in production,’” with the squash harvest planned in September, 120 days after the manure was applied.

Another example of mixed crop was what agronomy professor Stephen Herbert called “the first installation of dual-use grazing land and solar panels” in the country, with 90 to 95 percent of normal hay yields. “What you see around the country, and around Massachusetts is farmers giving up land for solar panels,” said Herbert. “We need every acre of farmland we have for food.”

The UMass system, with 70 panels 7 feet off the ground and arranged on posts at different distances apart, generates 26 kilowatts of electricity on less than a quarter-acre, and includes small plantings of tomatoes, kale, broccoli and lettuce. A larger system is also planned.

“It’s a no-brainer,” he said of the systems, plotted so the panels shade out little of the crops. “You just have to be crazy enough to imagine what you might do.”

On a demonstration plot on one-half acre, biologist Lynn Adler pointed to 1,500 flowering plants of 15 varieties which researchers are inoculating with laboratory-raised parasites, crithidia. The crithidia are placed in large screen cages with common Eastern bumblebees to study the effect of different defensive plant chemicals on transmission of disease to the bees. The research is part of a broader study of diseases that are weakening native bee populations.

“We’re recording how many flowers they forage on … and how much total foraging time,” said Adler, explaining that after each afternoon’s trial, the bees are returned to the lab and dissected after a week to see whether they are infected and what the extent of the infection is.

It’s far too early to know whether it’s the bee balm, foxglove, snapdragons, sunflowers or other varieties that are most likely to transmit the pathogen left in the feces of other infected bees, and to discover what kind of floral traits might predict odds of transmitting disease.

“Is it species that make lots of flowers, is it species that make lots of nectar, is it flowers of a certain shape, or flowers with a defense chemistry in their nectar?” said Adler. “Can I make some more general predictions that would help us be able to predict in a landscape which species are likely to be the hub of transmission?” That kind of research is a far cry from testing the use of a humidifier with air-cooled food storage systems that try to boost energy efficiency and also the freshness of stored fall crops like carrots, or a test to improve soil fertility by using mineral-rich rock dust and biochar from burning plant matter with limited oxygen.

But each of the experiments, Herbert said, could potentially have import applications in helping to make agriculture in the region more viable.

For information on majoring in Sustainable Food and Farming in the UMass Stockbridge School of Agriculture, see: Bachelor of Sciences in Sustainable Food and Farming.