An educational farm in northern Delaware is ramping up production — hoping to reach more people.
Coverdale Farm Preserve, run by the Delaware Nature Society, has long hosted camps, field trips and public events. Now staff are demonstrating sustainable practices to increase the amount of food the farm produces, in hopes of reaching more people.
Their target audience: kids, parents, working farmers—and people who eat food.
Coverdale site director Michele Wales cut the ribbon on a new education center and farm store Friday.
“Not only does it provide a space here … for the community to come for another means of connecting to the source of food grown with environmental integrity, they are advocates when they walk through that door and choose to buy food from us,” she said.
The new farm store is open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through November.
Wales says Coverdale also plans to start supplying produce to farmers markets and community centers in the City of Wilmington, and accepts Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and Senior Farmers' Market Nutrition Program vouchers.
Coverdale Farm staff say the secret to growing more food on less land is focusing on building healthy soil—which includes rotating crops and aerating soil with hand tools, rather than tilling.
“We don’t use any synthetic inputs whatsoever,” said Patrick Eggleston, vegetable farmer at Coverdale.
“We’re able to pull away from those entirely because we put so much front-end work into the soil itself.”
