For the first time, he came face-to-face with world-changing historical conflicts: in Israel, in South Africa at the end of apartheid, in post-civil war Guatemala. In 1992, he entered Haverford to study political science and travel internationally on academic projects. In high school, he was service-oriented, volunteering in local hospitals and spending a summer in Montana, where he helped to build? a teen center and baseball dugouts on a Native American reservation. He called the city “sort of a little bubble.” Demographic data provided by the City of Newton boil Kriegman’s words down to “mostly white and affluent.” He wanted out. 29, 1974, attended public schools in Newton throughout his childhood. Kriegman’s work wasn’t always so locally based. “There’s a really great group of people who work together at the Boston Food Forest Coalition that I’ve met, and their team and energy are very contagious.”Ĭarolyn McGee, right, is helping to create a “food forest” near her Ellington Street home. Once you start, you can’t stop.”Īnd while it would be easy to overstate the credit due to Kriegman - the food forest is a collaborative effort - McGee said his eagerness is clearly the driving force. “Everybody kind of comes together, and you form this kind of common bond, and you gain friendships over food and helping your community and helping the world. “It was like turning over a new leaf, like a new awakening for me,” McGee said. ![]() In late 2015, when Kriegman first approached her about creating a food forest on the street, the lot was full of cars, trash, and “all kinds of waste,” she said ,adding that the coalition was instrumental in galvanizing residents to help clean it out and build something new and positive on the site. Carolyn McGee is a resident there who serves on the project’s stewardship team. Kriegman and the Boston Food Forest Coalition team seem to have ignited something on Ellington Street. We’re healing our neighborhoods by coming together and repairing the social fabric and getting to know each other again, and seeing each other, and having our kids play with each other and all the stuff that makes a community go.” “This then takes us into the whole mission, which is like, we’re learning together, we’re growing together, we’re healing ourselves with proper diet. “It’s not just the food, right,” Kriegman said. In the coming months, the Coalition and the neighbors-turned-gardeners on Ellington Street will add a gazebo and a medicinal mandala, transforming the once-vacant plot of land into a community space. ![]() As of mid-July, Ellington Community Food Forest was also home to a water house for irrigation, a community bulletin board, a stone patio, and mature peach and pear trees. Now, in mid-summer the following year, the saplings are steadily growing after surviving a brutal New England winter. Kriegman’s crew planted about 50 young trees in November. “It takes 10 years for a fruit tree to really produce for you, so we’re planting for the future.” “The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago, and the second best time is today,” Kriegman said recently in an interview. Now 43, he grew up in Newton, attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania, traveled internationally, picked up a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and moved around as a consultant at a few think tanks.īut that’s all in the past. Bearded, with flyaway brown hair and round, clear-rimmed glasses, he had the appearance of an urbanite-turned-woodsman. Orion Kriegman, the coalition’s executive director, zigzagged around the site late in the afternoon. On a Sunday in late November last year, the coalition organized a “garden raising” there, where volunteers gathered to plant trees and prepare the site for winter. ![]() The lot, at 103 Ellington St., is Boston’s latest “food forest,” an urban garden set up and cared for by the nonprofit organization Boston Food Forest Coalition. The city seemed to fall away as all around neighbors became gardeners, clearing trash and making the soil suitable for growing food. Raised beds, fanned out like rays of sunshine, were spilling over with parsley and greens. Mounds of dirt and woodchips created rolling hills. Framed under a dusky purple sky and sandwiched between three-deckers near Four Corners, the vacant lot was out of place in the urban landscape surrounding it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |