Here’s a recipe for a lovely summer day: Pack a little picnic, grab your best floppy hat or Phillies cap, slather on some sunscreen and take a mini road trip to a nearby farm to go fruit picking. This fun outdoor activity is a life-affirming blend of frolicking in a field and getting access to
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Amirah Mitchell , founder of Sistah Seeds. Photography by Drew Dennis. Ground Work by Jenny Roberts Amirah Mitchell has known she wanted to be a farmer since she was a 14-year-old intern with The Food Project, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit devoted to building sustainable food systems. “That’s kind of when I caught the farming bug,” Mitchell,
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From seed to supper” sums up the credo of Food Moxie, a Northwest Philadelphia nonprofit that “educates and inspires people to grow, prepare and eat healthy food,” says Lisa Mosca, executive director of this offshoot of Weavers Way Co-op. Launched in 2006, Food Moxie grew from a project where Weavers Way in Mount Airy supplied
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By Rory Sweeney Working out of the Drexel University-backed ic@3401 startup incubator in University City, the five-man team at GrowFlux is banking on a hunch that, for plant-growers, less is more. They’ve learned that, rather than gadgets and wizardry, the best thing technology can offer to the horticulture industry is simplicity, and that all other
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On a quiet street in East Germantown is a small farm blooming with red bok choy, turnips, Brussel sprouts and nasturtium, all grown organically. Located within the confines of Awbury Arboretum, this is one of Philly’s “food forests,” also known as forest gardens. Food forests are a modern name for an ancient practice—historically found in
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As the beginning of the pandemic left people with sleepless nights and unending anxiety, many turned to a natural remedy to help with their dread and gloom: lavender. Lavender sales surged internationally in 2020. The farms that grow these little purple flowers in the Philadelphia area felt the newfound demand. It’s been a busy year
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Khalil steward first envisioned Philly Farmacy while working on a class project at Delaware Valley University. “I had an idea for a school bus or old ambulance turned into a mobile produce store,” Steward says. The mental image stayed with him, and he made Philly Farmacy a reality in 2019, a year after graduating from
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Sally Quigley is not a farmer. But today, at a food distribution event in the parking lot of CURE Insurance Arena in Trenton, she could fool anyone. She looks down at a table heaping with butternut squash and recalls wistfully how she planted this squash and later got to harvest it. Today, she’s proud to
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For a week in late October, goats grazed on a broad hill in High School Park in Elkins Park, a stone’s throw from Philadelphia. Friends of High School Park, which has been taking care of the park since 1995 when a fire destroyed abandoned buildings that were once Cheltenham High School, organized the event with
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Spotted lanternflies landed on my hat, my face and every other available surface of my body on August 5, at The Woodlands in West Philadelphia. I was there tagging along with a team of Penn State researchers on a mission to collect 3,000 of the bugs that morning. Alongside me were entomologist Osariyekemwen Uyi; Michelle Niedermeier,
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This week is National Farmers Market Week and Grid is doing a round-up of eight of our favorite Philly Farmers Markets to mark the occasion. Even as many of us are realizing the value of local food during the pandemic, the Farmers Market Coalition reports that 57% of farmers market operators surveyed had seen an
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