Farm Fresh Veggies
“Farm fresh,” has taken on new meaning in Lower Manhattan this summer.
The Urban Farm at the Battery, a public farming project that broke ground this spring on a lawn in Battery Park, is now selling its produce at a farm stand twice a week. No ordinary vegetables, these are the first grown on a Lower Manhattan farm in roughly 400 years.
Vegetables are harvested in the morning, and then sold in the afternoon a few feet away from the soil they were plucked from.
“People love it,” said Lourdes Vera, the farm’s outreach coordinator, adding that the stand also serves as an informational booth about the project. “We get a lot of tourists in the area that are curious to see this going on in New York City. We also get people on lunch breaks from work that come in the afternoon.”
The Urban Farm, a project of the Battery Conservancy, covers an acre of the park, surrounded by bamboo poles and covered in soil from New Jersey. The farm is expected to be dug up in 2013, when construction begins in the area on a bikeway that will connect the east and west
sides of Lower Manhattan.
Opened early this summer, the stand has been so popular that a second day was added. Volunteers staff the stand (located in front of the farm near the State and Pearl Street entrance to the park) from noon until 5 p.m. every Monday and Thursday through October.
Eggplant, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, okra, thyme, peppers and greens—including collard greens and Swiss chard—are now in season.
“We have so many greens it's crazy,” Vera said. “They just keep popping up after we harvest them.”
Suggested donation prices ($5 a pound for heirloom tomatoes, $3 a pound for cucumbers and $4 a pound for squash) are based on costs at local farmers markets. Reusable Urban Farm bags are sold for $3. Proceeds help cover the cost of running the farm.
Most people pay the suggested price, Vera said, but no one will be turned away for offering less. Leftover vegetables at the end of the day are often given away to homeless in the park.
Volunteers may decide to keep the farm stand open later to make it more available to the nearby city dwellers.
“The response to the tomatoes is overwhelming. Many people haven't seen such things—they grow in odd shapes, and they are orange and red and green and yellow,” Vera said of the farm’s multicolored heirloom tomatoes, adding, “But they taste so good!”