Grace Note

I’d like to highlight the new relationship that developed this year between the farm and Highland Grace House in Worcester. Highland Grace, which encountered neighborhood resistance and media controversy when it opened, seeks to divert teenage girls with drug convictions from jail to a 6-month live-in recovery program that helps them beat drug habits and gain life skills to avoid bad situations.

Only about a dozen girls are enrolled in the program at any time. They range in age mostly from 14 to 16. This summer, about half came from middle-class homes in towns like Westborough, and half came from situations of urban or rural poverty.

The girls and their staff brought good attitudes, open minds and their senses of adventure and humor.

Trish Stefanko, the assistant farm manager, and I provided supervision and worked with them harvesting, transplanting and weeding.

I find it appalling to think that just 18 months ago, the kids we interacted with in work and conversation at the farm would have been warehoused in a juvenile correctional facility, lacking support and at greater risk of drifting further into crime and high-risk behaviors both in jail and when they completed their sentences.

Small, intensive programs like this (and their staff) need to be better funded and expanded upon.

For kids and teenagers, the farm is a big experiential learning opportunity, and a place where they can experience no small amount of adversity. At the farm, the girls were followed everywhere by dragonflies, peed on by toads when they tried to pick them up, startled by snakes, surprised to see all the variations of vegetables beyond what appears on grocery shelves, learned to tell the difference between dog and coyote scat, observed birds, handled grubs, threw worms on each other, and were swarmed over by biting flies.

Trish and I used these experiences to try to teach about the relationships between these creatures (“Don’t swat at the dragonflies when they swoop around you. They are busy eating the biting flies”) and the food.

They also received “farm homework:” After each visit, we sent them home with a basket of vegetables—the more obscure and unusual the better—the idea being that they would be challenged to learn new cooking skills and new vegetables that weren’t a part of their diet (they live in a dormitory setting and must cook for each other). We also donated a CSA cookbook.

The big hits this year were raw tomatillos and kale. Though Heirloom Harvest is not a nonprofit charity, the time, labor and effort we put into working with kids like these is part of what you pay for when you join Heirloom Harvest.