This month, Groundswell is proud to spotlight Marcia Harrington, a trainee from Groundswell's New Farmer Training Program!A lifetime New Yorker from Syracuse, Marcia grew up spending time in the garden and has happy early memories of her grandfather’s small urban farm. Her interest in agriculture continued in her teen years, when she enjoyed visiting family member’s farms. 6 years ago, after years of backyard gardening, she began seriously looking for a property where she could create a farm of her own. Two years ago, she bought a beautiful piece of land in the town of Skaneateles, and found herself living her dream of getting back to the land. Although Marcia did have an understanding of agriculture that she gleaned at an early age, she felt she needed to get some training to refresh her knowledge and says the New Farmer Training Program has given her the confidence to begin some of her dream projects.
Although she spent brief periods of her life in other places across the Northeast, Marcia has maintained a very close connection to the Central New York area. As a young adult, Marcia got a Fine Arts Education between Carnegie-Mellon and Syracuse Univeristy. She had a studio at Eureka Studios in Armory Square where she founded a figure-drawing group called the “Walton St. Irregulars” that provided local atists with an opportunity to work with live models. In the 1980’s she became a cartographer at SU, where her work focused on thematic mapping of post-colonial Latin America. Marcia has also been a committed community organizer, active in the Interreligious Council’s Community Dialogue to End Racism, Syracuse’s Tomorrow’s Neighborhoods Today community councils, working in community gardens, and on the Board of the Syracuse Neighborhoods Initiative, addressing neighborhood vitality and safety. For the past 12 years, she worked for United Way of Central New York as the Marketing Vice President.
Marcia’s 8-acre homestead has been the same contiguous parcel since the house was first built in 1830, and has been a family homestead farm ever since. The previous owners had bought it just after the Great Depression and raised a family there. When the patriarch passed away, the home sat empty for about 5 years before Marcia moved in. Because it had not been updated in some time, Marcia hired a contractor to renovate the home. But when he went bankrupt in the middle of the project, Marcia realized that she was going to have to learn much more than just how to farm. She soon found that home renovtions can be a time and money pit, but the the work itself was something she could learn to do and she steadily took on each new challenge. Working on the home renovations gave her time to observed the land’s life through the year before she planted or modified the landscape, but this spring she could wait no longer! She prepared a 50’ x 50’ garden (see above; Marcia’s garden in June 2011) and has already grown a wide variety of herbs, flowers, and vegetables (see below; September 2011). You can see the joy in Marcia’s face when she describes the beautiful land and its Wassaic silt loam soil!
