Alaya Morning

City Slicker Farms, West Oakland , California

I spent two and a half months this summer working with Willow Rosenthal, Ingrid Evjen-Elias, and other friends at City Slicker Farms located in West Oakland , California . City Slicker Farms is a collection of six small urban vegetable gardens located throughout the West Oakland area. The project is committed to providing low-income residents of West Oakland with affordable locally and sustainably grown produce. It is a non-profit organization, run entirely by volunteers.

I worked with City Slicker Farms as a summer apprentice. My responsibilities differed depending on the day of the week. One day each week was spent working in the office. This meant paperwork, errands, and phone calls. The rest of the week was spent at the garden sites. At these sites, I spent my days planting, watering, harvesting, fixing, washing, selling, singing, chatting, and learning as much as I could from Ingrid, the farm's year-long managing apprentice. The favorite days were Fridays. Starting in the afternoon and heading into late evening, Ingrid and I, often joined my many friends, would harvest, wash, and bundle fresh vegetables for the sliding-scale farm stand the next morning. We would transport the veggies from each of the smaller sites to the larger garden in a bicycle rickshaw created especially for City Slickers by a local cart-maker.

My internship with City Slicker Farms was an extremely important part of my education for a number of reasons. First of all, my work with them offered me a low-pressure working environment in which to learn first-hand the practical skills and knowledge needed to garden/farm. I was able to put into context all of the environmental and biological systems work I have studied in my courses here at Connecticut College . Additionally, I was able to observe the trial-and-error process which is key not only in gardening but also in establishing and maintaining a non-profit, volunteer-run organization.

I entered into this project with a few educational objectives. I intended to learn the basics of farming: when, how, where to plant what, etc. I also had the intention of working with children, gaining experience in teaching and curriculum building. However, the importance of working with kids in an official way took a backseat to my desire to learn the hands-on skills required to garden. It was impossible in the time I had set aside for the internship to create a fully structured educational program for children. There was another cooperative organization in the area that was more focused on creating educational opportunities for children in the field of agriculture, food systems, and environmental education. Willow made it clear how important she had found it to not try to “do it all.” There was already an organization working with kids and City Slicker Farms was an organization fighting food-access injustices. She was open to my creating projects for kids, but it was clear that there was a great deal for me to learn before I could develop a curriculum with which to teach children. However, I was able to work with children in a more indirect way. Kids would often stop by the garden and I was able to teach them small tasks and get them to start thinking about the science behind them. So, while my goal to gain experience in curriculum development was not met, I felt it was made up for by the new directions in which I was pushed.

I had not originally intended to intern with an urban garden project, but through conversing with customers and volunteers at City Slickers, I have been exposed to the importance of this type of space in urban areas. Many of the members of the West Oakland community were black Americans with strong familial roots in the rural South ( Louisiana ). Many of them had grown up on the farms of their parents and grandparents. They knew the most effective ways to prune tomatoes, why our okra failed, and how to keep the rooster from attacking when you went to collect eggs. From an ethnobotanical perspective, these garden plots in West Oakland became important spaces in transmitting and preserving knowledge from one generation to the next.

Exposure to this dynamic has helped me to narrow the focus of my senior integrative project. Working in the “field” helped me to understand the reality of what is important about community agricultural work. I'd like to focus on the importance of land access in maintaining environmental identities, and in maintaining space for the perpetuation of knowledge about specific ecosystems, growing climates, etc. I am currently studying abroad in northern Brazil . There is an opportunity to connect my work here with my experiences this summer by examining more specifically the MST (Movimento Sem-Terra), a group of landless workers organizing to gain access to land for farming and self-subsistence in Brazil .