Interview with Kwesi Joseph, Urban Gardens Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Harvest New York

One of my long-term goals is to get rock dust supplied to community gardens in NYC. To me, it is more important for soil and plant health than compost.

By Anna Speck
Hunter College New York City Food Policy Center
April 24, 2024

Excerpt:

NYC needs more active green spaces. Community gardens provide several benefits to all members of society. NYC can also make gardening a mandatory part of the school curriculum from kindergarten to 12th grade. This will teach the children, the most vulnerable in society, the importance of eating vegetables and how to grow them. Children will also learn which foods to avoid.

Gardening is science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) with an outdoor component. I taught a simplified version of the periodic table of elements to third graders (eight year olds) by first using gardening and composting. Every school needs a dedicated gardening teacher. A regular teacher with the additional burden of running a gardening program will quickly burn out and quit.

Community gardens also need dedicated staff. Being a gardener in NYC is almost as exclusive as being a White House intern in Washington D.C. Some of the gardeners I’ve known were being supported by their parents or were using public services to make ends meet. Most garden jobs are low-paying and seasonal. Gardeners do more than grow hyper-local, nutrient-dense vegetables, and they need to be paid a living wage.

Mardelle Shepley, a professor, and Executive Director of the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures (CHIF) told me about the research she has done indicating that having more green spaces in urban environments will decrease crime (Shepley et. al., 2019 and Sadatsafavi et. al., 2022). Residents of large cities are often isolated and lonely, especially seniors. Gardens are a communal oasis in a concrete desert, and their benefits far outweigh their costs or carbon footprint. They are preventative and restorative.

Read the complete article here.