A Farm Grew in Brooklyn

A farm grew in Brooklyn. Did. Used to. I figured out today that it’s gone now. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that for a couple years, a farm grew in Flatbush. Broccoli, cucumber, bittermelon, callaloo, Swiss chard, marigolds, zinnias, Thai basil, sungold cherry tomatoes, tall weeds and perennial irises, bindweed twisting along the fence, and, if you’ll forgive some sappiness, a twenty-two year-old girl grew there too. Grew up, rather. 

The farm was already falling apart by the time the powers-that-be placed it in my hands. I couldn’t let go of a dying thing, and so the dying thing became my responsibility without my realizing the work required in adequately hospicing an acre. So in a lot of ways I feel responsible for its death. 

I remember the walk to the farm; it was a long walk, but the bus ride wasn’t much shorter and was far less reliable, so I’d head East down Dean Street until I hit Kingston Ave, turn right, and walk through Crown Heights, passing the kosher bakery and grocery, walking downhill in the direction of the two tall, thin smoke stacks that towered over the psychiatric hospital adjacent to the farm. Our acre was in a schoolyard - land otherwise left vacant, tended for over a decade and made lush, verdant, a hub for environmental education and community engagement in a place otherwise occupied by compartmentalized brick and concrete. The gate was never really locked, so we’d occasionally have walkers-by stop in to see what was up, maybe ask nicely for garlic. I’d arrive in my “farming pants,” thin button down to protect from the sun, a bandana, and boots, carrying a lunch box and thermos, smelling a little like SPF 45. 

I got there before the others at 8am when the lot was still shaded under the school building and the sweetgum tree, cool, still waking. I’d drop everything on the picnic table and start my farm walk. Note the beds that the interns should weed, look at what was about ready to harvest and think through what could go in that week’s CSA bags, decide which beds were ready to pull and prep for new transplants. And I talked to the plants. I addressed them by name. I asked them how they were doing, hoping that in their own small voice they’d tell me. “Oh, fine,” the broccoli would say. “Maybe a little thirsty. No rush.” The tomatoes - I wish the tomatoes would use their words. “Blight?” I’d ask them. “Pests? Blossom end rot?” You’d learn to listen to their own ways of speaking. 

Interns showed up around 8:30. By then I had a list of activities planned for the day, tools laid out. We’d stretch, check in. Ask a silly question to get to know each other. “What’s the first album you ever bought?” “What’s your favorite type of salad dressing?” “What did you learn yesterday?”

For the first few hours I felt like I could hold it together. But as the sun moved across the sky, as the school let out and the interns left, I could sense just how much we still had to do to maintain even a small farm. And I left for the day obsessing over what was left on the chore list so I could come back tomorrow after a shift waiting tables in Manhattan, a list that only seemed to grow, weeds that exploded overnight, sprinklers that wouldn’t work, a hoop house that needed cleaning, kale starts practically bursting out of their trays, and dammit why won’t the tomatoes just tell me what their problem is? 

It didn’t help that the school still hadn’t figured out how to pay me. They didn’t want an established nonprofit meddling in their affairs anymore, so they essentially kicked them out and insisted they would take it from here, having no actual idea how to run a farm or how to manage its personnel. I hadn’t received a paycheck the entire time I had been there. As an intern I was paid in bags and bags of leftover vegetables, but in my second year, I was supposed to start making money. Like a professional. Instead, by the time June and July rolled around, I still hadn’t gotten any straight answers. I couldn’t afford to drop any shifts at my paying job. So I was running on little to no sleep, as much caffeine as I could handle, and the help of friends who would come by to weed the beds or water the starts. 

I cracked in September. A lawyer from the old nonprofit told me not to go to the farm anymore while I begged the administrators to get me on payroll - I had to withhold my labor or something like that. Interns kept showing up to make sure it didn’t completely fall apart. But interns left for school, got new jobs, and I quit. I was so tired. I moved to a different part of town, where my paycheck arrived in the mail in January. 

I always thought I was pretty replaceable; certainly if a public school had maintained a small farm for a decade without me, they could manage another ten after I left. I’m not sure what happened. I would Google the farm sometimes for updates. Not much, though at one point it seemed like their new environmental science teacher was reviving it. Seemed like they were running a fresh food pantry or something.  

So when I finally went back - February of 2024, Aquarius season, about five years since I left - I planned on taking videos of beds resting, weeds falling back, garlic growing patiently under mulch - I had cleared the storage space on my phone. I would record that same walk down Kingston, pan to the smokestacks, round the corner as the hoophouse came into view. Maybe open the gate, point out where my beloved broccoli used to grow. Surely the picnic tables would still be under the tree, albeit with fresh paint. But as I walked closer, I noticed tall, opaque, dark green fencing blocking the view. I kept walking in search of an opening. But it never came. Instead, through a torn hole flapping in the wind, I saw…nothing. Dust. Construction vehicles. A couple shipping container offices. Scaffolding. No trees, no broccoli, no garlic, no picnic tables, no perennials, no herbal medicine garden, not even a blade of grass left. Nothing. The farm died, and I killed it.

So now I’m sitting in the public library unable to shake the image of a raised garden. Light brown dirt where there was once nearly black, steaming beds of compost folded lovingly back into the earth. Unstoppable green. Still, I don’t know what else I could have done. I flip through the pictures on my phone and remember this place where I grew up, and while I know there’s a lesson here, I just can’t think about it yet. I hope, however, that the perennials are still underground. I hope that whoever cleared it all didn’t know to dig deep enough to disturb them. I hope that, come spring, the construction workers notice something bright poking up by that stupid green fence, and I hope they don’t care enough to pull it the way I might have. I hope an iris grows in a schoolyard in Flatbush. I hope a garden grows back in Brooklyn, in spite of me, in spite of everything.  

This is how I want to remember the farm.