Hello, hello!

I have arrived back in the States safe, sound, and full of ideas from my travels in Cuba. My plane touched down in Havana on July 13 and for the next 18 days I traveled the country, visiting eight urban, organic farms along the way.

Cuba left me feeling inspired, fascinated, frustrated, and hopeful all at the same time. It is a country full of contradictions. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the experience and what I want to say about it. My travel partner and I are in the process of sorting through our photos and thinking through our experiences, but we will soon sit down and put together a website that documents our time in Cuba and what we learned there.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some photos that offer a window into my world for the past month. The photos here are just the first in a series that I’ll be posting in the next few days.

Also, I have to mention that my trip would not have been possible without the incredible ideas and work my guest bloggers offered all of you in my absence. I want to thank my wonderful friends John Hurd, Justine Dell’Aringa, Betsy Gardner, Dinah Dimalanta, and Aimee Theriault for taking such fabulous care of DigginFood while I was away. Coming home and discovering such a wonderful collection of guest posts was so fun. I can’t wait to make fruit infused vodka, basil ice cream, and authentic New Jersey red gravy!

While visiting Santiago de Cuba, we had the opportunity to visit a really amazing farm located right in the middle of a decaying urban landscape punctuated with tall, concrete Soviet-style apartment buildings.

This 1-hectare farm featured rows and rows of raised beds built with recycled concrete and rocks. The beds are filled with soil and amended with worm-compost that is made on site. The farm grows a wide range of fresh vegetables year round, including sweet peppers, tomatoes, greens, medicinal and culinary herbs, cucumbers, eggplants and more.

Workers, like this man named Santiago, arrive each morning early and harvest crops that are sold in the on-site farm stand and distributed for free to primary schools, old folks homes, and maternity centers.

The crops are sold at a very low price (about 4 cents for a bunch of lettuce) to members of the community and workers at the farm can purchase food at a discount twice a week. This was truly one of the most productive, organized, beautiful urban farms that I’ve seen anywhere. I was most impressed with their cropping system, which follows a strict rotation and soil maintenance plan. Each long raised bed is capped on either end with small plantings of corn, flowers, and herbs designed to lure in beneficial insects and everything was strictly organic. Totally amazing and I think a good model for urban farms here at home.