Companies & Green City Growers

This is taken directly from the Wickedlocal website, and we should have had it up months ago. As part time "marketing guy", Renewacycle apologizes.

An organic farm is sprouting on Route 9, within sight of thousands of commuters.

In an effort to promote a healthy lifestyle, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is offering its employees the chance to learn how to grow organic vegetables at its Wellesley and Quincy offices. Partnering with Green City Growers, a Somerville-based group specializing in building farms in urban locations, more than 50 employees have signed up to be a part of the project. Their harvest will be donated to Second Helping, a Greater Boston Food Bank program.

“This organic farm started with the notion that people don’t know how to use food that’s whole and fresh,” said Judith Frampton, the company’s vice president of medical management. “My hope for the company, for the people that are volunteering, [is] that some learn how to garden that didn’t know how to before, but that everybody learns how to use nutritious, whole food in ways they never knew before.”

This is the first time Harvard Pilgrim has gone the route of farming. Frampton said the program will be a test run and if it goes well, the company will encourage its members to try and grow their own organic peppers and eggplants. The farming not only encourages people to eat locally and more healthily, but it also gets employees out of the office during warm summer days. “I just jumped to it,” said Yvonne Kantak, who works in general accounting. “I love gardening. I find it very calming.”

At the company’s Wellesley headquarters, more than a half-dozen wooden frames have been installed in the lawn. While most of the beds lay flat on the ground, two are raised to about waist height, for employees who have bad backs or knees and can’t bend down to tend to the vegetables. Each frame is divided into 16 sections, with different plants growing in each square.

“Harvard Pilgrim is the first health-care provider to ever do this,” said Green City Growers co-founder Jessie Banhazl. “It’s the first corporation that we’ve worked with and, I think, that is doing anything similar in Massachusetts. The … prospect of doing something on this large of a scale was really exciting for us.”

This past Monday, Banhazl stopped by the Wellesley headquarters to check up on the vegetables. She showed volunteers how to mulch the plants. Throughout the summer, members from Green City Growers will also come by to offer advice and helpful tips to the volunteers. “The beauty of this, too, is that we’ve got volunteers from across the company, but also from a wide range of gardening experience,” Frampton said, who has grown peppers and tomatoes before, but not much else. “We’re going to have people with lots of experience and people who have never put their fingers in the dirt before.”

Harvard Pilgrim plans to donate around $25,000 in produce to Second Helping, said Frampton. Although the summer has been rainy and not the best weather for growing plants in, Banhazl said she still expects a strong harvest.

Frampton said the farm will last through the fall. There will be tasting sessions and lessons on how to cook what is being grown. She said Harvard Pilgrim would be interested in joining with local schools and sponsor educational programs around healthy, locally grown, organic food.

“This is a commitment,” she said. “We are definitely going to keep doing this.”

Kantak and co-workers Andra Barnette and Linda Fei were enthusiastic about the vegetable beds. Wearing gardening gloves from home, the three women walked around to each frame, carefully tending to individual plants. In some cases, the seeds had been planted too close to one another and were separated. The ladies also put mulch around every plant.

“I think it’s just a wonderful project,” Barnette said. “If it will get other companies to start thinking the same way, it would be really good. Plus, you get to come out in the sunshine and feel like you’re doing something good.”