“Where the scholars can become workers and the workers become scholars”
Peter MAurin
Education
Mama Mary Community farm provides education on ecology and food production for the Joshua Group. Mama Mary Community Farm hosts Joshua Group’s summer program’s “Farm Club.”
Compost
“We think the flower is not the garbage and the garbage is not the flower. But if we leave the flower for ten days, it becomes a piece of garbage. And if we know how to compost the garbage, in a few months it can become a flower. The flower and garbage inter-are.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Compost is a great way to create a full food cycle. We use a combination of outdoor compost bins (above) and the bokashi method to compost our food scraps and food scraps from the St. Francis of Assisi soup kitchen.
Food scraps in landfill produce 58% of the methane gasses in the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas that contribute to the increased warming of the planet, creating extreme heat that disproportionately endangers our unhoused, poor, and elderly neighbors and fostering extreme weather patterns like flash flooding that disproportionately impacts the unhoused, poor, and marginalized.
Since the St. Francis Soup Kitchen cooks more than 200 meals each day, there are lots of compostable scraps from the meal prep to create good soil. The food scraps provide a source of nitrogen which is mixed with carbon sources like old newspapers, wood chips, or dry leaves. After a few months, this mixture creates rich compost which can be used in the garden beds which then can produce more food for the soup kitchen, neighbors, and community.
Food Desert
“For I was hungry and you gave me food”
A food desert is an urban area where it is difficult to find affordable and quality fresh food which can have devastating economic and health effects.
For residents of Allison Hill without a vehicle, it can be difficult to find an affordable grocery store with locally produced or high-quality fruits and vegetables.
Studies show that groceries in low-income neighborhoods are higher-priced than grocery stores in wealthy neighborhoods. We see this first-hand comparing prices of household goods in Allison Hill and those on the West Shore.
The Catholic Worker garden is an attempt to grow fresh food locally at no cost to neighbors. For more information on how gardens can transform food deserts please check out Ron Finley’s TED Talk.