On Tuesdays we wear our work clothes.
Cambridge City Growers meets at The Lucky Jungle on Broadway right next to Lamplighter Brewery on Tuesdays at 7pm (as long as it’s not raining or doing something crazy), and it’s always a blast! Join us if you’re free, we welcome anyone and everyone to come garden with us, make music, dance, chat, or drink beverages.
May 1st is approaching, and CCG has 2 great events with our partner organizations to celebrate our first year and continue into the next. We hope you can attend!
Sign up to be a fridge parent for the Coast Community Fridge @ 5 Callendar St., Cambridge, MA 02139.
Being a fridge parent means committing to bringing a staple or needed item to the fridge weekly. It can be as small or large as you are able and willing to make it!
We are piloting this so that we can ensure that fridge visitors can rely on a slightly more consistent fridge stock each week. We don’t want to regulate the fridge in any way but just want to make sure that folks who are looking to grab from the fridge can rely on the fridge to have what they might need or want.
Some suggestions:
In the next two months we will begin building raised beds at our new garden plots around the city. Raised beds are necessary as Cambridge soil is notoriously contaminated with lead; raised beds prevent our crops from being contaminated as well.
In the long-term, we are really concentrating on building the narrative of food sovereignty through urban agriculture. We are doing this through skill share sessions (teach-ins on woodworking, compost and composting, gardening 101, food justice, etc.), social hours, and postcard campaigns to neighbors.
We also need funds to continue running our community fridge at the Cambridge Community Center.
The Coast Community fridge has now officially been up for two months! In that time, it has seen new doors, murals, snowstorms, and lots of food coming and going. We have so many people to thank for making this evolving resource possible. First, a huge thank you to the folks at the Cambridge Community Center who have been essential partners in this process. They are also to thank for coordinating with Cambridge Arts Center to bring amazing teen artists, Kiersten and Mo’mo, who painted the mural on the fridge with local graffiti artist Eyevan. Read more here from CCC about the mural process: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLC89sjM5XI/
The fridge and pantry seem to be getting lots of use but are still often full thanks to CCC’s pantry leftovers and community offerings. We love being in connection with the many other Boston area fridges who are ready to stop by and redistribute when there is an abundance of items at 5 Callender St, doing what we can to make food available to our communities and limit as much food waste as possible. We have also been receiving drop offs of premade meals from local restaurants, as well as food and household item donations from local churches, organizations, and even the Red Sox and Patriots Foundations.
Our neighbor volunteer team has also been growing! We now have people coming to clean and organize the fridge and pantry twice a day. It is important to us that this continues to be a sanitary and safe experience for everyone who comes by. We keep eachother updated through a signal group chat and are always open to more people joining in. Daily updates on what’s inside the fridge can usually be found on our Instagram stories here: https://www.instagram.com/cambridgecitygrowers/?hl=en
We are open to any and all feedback and have left a white board inside the pantry for anyone to add suggestions of what they’d like to see in the fridge. Personal hygiene products have been very popular at the fridge, such as pads, tampons, soap etc. and we hope to be getting more of those to put out soon. We are looking forward to adding our garden harvests into the fridge when the time comes, but for now we will focus on keeping the shed accessible through the many snowstorms.
Coast Community Fridge is always looking for more sanitary products, household items, and condiments (in addition to produce, staples, and pre-made meals):
Cambridge City Growers – We are Pandemic Gardeners
Last spring, as the COVID-19 crisis caused food shortages and threatened the health of our communities, some Cambridge residents came together to form the Cambridge City Growers, and begin to grow food for each other and our neighbors. Since we began in early April of 2020, we have made remarkable progress.
We’ve established 9 community garden sites throughout the city: see them here. We are building strong partnerships with other community, agriculture, and justice organizations in Cambridge. We have joined with Goree House, Green Cambridge, Mothers Out Front, Filling in the Gaps Inc, Restaurant Workers Mutual Aid of Eastern Massachusetts, Cambridge Community Center, Crab Apple Gardeners, Margaret Fuller House, and Cambridge Mutual Aid Network, and others, working together to build new gardens and to advance food sovereignty, health, climate, and racial and economic justice. We have connected with over a hundred neighbors who are eager to participate in some way. We have the labor and the public support–but we need the land!
Last summer, willing neighbors opened parts of their lawns, driveways, and other areas, so we could grow food with and for each other. In a few short months, we built 5 new garden sites in various yards, and utilized raised beds and planters–some had lain unused for years–at various community sites. We also supported many other home gardeners, and educated many tenants and other landless neighbors, giving them access to land to grow. At the end of the summer and into the fall, we were able to share our harvests with neighbors and each other, and to give even more through other food distribution channels, including the Margaret Fuller House and Restaurant Workers Mutual Aid of Eastern Massachusetts.
But this is just the beginning. We can do so much more.
We plan to spend the winter gathering seeds and nurturing seedlings, so that this spring, we have hundreds, or even thousands, of young plants we can use to start new gardens, plant our existing gardens, and give away to support more gardeners. We are reaching out to businesses and farms to contribute funds, seeds, and other supplies. But one resource is essential and we are asking all our neighbors in Cambridge to consider sharing it this coming year:
We need land.
We call on homeowners, landlords, religious communities, schools, and business owners all over Cambridge to open your yards and driveways to your neighbors. We can help build new raised beds, gather soil and seeds, and bring in volunteers who live nearby. But we need the space to grow on. If you have no land to share, can you encourage your landlord to let you start a garden with us? Do please consider joining as a volunteer. Or contribute money, seeds, tools, wood or other resources. No experience needed! We learn together.
We can build dozens of new, communal gardens in the yards of Cambridge next year, and together do our part to help our community weather this pandemic and any other crises that may follow. Let’s build a local economy of sharing in 2021, so that none of our neighbors go hungry, so that we can together re-envision land use and economic justice, and so that we may be an example for other cities to follow.
Please contact us at: CambridgeCityGrowers@gmail.com
Check out the shorter statement as a 1 page flier below. Pick your favorite and print some out for your neighborhoods or your local bulletin board:
2020 was a WILD ride! Pushed into action through concerns about a potential global food supply meltdown, a group of us neighbors decide to see if we could get people to share land and resources to grow food together. And we did it!
We’re a very loose group of folks with lives to live and things to do, so CCG is fairly anarchical. Without any hierarchy, formal funding, or organizational structure, we’ve done quite a bit more than we anticipated. And we’re gearing up for more.
Here’s what we’ve done in 2020:
Here are just some of the friends we’ve made along the way:
Here’s what we’re planning in 2021:
We’re excited to continue the work. If you want to join us in any capacity:
Happy New Year everybody! Here’s to a fruitful, bountiful, joyful 2021.
The Coast Community Fridge is up and running at the Cambridge Community Center at 5 Callendar Street.
Why a community fridge?
Community fridges are a form of mutual aid, community love, and local resilience that is not necessarily present at larger organizations that rely directly on supermarkets and corporate donations. These fridges directly address household food waste while also providing more healthful, diverse foods for folks who are food insecure. The Coast Community Fridge accepts homemade meals as long as they are labelled, as homemade meals offer a glimpse into the food made by the people in our community, and a taste of someone else’s home.
In the summer, Cambridge City Growers will put our garden harvests into the fridge so that we can give out our produce directly to folks.
Who can use the fridge?
Anyone and everyone who needs food or supplies.
Safety guidelines for those using the fridge:
If you are dropping off food, please follow a few guidelines:
Are you interested in volunteering?
We would love to have folks stop by consistently to help clean and check on the fridge/pantry. This includes ensuring that dry goods in the pantry are dry and in good condition, cleaning fridge surfaces, making sure food is organized so that it can’t get damaged when stacked in the fridge. Please reach out to cambridgecitygrowers@gmail.com if you would like to help!
What started with a long-dormant idea in the summer turned into a very fast moving train! We received a fridge donation offer on Monday and today, Wednesday, we have a host and location.
This means we need to get volunteers ASAP to build our fridge.
Community fridges need a shed to protect from weather and other elements, as well as an artist or artists to make the fridge a vibrant community resource, not just a kitchen fridge. So here’s what we’re looking for:
Get the word out! Let’s get this fridge running.
On this Giving Tuesday, we are not asking for very much. But we’re doing a LOT!
Here is what our group is working on, and it’s probably not even the full list:
We are hoping you will considering contributing $1 or $5 to our GoFundMe today so that we can get all we need to get done before the next growing season.
We are not just a gardening group. We exist to address food, economic, and racial injustices present here in Cambridge. While we started in April, we’ve come very far in building up our community and alliances, and have been able to grow on more plots than we imagined!
Right now, we are on the verge of setting up a community fridge, and in order to uphold our mission of economic justice, we want to pay back our friends who help transport, build, and paint our fridge. There will be maintenance costs as well. This community fridge will be a resource that is unbound by the corporate-industrial complex to which traditional food banks are tied, and promotes mutual aid and allyship rather than charity.
Happy Tuesday and power to all.
Cambridge City Growers 