Dear Farm Friends,

May was an incredibly busy month and we're starting out June much the same way! Thank you to all our friends and family who joined us for the Open House and the Seedling Sale. We also appreciate our Newton Serves volunteers and the opportunities to connect with students at Newton North High School's Sustainability Day, Newton South High School's Sustainability Class Poster Session, and Meetinghouse Preschool.

Tonight, June 1, at 7 pm we are thrilled to present the esteemed Dr. Walter Willett as he discusses his research "Can We Feed 10 Billion People a Diet That is Both Healthy and Sustainable?" through a free, live-streamed, online program. Register now to receive the link and prepare for an informative, thought-provoking exploration of how our food choices affect the climate, and what that means for the future of our personal as well as planetary health. You don't want to miss this!

June is the month when we open the on-site farm stand, return to the Newton Farmers' Market on Saturdays, start distributions for the Summer CSA, and, as always, continue planting, growing, and harvesting a bounty of fresh veggies and herbs in the field. We're planning our upcoming line-up of fun, educational, community-building programs and events too. Summer is just around the corner and we are excited to enjoy the season together with you!

With gratitude,

Sue Bottino

Executive Director

Can We Feed 10 Billion People a Diet That Is Both Healthy and Sustainable?

Virtual Program with Dr. Walter Willett

Thursday, June 1, from 7–8:30 pm

Free, Live streamed online (Register to receive the link to watch this program.)

We all know that what we eat affects our health, but have you thought about how your food choices affect the climate? Dr. Walter Willett, cochair of the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, and Health, will present the findings of leading scientists on how what we eat and how we grow food impacts our planet, both now and in the future. In addition to predicting dietary health outcomes, this team included environmental factors (such as greenhouse gas emissions, food waste, and improved agricultural production practices) to arrive at their recommendations. Dr. Willett will describe how transforming our eating habits can have major benefits for human health and allow us to stay within sustainable, planetary boundaries. He will also identify the strategies to achieve these goals that require the engagement of government at all levels, civil society, and individuals.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Walter Willett is a physician, epidemiologist, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a world-renowned speaker. He served as chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard for 25 years. Much of his work has been on the development of methods, using both questionnaire and biochemical approaches, to study the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases. He has applied these methods starting in 1980 in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Together, these cohorts that include nearly 300,000 men and women with repeated dietary assessments are providing the most detailed information on the long-term health consequences of food choices. Dr. Willett has published over 2,000 research papers, primarily on lifestyle risk factors for heart disease and cancer, and has written the textbook Nutritional Epidemiology, published by Oxford University Press. He has also written four books for the general public. Dr. Willett is the most-cited nutritional scientist internationally. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the recipient of many national and international awards for his research.

Thank you to everyone who came to the Farm for our Open House on May 6. We celebrated the unveiling of the latest sustainability measures including the dedication of the Dr. Eugene Rubin Greenhouse and the new solar array on the roof of the barn with 200 friends. Highlights of the day included this lovely poem by Arlene Rubin, in tribute to her late husband:

To celebrate the life of

A man who truly cared,

Who thought that the remainder of

This farmland should be shared,

Who labored to preserve it

Against contractors’ gain,

And solicited the City

To help this farm remain,

We dedicate this greenhouse

In Eugene Rubin’s name.

Arlene Rubin

Photo by Phil and Lynn Rubin

Farm Manager Greg Maslowe, Commissioner Randle, NCF Board Co-President Paul Holt, Mayor Fuller, and NCF Board Co-President Dede Vittori

Photo by Ken Mallory

We also were honored to hear remarks by Massachusetts Agriculture Commissioner Ashley Randle, Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller, Ledgebrook Condominium President Harvey Crosby, Rubin family member Steven Barg, and NCF Farm Manager Greg Maslowe. Together we are growing greener! To learn more about the solar array, including daily performance of the system, visit our website.

Steven Barg,

Rubin family member

Photo by Ken Mallory

Sue Bottino, NCF executive director, and Madeleine Barr,

co-founder, Resonant Energy

Photo by Dean Bottino

Harvey Crosby, chair of Ledgebrook Condominium Association, and Greg Maslowe, NCF farm manager

Photo by Ken Mallory

Last month we told you about the opportunity to double your donation through a matching gift from the Barg family for equipment and supplies for the new Dr. Eugene Rubin Greenhouse. With generous financial support from this community, we met the match! We are so grateful to all our supporters. Thank you!

Our annual Spring Seedling Sale on May 20 and 21 was a huge success! Despite the rain on Saturday, we had 685 customers and sold nearly 27,000 seedlings over the weekend! Thank you to the staff and the 40+ volunteers who worked so hard to make our trademark event so wonderful.

We have a small amount of plants and soil amendments available for sale online through the end of the day today, June 1, with pickup on Friday, June 2, from 2–6 pm at the Farm. To view our online store and place your order, click here.

If you have any black plastic carrying trays from the Seedling Sale that you would like to return, you can drop them off at the farm stand on Winchester Street anytime and we will reuse them. Please do not return the 4- or 6-pack tray inserts or drop off any other plant containers.

Here we go again!

Where you'll find us:

Our on-site farm stand on Winchester Street, near the intersection with Nahanton Street, starting on Thursday, June 15. We will be open Thursdays and Fridays, 1:30–6 pm and Saturdays, 9:30 am–1 pm.

Newton Farmers' Market on Saturdays, starting June 24, Newton North High School parking lot on Lowell Avenue, 9:30 am–12:30 pm.

Summer CSA sharers: Pickups for weekly and alternate week 1 sharers begin on June 7–8, from 2–7 pm. Please reply to this email message if you did not get the welcome email from Farmer Greg.

(Please note that the Summer CSA program is sold out.)

Stop by Winchester Street near the farm stand to see our new historical sign.

Thank you to volunteer Tanya Lazar for creating this beautiful design.

For translations in five languages, visit our website.

This month we are highlighting long-time supporter and former NCF board member Sam Fogel. Sam has been an engaged volunteer at NCF since its inception and has played a critical role in many of the Farm's developments over the past 17 years. Sam was one of the first people who interviewed then-prospective Farm Manager Greg Maslowe and helped make the decision to hire him in 2006. Sam created and tended to the experimental apple orchard at the Farm for over ten years. He and his late wife, Margaret, did important research that helped lead to the solar array we have on the barn today. They have made an indelible contribution to NCF. 

Sam grew up in Philadelphia, where his parents owned a grocery store. He met Marge in graduate school in Urbana, Illinois, because they were seated alphabetically and his last name came right after Marge's. After receiving their Ph.D. degrees, his in microbiology and hers in biochemistry, the Fogels moved to Massachusetts where Sam worked at MIT and Harvard while Marge worked at Harvard. While at Harvard, the Fogels became more involved in the environmental movement of the 1970s. They moved to Newton where they started their own backyard victory garden before they had even closed on their new house, much to the delight of the home's seller. Here they had two sons. Marge went into consulting and eventually started a successful bioremediation company. Sam also joined the company and their work together included soil and water cleanup of contaminated aquifers with chlorinated solvents, and petroleum. They also developed methods for improving soil structure using polymer producing strains of soil algae. Sam and Marge pioneered the use of many of the environmental advances of today both professionally and at home, including being the first people on their block in Newton to get solar panels and install heat pumps.

NCF has greatly benefited from the Fogels' environmental leadership and activism. They have led by example in their personal and professional lives and also generously shared their talents, time, and resources to help establish NCF as a small but mighty leader in sustainable agriculture in this region. We are incredibly grateful.

NCF has been fortunate to have two assistant growers working with Farm Manager Greg this spring. We featured Andrea Egan in last month's newsletter, and this month we'd like you to meet Grace Woroch. Grace is originally from Toronto and has lived in Boston, currently in Jamaica Plain, for the past six years. She worked at Siena Farms in Sudbury for three seasons—first as an apprentice, then as a harvest manager, and most recently as a production manager—before coming to NCF in March. Grace enjoys farming because she loves being outside and feeling connected to the land. She was working in an office before switching to farming and cannot imagine ever going back to that lifestyle. Grace says she is so much happier and significantly more fulfilled in her work as a farmer. 

Grace came to NCF because she wanted to be on a small, community-oriented farm closer to Boston. "I absolutely love the people I work with! Greg, Andrea, and Sue are so passionate about what they do, and it has been so fun kicking off the growing season with them. I really appreciate how much time Greg dedicates to demonstrating and explaining different techniques! And I have learned a lot about proper greenhouse management from Andrea." Grace has been a huge help this spring, and we will really miss her when she leaves the farm in late June. Grace played soccer in college, and she and her girlfriend are going to the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand in July. They will be spending several months traveling in a van across New Zealand. Thank you, Grace, and good luck in your adventures!

Thank you to Newton South High School (NSHS) seniors Alison O’Brien, Noa Dahan, Samantha McClintock, Zezo Beshir, and Henry Knight for your work on NCF’s food insecurity alleviation initiatives. These students are enrolled in teacher Andrew Thompson’s Sustainability Class (social studies), and they completed this work under the guidance of NCF Board Co-President Dede Vittori as part of their year-end action capstone project to find solutions to real-world problems.

NCF is committed to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion, and one of our key initiatives toward this goal in the past few years has been to improve access to locally-grown fresh produce for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps) and Healthy Incentives Program (HIP) clients. Starting this May, NCF has become an approved vendor for these Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) programs, and we welcomed SNAP and HIP as payment for food-producing seedlings at our recent Seedling Sale. Customers will be able to use these benefits for fresh produce at our stand at the Saturday Newton Farmers' Market this year.

In learning more about these programs, we have become aware of many of the complexities and challenges that clients face when using food assistance. Issues can arise around understanding which products are eligible for one or both of these programs, how customers can use HIP but only if they still have a positive SNAP balance, when benefits are disbursed each month, how to get information about the programs in other languages, and how the federal (SNAP) and state (HIP) programs can work in conjunction with other programs, such as WIC and tokens at the Newton Farmers' Market.

The NSHS project team worked with us weekly for several months on this project:

● learning about the details of the federal, state, and local food assistance programs and food insecurity in our community;

● finding useful information for vendors and customers on the Internet;

● visiting stores to learn how vendors are publicizing the program; and

● developing recommendations.

The students' work has been illuminating and has resulted in a list of links to many useful websites and also more than ten concrete recommendations for NCF to consider. We appreciate their efforts, insights, tech-savvy perspectives, and enthusiasm. Thank you to the NSHS Project Team for helping us address food insecurity. We wish you the best with your future plans after high school.

NCF is currently accepting applications for summer high school field crew interns, and we only have a few spaces left! This program offers the experience of working on an intensive market garden (the traditional term for small vegetable farms) for students entering 9th–12th grade in the fall of 2023. These unpaid internships last for four weeks and are three mornings a week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), 8 am to noon. Applicants can indicate if they are available for session 1 (July 11–August 3) or session 2 (August 8–August 31). Check out our website for more details and to apply online.

Blooms & Buds Sustainable Floral Design Workshop with Susie Margolin

Saturday, July 15, 5–7 pm at the Farm, $75 per person. Preregister here (required). Sign up soon before this class fills up! If you need financial support to attend, please let us know. Email sue@newtoncommunityfarm.org

Build your own bouquet from a fresh local flower and greens bar while learning sustainable floral design tips from the brilliant Susie Margolin (Lotus & Lettuce). Light refreshments will be provided.

About the Instructor:

Susie Margolin is a lifelong gardener and entrepreneur who launched the sustainable floral design business Lotus & Lettuce as a response to climate change. Susie’s designs feature organic blooms that she grows from seed in her Auburndale gardens, arranged in vintage vessels for sustainable beauty. Her “floral sculptures” incorporate bold colors, unusual textures and shapes, as well as vegetables and foraged natural elements. Her goal as designer and instructor is to promote creativity, sustainability, and community through “seed to vase” floral design.

Join us in July for a group discussion of the book From Scratch: Adventures in Harvesting, Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging on a Fragile Planet by David and Jon Moscow. Date to be determined. To be added to our book group email list to get more information and notices about what we are reading, email sue@newtoncommunityfarm.org.

Apple, Radish, and Cabbage Slaw 

Chop 1 apple and 2–3 medium-sized radishes into small, matchstick-sized pieces. Core the cabbage and finely chop it into thin strands. In a separate bowl, mix together the following to make a delicious and refreshing dressing: 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar, 1/4 cup olive oil, 2 tbsp honey, 1 tbsp dijon mustard, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Mix all together until slaw is evenly covered with ingredients. Enjoy as a side salad or on top of a sandwich for some added veggies and crunch.

Recipe by Inna Kagan, local Registered Dietitian Nutritionist

Only three spots left!

NCF is partnering with Duck Hollow Farm to bring you fresh, local flowers all summer. Sign up for ten weeks of floral bouquets, organically and lovingly grown in Sherborn, MA. Pick up weekly at NCF on Wednesday or Thursday, 2–7 pm, from the end of June (exact date TBD) through the end of September. Price is $190.

Click here to sign up. Please email 

laurel@al-freshco.com with any questions.



NEWTON COMMUNITY FARM

303 Nahanton Street

Newton, MA 02459

617-916-9655

www.newtoncommunityfarm.org

information@newtoncommunityfarm.org