Soil Products

Celebrating its fifth year, Bartram’s Garden has produced over 12,000 lbs of food, has held 60 affordable weekly farm stands, and has distributed over 80,000 vegetable transplants through the PHS City Harvest Program to over 130 farms and gardens throughout Philadelphia.

The Bartram staff works alongside 22 paid high school interns and 45 local families. Many of the people Bartram’s works with are low income residents who would otherwise not have access to healthy food choices or a connection to the land from which their food comes from.

Mill Creek Farm is an educational urban farm in West Philadelphia that is in part supported by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Their mission is to improve local access to fresh, chemical-free produce at a low cost for the immediate Mill Creek community and surrounding neighborhoods. MCF is located in West Philadelphia, in what is considered a “food desert”, and defined as “an inhabited area where there is no access to fresh, healthy food.”

The Mill Creek runs under the land MCF works on today and was enclosed in a sewer over 100 years ago. Housing was built on fill that turned out to be unstable. The subsiding land compromised the structures, which were eventually torn down in the 1970s. Since that time, there has been a community garden on the western portion of the block, but the eastern portion sat vacant collecting trash and weeds.

In August 2005, the Philadelphia Water Department awarded 1.5 acres of vacant land at 49th and Brown Streets, on which to start the project. The land MCF was given had shallow and depleted soils. Laurel Valley Soils Premium Compost was rototilled into the existing site soils to create in-ground growing beds. These compost amended soils have been yielding bumper crops ever since.