On a frigid day in the middle of Boston, Kannan Thiruvengadam was plotting how to defeat the deep New England winter and grow more plants.
“I want to build a food forest,” Thiruvengadam proclaimed, laying out his vision for the expanding Eastie Farm. “Something that that you walk into, then there’s mulberries, and there’s peaches and there’s pears and persimmons that you can harvest and eat as you go.”
It was as though Thiruvengadam, practically glowing despite the morning’s gelid low of 14 degrees on Wednesday, was already inside the greenhouse that that he was watching get delivered, a place where the year-round steady temperature of around 58 will allow his organization to grow more food, teach more kids, feed more hungry Bostonians.
Thiruvengadam’s nonprofit Eastie Farm has been on Sumner Street in East Boston for 7 years, filling in a “missing tooth” vacant property on Jeffries Point. There, the largely volunteer-driven organization grows various kinds of food with an eye on providing sustenance to those who might otherwise go without. The farm has about six other outposts throughout the peninsula neighborhood, largely in connection with schools where Thiruvengadam said kids happily “get their hands dirty” learning about how to grow and preserve food.
On days like Wednesday, though, when several inches of snow still cover unshovelled areas and the mercury sits well below freezing, not much is possible at the main Sumner Street location or its little cousin plots around town.
Hence the greenhouse. Over the next couple of months, Thiruvengadam and company will assemble it in the shadow of two billboards right outside of the Sumner-Callahan tunnels that connect Eastie to downtown. It’s supposed to be a carbon-neutral building, heated — and cooled in the summer — by a geothermal system 450 feet deep to around 58 degrees.
“We’ll have about 1500 square feet more of growing space that is conducive for plant growth throughout the year,” said Thiruvengadam, the son of a south Indian farmer who now serves on Boston’s Conservation Commission and Community Preservation Committee. And in terms of the educational programs, “We’re really missing the kids in a couple of seasons, so this greenhouse will bridge that gap.”
State Sen. Lydia Edwards, who lives a couple blocks away and has represented the area on the city council since 2018, said she hopes other organizations follow in the farms’ geothermal footsteps.
“This started as a grassroots effort and is now becoming a city wide model,” she told the Herald later in the day. “Everyone is welcome. People of all backgrounds are stewards and beneficiaries of the garden.”
The 14-foot-tall greenhouse theoretically will allow Eastie Farm to begin to grow perennials, tropical fruits and maybe even some trees that otherwise can’t thrive through New England’s chilly winters.
These days the Eastie Farm grows a range of fresh fruits and vegetables, including many near and dear to the large local Hispanic and South American populations, including a Colombian corn and a Brazilian eggplant. Then, of course, there’s Thiruvengadam’s personal favorite, mulberries. The food goes to local soup kitchens and food pantries, and during the pandemic, the farm began delivering to people in need.
Alex Graora, the organization’s farm manager who admitted with a smile that he’s been learning about greenhouses on the fly as quickly as possible, said the goal is to get the structure up by mid-spring.
“There’s a lot to be excited for,” Graora said.
The commotion on Wednesday was over the delivery of the parts of the greenhouse, which were showing up in a shipping container on the back of a truck. The farm had hired a mobile crane to lift it onto a vacant Boston Public Schools-owned lot on Paris Street, an area the city had agreed to let the farm use as a construction staging area for the greenhouse, which technically will sit on the lot next door behind the small road of Chelsea Terrace.
The process on Wednesday took a bit of wrangling. A couple of drivers on the ever-chock-a-block Eastie side streets had ignored the don’t-park-here-today signs next to the lot, and Thiruvengadam and company — plus a very patient truck driver sitting in the middle of Paris Street — had to wait for the cars to be towed away.
Then the container clung obstinately to the truck bed, causing the workers a few minutes more of puzzled shimmying to shake free. But eventually the crane operator — shouting out the union Local 4 to those assembled — deposited the box on the ground in the snow-covered lot for the now-cheerful workers to crack open.
The contents appeared to be a typical mishmash of building supplies — wood, metal, glass and the like, all, for some reason, with Dutch labels. Thiruvengadam did point out a couple of greenhouse-specific ingredients, including a large sheet to stop the sun from glaring in too strongly.
The work would begin in the coming days, but Graora could already see the finished product.
“Looks like a greenhouse to me!”