Media

An August 14, 2008 column in the Philadelphia City Paper describes Mill Creek's bee keeping operation. Check it out.

May 21, 2008

"We try to grow a variety, especially things that are popular in the neighborhood but aren't available affordably or fresh. We sell produce at a farmers market, Mariposa food market and some smaller cafes, and donate to food cupboards and a women's shelter. People are excited to buy stuff that's grown in the neighborhood without chemicals. A lot of seniors use their farmers market coupons with us, which is great. We're in our third growing season. The other co-director, Jade Walker, and I were working for the Urban Nutrition Initiative and put a proposal forward to start a farm. We grow vegetables, fruits and herbs. The summer I got out of high school I got a job at a farm and I've been farming ever since. Jade has been farming for more than 10 years and learned how through experience rather than schooling. The two of us are the only paid staff, but we couldn't do it without all the volunteer help."

Curator of Puppet Uprising pays tribute to Mill Creek in the City Paper. Check out the December 13th edition of Philadelphia City Paper's Culture Shock column. 

Mill Creek Farm

Urban farming

On the other side of the country, on a formerly abandoned lot in West Philadelphia, Jade Walker and Johanna Rosen, both 27, are growing produce and selling it to local residents at dirt-cheap prices.

Both Walker and Rosen are former employees of the Urban Nutrition Initiative (UNI), a project of the University of Pennsylvania that teaches children in the public schools about nutrition and wellness. When the two women decided they wanted to reach more community members and grow more crops than they could in the school gardens, they applied for a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to start Mill Creek Farm.

The farm’s mission is twofold: to improve access to nutritious foods, and to promote sustainable resource use by growing and distributing produce and by demonstrating ecological methods of living.

Located in a low-income, predominantly African-American neighborhood, the farm shares an acre and a half with an established community garden. The land that wasn’t being used by the garden was filled with garbage, weeds, and drug activity, but the soil wasn’t contaminated. “We didn’t have to do any remediation,” says Rosen. “We just put in mushroom compost.”

In the summer of 2006, the farm’s first growing season, Walker, Rosen, and the few hundred volunteers who stopped by to lend a hand grew 50 varieties of fruit, vegetables, and herbs, giving some of it away and selling some from their on-site market. “Okra was our best seller,” says Rosen enthusiastically. “The farm is right on the corner; it’s a very visible site, and we would sell out of it even before our market opened.”