Revived Milford Community Garden Needs Help Readying Winter Crop
Jenn Hahulski weeded and planted the overgrown Milford Community Garden to grow vegetables for the food pantry. Now she needs help planting winter crops.
Port Jervis massage therapist Jennifer Hahulski was giving a massage when her client mentioned another earthly need for her efforts. Milford Community Garden, next to Milford Township Hall had been abandoned for two years and was overgrown. The Milford Garden Club had previously cultivated it to provide vegetables for Milford Ecumenical Food Pantry.
“Getting people to continue working on the garden was hard,” said Hahulski. “But I like having a community garden. I lived off two acres in Middletown.”
When Hahulski took on the garden in mid-August to again raise vegetables for the food pantry, she was assisted by another massage client from Rise and Root Farm in Chester— women aiming for social justice. They donated 600 plants to replant the Milford garden on 600 beds donated by Home Depot and put together by volunteers from the store’s staff four years ago.
Hahulski is enthusiastic and knowledgable about gardening for self-sufficiency. Before moving to Port Jervis, she had fed her family by making use of two acres in Middletown. She grew broccoli, cauliflower, beets, rutibagas, carrots and spinach and raised geese, ducks, rabbits, chickens and pigs. She recalled how the pigs cooled themselves in a rubber wading pool.
Now Hahulski has revived a community garden that can grow greens through December. She has weeded and planted industriously, aided at times by her friends Kari Murante and Ashley Markwalter. On Friday, Liz Steen will help harvest beets and rutabagas, Hahulski said.
“That will be the first community garden harvest in years to come to the food pantry,” she said.
Now help is needed to weed the remaining 10 to 15 beds and build the hoop houses and high tunnels that will be covered with plastic to protect vegetables growing in fall and winter from frost and snow and keep heat around the plants.
“We can get spinach, lettuce and garlic in now if we get the weeding and high tunnels done,” Hahulski said. “Then we can harvest until at least January. But we can’t start lettuce and spinach in December.”
As an expert canner, she also envisions doing canning workshops.
“I’ll do free canning workshops to teach people how to use extra produce and get people into gardening and sustainability,” she said.
In this new cycle of gardening activity, Hahulski has also been in contact with Chad Pilieri, who began a Greenwood Lake community garden two years ago. She joins his bimonthly zoom meetings with local gardeners.
Pilieri will have a free event on Oct. 7: Seed Collection and Native Plant Dig Workshop, at the Grow Local Greenwood Lake Common Ground Community Garden, 13 Poplar Street, Greenwood Lake, NY, on Saturday, Oct. 8, 10 a.m. to 12 noon, rescheduled from Oct. 7. RSVP to growlocalgwl@gmail.com.
To contact Hahulski about helping with the Milford Community Garden or her canning workshop plans, email her at Healthwithease@yahoo.com or call 845-467-8727. She can also be found on Facebook: Milford Community Garden facebook.com
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