With spring just around the corner, gardeners in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood say they’re eager to start planting.
At Akron Cooperative Farms, a community garden that mainly serves Bhutanese immigrants, mustard greens, a hearty crop that can be harvested a few weeks after planting, are already starting to poke their heads out of the soil in greenhouses.
Board Member Amar Gajmere also has garlic that was planted last year, but he’s waiting for more consistent weather to put most other crops in the ground, he said.
“Warm, not rainy," he said. "Windy’s fine.”
After harvesting the mustard greens in the greenhouses, Gajmere, a Bhutanese immigrant, will move on to other crops, he said.
"We may do cilantro, plus tomato and some other vegetables, which are basically used by people over here," he said.
The farm has plots rented by 140 gardeners, who are able to eat or sell their produce. This year, the produce grown in the greenhouses will be sold at local grocery stores and farmers markets, Executive Director Doug Wurtz said.
"What we'll do when it's ready to harvest is put them in little bundles, and then we'll sell those bundles," he said. "We have a number of little Nepali markets in the area, so they'll be hungry for that."
Wurtz founded the more than 4-acre farm on a former city-owned baseball field in 2019, with the intention of creating a community space for immigrants in North Hill. Gajmere has been working with Wurtz on the farm ever since.
"We are planning to make this garden as garden therapy for the people," Gajmere said, "because our people, immigrants - generally immigrants love doing this."
Gajmere and Wurtz are also preparing compost for the gardeners to use this year.
“That’s one thing that the gardeners here, being Bhutanese, that’s how they’ve always prepared their gardens," Wurtz said.
The farm is trying something new this year: vermicomposting, he said.
“We can actually get these set up in the gardens themselves. The worms start reproducing, and they put their compost material in there," Wurtz said. "And then they’ll start going out throughout the other parts of the garden, coming in and out and in and out.”
The process utilizes worms sunk in a square hole in the ground that provide nutrients for plants within about a 10-foot radius, he said.
"Always having that ability to put those other nutrients that you can't always get anywhere else - it's a wonderful thing that we're doing," Wurtz said.
Wurtz hopes to add more composting bins throughout the farm this year, and he's expecting to see gardeners start working on their plots this week, he said.
"It was winter last week, now all of a sudden everything changes," he said. "We're out in here in our t-shirts pretty much, and there's not much activity now. But there's gardeners coming out with this nice weather."
The farm hosts its own farmers market in the summer months in partnership with Asian Services in Action, a health and human services agency serving the Asian American/Pacific Islander community in Northeast Ohio, but Wurtz is worried impending cuts from the Trump administration could have a negative impact.
"With the SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance] program, hopefully that will still be in place," he said, "because a lot of the people that come are dependent on that."
For now, Wurtz is focusing on getting gardeners settled in their plots for the growing season, he said.
