Sunday, February 1, 2009

New Deal Residue

The National Civilian Community Corps, a team-based government program that allows 18 - 24 year olds help strengthen communities and develop leaders through direct, team-based national and community service, worked the soil along side community volunteers and interns yesterday. The NCCC (N-triple-C), is in practice, a modern incarnation of the now dissolved Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the public works program enacted under the New Deal legislation during the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed the CCC to primarily employ young men who otherwise could not find employment and also to continue the tradition of natural conservation that our first President Roosevelt conceptualized around the turn of the century.

The two Sacramento based teams arrived downtown at around nine o'clock and our own Paul Maschka and Julia Dashe educated the group of about twenty on the virtues of growing your own food locally and organically. Then the time to begin work arrived. Tasks were dispensed and at around noon time our work force had plucked the remaining stubborn roses that lined the farm, we utilized the highly efficient bucket brigade technique to move a truck bed of compost up the hill from the parking lot, we cleared more land at our newer site on the west side of Park Avenue, and we began the process of converting the terraces on the south facing hillside into nutrient dense beds for more food!

The efforts of the Corps members will be evident for a long time to come. It was great getting to know some of them and I hope to see them back in the future.

It's quite a stretch and certainly a poor attempt at linking FDR to our humble farm but I can't imagine Mr. Roosevelt would mind.

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