Sister Jeanne with children

Sophia Garden is a 1½ acre certified organic farm in Amityville, Long Island. It lies on land owned by the Dominican Sisters of Amityville. Towards the back of their property is the farm, a colorful, lively area of vegetables, flowers, tool and harvest sheds. In late 1996, the Sophia Garden was started on a section of the Dominican sisters’ land that was an orchard in years gone by. The farm produces organic vegetables within the CSA model of agriculture that joins suburban families with locally grown organic produce. In 2006, the farm was moved to a different area of the sisters’ property where it currently exists.

In our Sunny Way efforts to open up dialogue, and listen to varied perspectives, we thought that reaching out to religious communities could foster relationships to figure out how we’re going to create an inspiring, hopeful future where all of life, in all its variety is cherished and encouraged to thrive.

I interviewed Sr. Jeanne this past August in the garden. She spoke about her life, dreams, and works for social justice. I was so impressed by her courage and vision to start the Sophia Garden that I decided to volunteer there once per week. I am learning how to approach the time I spend there with absolute openness and humility. There’s so much to be curious about when I greet the garden’s plants, insects, and people with a truly open mind. It’s also fun and rewarding to see the vegetables thrive from my careful weeding.

Sr. Jeanne’s story unfolds beautifully in this interview. She has transformed her own search for community and home into a vibrantly accessible garden and learning program that suburban Long Islanders are rejoicing in.

VG: What was your inspiration for wanting to start Sophia Garden?

SJ: It was related to my believing that we need to come home to Earth. In the 1980’s I went to the West Coast near Seattle, Washington to join Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. Ground Zero is located on the Kitsap Peninsula, just sixteen miles across the Puget Sound from Seattle. It is the “home” of the Trident Submarine, a nuclear submarine designed to destroy 409 cities at once. At the time the Navy wanted to build thirty of them. I knew that this was as far as we could go with violence and wanted to say “NO.”

While there I began to write about “home” since everyone on the Kitsap Peninsula talked about the “Homeport” of the Trident submarine. I knew that the Trident submarine was opposed to all that I thought of as home. After five years at Ground Zero on the West Coast I returned to Long Island and became very involved with Salvadoran refugees who were now in large numbers on the Island. It was while working among them that again the theme of “Home” emerged. There was a campaign called “Going Home” which engaged North Americans in going home with Salvadorans from a refugee camp in Honduras to their home, El Salvador.

It was on one of these trips that I realized that I not only wanted to accompany the Salvadoran people home to their land, but that I, too, needed to “come home.”

The Salvadorans were so connected to the land. When they thought of returning to El Salvador, it was to the land. I realized that when I thought of my country the United States or my home, Long Island, I did not think of the land. I had grown up disconnected from the land. I needed to “Come Home.” It was a very deep and personal experience of knowing in ways I had not known before. I certainly wasn’t a refugee the way the Salvadorans were, but in some way I was a refugee. I had been taken away from the land, my home. In 1992 I went to Genesis Farm in New Jersey and did a seven-week program with Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis which led me to come back to Long Island, my home with a new understanding that the human and natural world are one sacred community.

VG: Wow, that’s quite a story.

SJ: With this new understanding I came back to Long Island knowing I needed to become more intimate with its rivers, its birds, flowers, soil. I began the not-for-profit, Homecoming in order to focus myself and others on connecting with this place where we live. We are all learning to come home to Long Island; learning to come home to Earth.

At this time I connected with some others who had a similar vision. We gathered and reflected together and came up with the idea of purchasing a piece of land on Long Island where we could model how to live sustainably. Some folks were thinking they might sell their homes and join in this venture of holding land together, building homes that were clustered so that we left more of the land open and available for the growing of food that we would all share. We looked at many parcels of land, but were always met with financial obstacles and the high price of land and taxes on Long Island. After many months of looking and dreaming we decided we should not wait, but should begin to think of ways we could begin with what we already had.

Maturing eggplant

VG: Right, beginning with the resources at hand is a practical way to start anything.

SJ: I thought about the land my Dominican congregation had here in Amityville. At that time I was on a committee with other sisters related to visioning a new kind of world. We all began to think of the land here in Amityville and came up with the proposal to create a CSA on the land thereby connecting people to the land and to local organic food. At a meeting of all the Dominican Sisters, we presented the proposal and it was approved. We named our farm Sophia Garden. Sophia means wisdom. We believe that Earth is the wise one who is going to give us the wisdom we need if we look to her.

So that was the beginning of Sophia Garden. It was a coming together of a group of people with a vision for sustainability on Long Island and the Dominican Sisters vision of looking at a new way of ordering life; one which included Earth. We came together saying, “We’ll begin here.”

VG: What you described with the clustered homes reminds me of cohousing. I went to an orientation of a group of people in Brooklyn who are starting a cohousing community there. It’s interesting to see it in the forming stages.

SJ: And there are ecovillages. I’ve read about a lot of them all over the country. Some have been successful; some not. As a culture, we’ve been brought up to live independently. So for us as North Americans it is a challenge. Perhaps the idea is a bit easier for me since I am a part of a religious congregation where we do share things in common.

VG: What are the challenges you face in continuing to keep this CSA going?

SJ: (Looking out to the fields…) The farmer

VG: Why is that?

SJ: Keeping a farmer is one of the biggest challenges here in this part of Long Island. We are in suburbia and it is a small parcel of land. We try to pay the farmer a living wage, but it is difficult since what the people pay is not really the true cost of what it costs to grow the food.

VG: Right

Heirloom tomatoes

SJ: You don’t want to raise the price because you have to be competitive with all the other CSA’s. That’s the challenge. It’s a challenge for all of us: how to grow food locally and pay a living wage to a farmer. We are use to cheap food which is subsidized by the government. We don’t realize what it really costs to grow food.

The other challenge in keeping a farmer here at Sophia Garden is that we are located in suburbia. Most young farmers don’t want to come to suburbia. They like the rural farms. And they are working toward having their own farm. They want ownership. We’ve had some young farmers and some older ones. A person who is close to retirement might also be able to do it financially. But as they get older it becomes too difficult and they can’t continue. So the biggest challenge is keeping a farmer for the long term.

VG: There are differences between organic farms in suburbia and those in rural areas. Suburbia doesn’t seem to have the same support structures that a rural area has. It seems to me that farmers barter for goods and services in rural areas so that; often no money is exchanged outright.

SJ: Yes. And there’s another piece here. We don’t have housing. So that’s a big piece. There’s a farm in Stanfordville, NY that the Sisters of Charity run. They had trouble in the beginning with farmers. They finally found their present farmer Dave who is building a house for his family on the land. He is married with two children. Having the house makes it probable that he will be there for a long time.

So in a sense it is his farm and yet in another way it isn’t. CSA’s really belong to the people. It’s a mutual relationship between a farmer and the people who buy shares in the farm. It’s more like a marriage. Things are not mine. They are ours. The people support the farm and farmer and the farm supports the people by giving them wonderful organic vegetables.

VG: Yes, that’s so true.

Victoria’s interview with Sister Jeanne continues tomorrow.