Rusty Wheelbarrow Farm - We Love Elmhurst!

Summary

Nestled at the intersection of Elmhurst and Woodside, a dedicated group of volunteers is cultivating more than just produce; they're growing community. The Rusty Wheelbarrow Farm employs beyond-organic farming methods on a small urban lot, striving to provide fresh, sustainably grown food to local pantries. Beyond food production, RWF is committed to educating neighbors about sustainability, safe urban gardening, and responsible waste management. Ultimately, they aim to create a welcoming green space where community members can actively participate in healthy activities while contributing to the well-being of their neighborhood.

We spoke with RWF founder, Benji.

Why did you start Rusty Wheelbarrow Farm?

So the super long story short is we started with Woodside, Sunny Side composting with a small group of volunteers In 2020 when the pandemic hit, a lot of people started to drop a lot more food scraps than usual. We started to run out of space for composting, and we had all this finished compost that needs to go somewhere.

One block away from there is a piece of public land that belongs to parks department, so we run a petition. We got over 1200 signatures from around Woodside, Sunnyside, Elmhurst, Astoria, Long Island City, but the Parks Department would not talk to us. We asked Van Bramer (city council member, Jimmy Van Bramer) to help us, but that didn’t help. So eventually we decided to do sort of “gorilla gardening,” slash “gorilla composting.”

We started to build raised beds on that public land which, by the way, was supposed be a playground, but has not been touched in five years… So we could have grown food there for five years. But anyway, by August/September, like every week we or every couple of weeks, we would build a new bed and fill it up. By late October, we were able to first harvest from these beds. But just a few weeks later, the Parks Department came and ripped everything off.

A little bit later, I received a phone call from Pastor Joe, the pastor of the church right next to us (St. Jacobus Lutheran Church), and he’s like, “Hey, Benji, I have a piece of land behind the church,” which is what has now become rusty. We call it rusty because of a rusty wheel barrel that’s over there in between these green houses.

And so fast forward to that winter. We did a big cleanup. We didn’t count the number of garbage bags or weigh them. To my regrets, I should have kept track of that to know how much weight of the waste that we picked up from there, but we picked up a lot of waste, then what we did is that we put a very, very thick layer of leaves, thick layer of mulch that Queens Botanical Garden provided us with to sort of basically make a layer between the native soil, of the soil that was there before, and where we are going to grow food.

What is your mission?

We are composting up front, meaning people can drop off scraps in the brown bins that you see on the outside, hopefully emptying their bags and other things and putting in the veggies and egg shells — but no meat, no dairy. And then once or twice a week, we are processing these food scraps, putting it into composting bins for it to decompose. And then at the end, we end up with finished compost.

People from the neighborhood come every once in a while to pick up some compost to put, like on their flower beds or on their flower pots at home, or on the windowsill, etc. Then when we do tree cleanup, sometime, Pastor Joe and Angela and other people come and pick up some of that finished compost to put like in the tree pits that are all over neighborhood. What is not distributed to the community goes on top of the raised bed, as like the fertilizer to keep this soil to be having enough fertility to be able to grow food. And then the food that we grow is distributed by Sunny Side/Woodside Mutual Aid.

What’s your motivation to do all of this?

Very egoistically I like to put my fingers in the dirt. I need to be outdoors. Otherwise I’m going crazy. And why not doing that while helping the community in the same time?

Is there anything else that you’d like to say about your mission?

Or yeah, we always need volunteers. We need help. In the first year or so, it was mostly me. Sometimes Pastor Joe would see me on my own and come out and would help for an hour or two, and then slowly, we started to build a base of volunteers.

What do you like most about the neighborhood?

It’s alive. It’s diverse. I can walk 10 blocks in any direction and find food from three or four of the five continents. So these are things that I love here, and also, thanks to the 7 train, it’s fairly easy to circulate mostly. So that’s something I really like.