Community: Our bedrock is cultivating an internal community and supporting peripheral communities in seeking meaningful living and work situations, fostering connection to each other and to nature, and developing and sharing hard and soft skills to sustain us on a changing planet.

Though our work in the urban context has scaled back from when we began, we still find ways to be connected to our extended community in Queens. We welcome volunteers to work in our garden space in Astoria and for several years have partnered with Socrates Sculpture Park to host workshops on gardening and help steward their public learning gardening to support our community’s connection to growing food in an urban context. 

Social, Food, and Climate Justice: We understand that modern society’s distribution of opportunities as well as future susceptibility to impending climate change is unequal for individuals depending on race and socioeconomic status. We acknowledge that the local, organic food and sustainability movements that we are a part of are often guilty of apartheid. We strive to offer opportunities and to listen to members of disenfranchised communities.

We are working on several fronts to ensure that our produce is accessible to all members of our communities. This includes offering sliding scale payments for our CSA program, participating in New York City and State fresh food subsidies like Health Bucks and the Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) at our market, and donating unsold food to local emergency food distribution through the Astoria Food Pantry. We are always open to feedback and partnership around ways that we can work within our corner for the food system towards equity.

Necessary Sustainability: Our goal is to grow food and create and maintain human habitat and infrastructure while keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Rampant, thoughtless consumerism and greed promote both greenhouse gas emissions and material toxification of the earth, steering us towards collapse. The necessary response is sensibly scaled living with reduced or regenerative footprints achieved through restraint and thoughtful innovation.

In urban settings, we minimize fossil fuel use with available alternatives like biodiesel and solar for our community utilities, and utilize the bounty of salvaged materials for infrastructure. We don’t use plastic mulches in our human powered gardens and instead favor wood chips from local tree removals. We compost 5-8 tons of urban waste material per year with our community compost drop-off. In rural we disconnect from centralized utility systems favoring passive systems working with natural phenomenon.

Seed to Sauce: Much of the excitement of our program has stemmed from our small batch products making them a pillar of our farm and community. We work to constantly innovate what can be created using local, organic, raw ingredients, combined with creative culinary artisans. With each season we aim to create new products and to refine our existing ones.

Our products start as seeds that with time and care germinate to produce the high quality ingredients that are the foundation of our products, and end with delicious sauces and seasonings we are proud of. Meticulous thought has gone into the sustainability of their creation, processing, and distribution. Nearly everyone has used ketchup, but in an urban environment especially, not everyone has prepared a meal with raw produce from the ground. We hope that our products can be one way to help people connect with where our food comes from, and seriously, they just taste damn good!