Three turtles are waiting in the garden at the Max Myers Playground. The kids have to find them. As David Crutchfield, garden educator with Farm Philly’s Junior Farmers program, leads the after-school program attendees outside, the children sprint ahead, eager to dive into the kale, squash, beets and other plants to search. The Northeast Philly
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The Sunday following Philadelphia’s apocalyptic microburst storm, the Garden Court gardeners gathered late in the day to honor our fallen fruit trees. They sat around the apple stump and shared stories of the shade the tree had offered on hot July days and the roost the branches had made for birds and squirrels. Of the
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Surrounding nearly every suburban business center and office park are swaths of manicured grass, occasionally interrupted by ornamental landscaping. Unlike green space at schools or residential complexes, it’s rare to see this outdoor space used for recreation or sunbathing. In fact, it isn’t really used for anything. Up Top Acres, an agricultural startup based in
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Wanda Lebron’s garden has an open-gate policy. From morning to night, the entrance, framed by sunflowers, is left unlocked so neighbors can stop in to chat, rest or harvest a vegetable from one of the raised garden beds. But each day, Lebron wakes up knowing that she could lose everything she and her neighbors have
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When Grid visited the LandHealth Institute (LHI) nursery in May, community nursery operations lead Sara Mae Henke and native plant nursery associate Marcelino Smith were repotting hundreds of tiny bee balm plants from flats into pots to prepare them for sale. Behind them rose the arching end of a high tunnel greenhouse sheathed in plastic
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Every Friday afternoon from May to October, Alex Correia and George Murkowicz meet for lunch. Correia, a senior horticulturist at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, and Murkowicz, executive chef at its on-site garden-to-table restaurant, 1906, taste-test dishes that result from the horticultural-culinary partnership at the center of it. Correia, Murkowicz and volunteers work together, balancing
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The overgrown lot at 5308 Parrish St. in the Haddington neighborhood of West Philadelphia is getting back to its roots. After sitting abandoned, accumulating trash, construction debris and dumped car parts for over a decade, a new project is in progress to restore the space to a new iteration of its past life as a
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Germantown Kitchen Garden’s farmer, Amanda Staples, who hails from Upper Darby, did not grow up on a farm. Although her grandparents operated a Christmas tree farm near Clarks Summit, Lackawanna County, Staples’ initial hands-on contact with farming was growing lima beans in her backyard for an elementary school assignment. After graduating from Temple University with
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On Saturday, Oct. 26, North Philly-based artist and children’s books author Alyssa Reynoso-Morris hosted a DIY water purification event at North Philly Peace Park. This was the final event of a three-part series called Stories Grow Here, organized by the Barnes Foundation. The series is a part of Barnes North’s Everyday Places Artists Partnerships, which
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At the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) Pop Up Garden at South Street one evening in August, two long picnic tables are covered in plants: philodendrons, lantanas, begonias and more. Around them, dozens of people anxiously hover, some picking up plants from the table to inspect them, others using their phones to look up the species.
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