Our Values & Astoria, Queens Background - Hellgate Farm
Our Story
Hellgate Farm started out in 2011 in a residential backyard in Astoria, Queens. At that time there were no grand plans beyond gardening, but we were growing more than we needed and sold the surplus at a local coffee shop a few blocks away. Two years later our next-door neighbor was inspired to offer us their backyard, doubling the size of the enterprise. The following year we expanded to another backyard a few blocks away and to a commercial rooftop in Long Island City. Over the seasons, we built an amazing network of satellite gardens in Northwest Queens, and the momentum led us to expand to our own beautiful farm in Canaan, New York, in 2021, a decade after that first residential backyard. Over the years, we've turned underutilized spaces and non-agricultural land into lush, productive gardens. We've also run Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, taught skills like gardening and carpentry to the community, started a whole line of small batch products, and provided design, contracting, and consulting services.
Our aim is to transform damaged or unused spaces of thoughtless consumption to places of thoughtful production. It is beautiful to observe how quickly the natural world responds when we simply offer it space to flourish. Just a few planters on a fire escape can become a habitat. Connecting with nature and engaging in the production of our resources are intricate parts of our wellbeing. In the urban environment we must be innovative. We at Hellgate Farm wish to promote resilient living within our community and to provide opportunities for people to connect and learn. We invite you to join us, wherever we can find space to grow together!
Find us on Instagram to see our farm in production and meet the members of our team.
Volunteer at Hellgate Forest Farm (Canaan, NY) through WWOOF by following this link: Vegetable farm in the woods; sustainable building projects - WWOOF USA
Contact us at healingharvestfarm.connect@gmail.com with any inquiries.
Our Values
Hellgate Farm is a collective of farms and gardens located in Astoria in Northwest Queens and upstate in Canaan, with an emphasis on four primary values:
Community: Our bedrock is cultivating an internal community and supporting peripheral communities in seeking meaningful living and work situations, fostering connection to each other and to nature, and developing and sharing hard and soft skills to sustain us on a changing planet.
Though our work in the urban context has scaled back from when we began, we still find ways to be connected to our extended community in Queens. We welcome volunteers to work in our garden space in Astoria and for several years have partnered with Socrates Sculpture Park to host workshops on gardening and help steward their public learning gardening to support our community’s connection to growing food in an urban context.
Social, Food, and Climate Justice: We understand that modern society’s distribution of opportunities as well as future susceptibility to impending climate change is unequal for individuals depending on race and socioeconomic status. We acknowledge that the local, organic food and sustainability movements that we are a part of are often guilty of apartheid. We strive to offer opportunities and to listen to members of disenfranchised communities.
We are working on several fronts to ensure that our produce is accessible to all members of our communities. This includes offering sliding scale payments for our CSA program, participating in New York City and State fresh food subsidies like Health Bucks and the Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) at our market, and donating unsold food to local emergency food distribution through the Astoria Food Pantry. We are always open to feedback and partnership around ways that we can work within our corner for the food system towards equity.
Necessary Sustainability: Our goal is to grow food and create and maintain human habitat and infrastructure while keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Rampant, thoughtless consumerism and greed promote both greenhouse gas emissions and material toxification of the earth, steering us towards collapse. The necessary response is sensibly scaled living with reduced or regenerative footprints achieved through restraint and thoughtful innovation.
In urban settings, we minimize fossil fuel use with available alternatives like biodiesel and solar for our community utilities and utilize the bounty of salvaged materials for infrastructure. We don’t use plastic mulches in our human powered gardens and instead favor wood chips from local tree removals. We compost 5-8 tons of urban waste material per year with our community compost drop-off. In rural we disconnect from centralized utility systems favoring passive systems working with natural phenomenon.
Seed to Sauce: Much of the excitement of our program has stemmed from our small batch products making them a pillar of our farm and community. We work to constantly innovate what can be created using local, organic, raw ingredients, combined with creative culinary artisans. With each season we aim to create new products and to refine our existing ones.
Our products start as seeds that with time and care germinate to produce the high-quality ingredients that are the foundation of our products, and end with delicious sauces and seasonings we are proud of. Meticulous thought has gone into the sustainability of their creation, processing, and distribution. Nearly everyone has used ketchup, but in an urban environment especially, not everyone has prepared a meal with raw produce from the ground. We hope that our products can be one way to help people connect with where our food comes from, and seriously, they just taste damn good!