Internship with Paradise Farms
by Deana Lawrence

     I have been working with Gabriele Marewski on Paradise Farms in Homestead. Paradise Farms is a five-acre organic farm. Gabriele caters to many restaurants and chefs in the region and believes in supporting locally grown food. She does not ship any of her items and gladly promotes sourcing out locally grown food where ever you are.

     My project on the farm focuses on melding together native agriculture with the culinary and medicinal aspects of these edible plants. Based on these criteria, this knowledge will be used in the planning, planting, and harvesting of a garden that South Floridians can enjoy, tour, and learn from. Educating others will come in the form of labeling the garden to facilitate self guided and group tours as well as creating printed material with recipes, pictures, easy how tos, nutritional information, etc. The objective is to teach others about how best to utilize the vegetation in their own backyards to help sustain and nourish them. This data will also be dually applied to develop edible foods that Slow Foods Miami will use for a dinner that will be hosted on the farm next February.

     I have been researching native and naturalized plants that are pleasantly edible and that have properties that have made them popular for healing purposes in various cultures. Most resources contain one or possibly two of these aspects and my initial work has been to look at multiple resources to connect these attributes together. I have been utilizing reference books, electronic resources, and catalogs among others, to build a database based on the above criteria. The database is completed and my next steps have been to locate seeds and divide the database based on their growth requirements and habits that will assist in planning where the items will be planted on the property. The seeds will be purchased in August with planting soon thereafter. This is an exciting project to be on that joins together different disciplines holistically in the hopes of benefiting others through applicable knowledge. I will keep you updated!

This project has been made possible by a funding support under the USDA CSREES HSI Higher Education Grant Program. USDA-CSREES Grant Number 2005-36422-15940.