HISTORY — Boston Area Farm Gleaning Project

When B.A.G. went public so to speak, incorporated and applied for charitable status (2007), people persuaded me to adopt the shorter name with its acronym. It was in the summer of 2004 that the project got started, though it had roots from the 1990s. Released (retired) from Waltham Fields Community Farm where I had been volunteer director, I thought to contact farmers to see if they had any crops left in the fields for the gleaning. The first farm I called, Apple Fields Organic Farm in Stowe, Ray Mong, farmer, responded that yes, they had four (long) rows of over-ripe beets I could pick. Setting forth with my best fellow volunteer, Marina Montraki, a Greek immigrant, who in her 60s could out farm almost anyone (!), and over several days we picked the beets. The Russian immigrants at Helping Hand food pantry in Porter Square, Cambridge, loved the beets! Then Ray let us harvest extra collards and kale, also carrots. Down the road we came upon Hmong Farm at Bolton Flats, a dairy farm the farmer had leased to Laotian and Cambodian people to farm. The Laotians (then) only used the leaves and tendrils of the squash, in Laos feeding the squash to their pigs (which they did not have, living in Fitchburg apartments!). The field had been plowed under, but not well, and we filled up my mini-van twice with good Hubbard, delicata, butternut, acorn and turban squashes! At that time Drumlin Farm in Lincoln did not have a CSA, so they had a lot of vegetables to glean, various greens, tomatoes and peppers. In all that year we gleaned 290 boxes of produce estimated at 7,600 pounds, mostly delivered to Food For Free, the Cambridge food bank that delivers (now to some 60 food pantries and shelters)!

Unfortunately I lost my best volunteer to the immigration authorities (Marina used to spend 9 months of the year here on a tourist visa, and then had her papers stolen). And then as the gleaning goes, the next season farmer Mong didn’t plant too many beets, and the Hmong farmers got flooded out, and then learned (subsequent years) that there was a good market for winter squash! I recruited young half-way house young adults through Arlington’s Young Adult Vocational Program. I paid them “soda” money for helping me ($20 usually). Our best gleaning in 2005 was 60 boxes of corn picked at the Busa Farm fields in Lexington when successional plantings became ripe at the same time. The corn was well received at Sandra’s Lodge in Waltham where lived 100 woman and children! Our totals, though, were down to 148 boxes, half the 2004 totals.