Your Urban Teaching Farm
It’s Day 2 of the 12 Days of Give-mas. For the next ten days, we’re grabbing hold of that holiday theme to bring you stories of what we do, and we’re starting with the ground beneath our feet. Meet your E.A.T. South farm.
Pridefest 2019 at E.A.T. South
The E.A.T. South farm is primarily an outdoor classroom. Using the changing weather, seasons, plants and animals as our teaching tools, we teach year round about insects, nutrition, botany, gardening, compost and being good stewards of our air, water, soil and animals. Even in these cold months, there are lessons! With frost damage and falling leaves, we’re teaching about plants’ strategies for surviving cold weather, and we are sharing our harvest of purple sweet potatoes with our students.
Visitors from the California nonprofit La Cocina have lunch on the farm with staff from Tuskegee’s Carver Integrative Sustainability Center.
The farm is a spot where we welcome our community and visitors from near and far. Just this year, the farm hosted a family reunion, the Montgomery County Historical Society’s bar-b-que, and Montgomery Pridefest. Close to one hundred Maxwell Air Force Base officers in training from across the country helped with farm project this year, and we welcomed visitors from California, Virginia, and even New Zealand.
And even though we are in sight of the downtown skyline, we are making a home for the wild in our city. For better or worse, we’ve got foxes, groundhogs, and coyotes. In October, a frightened deer crashed through the bushes onto the farm. Birds -from hawks to Mocking Birds - have returned to hunt chickens and dine on a buffet of insects. For the first time ever, we were part of the fall migration of Monarch Butterflies.
Right now, our little farm is about an acre slice of downtown tucked between the railroad tracks and a bluff. We’d like to add a few more acres of edible forest and invite you to dream that into being with us. We’re a little bit of a hidden gem in the downtown area. Stop by and see what’s growing. If we’ve inspired you in some way, please consider giving.
