Phillippa Ewing is a visionary of sorts looking to both the past and the future. By day, she helps educate the world about the legacy of FDR and lessons learned and strategies employed to cope with the Great Depression. During leisure time, she and her husband are using their Clinton Corner”™s home to teach organic gardening to “interns” who live as guests in their home.
Ewing is director of communications for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute at Hyde Park with a focus on “understanding their legacy in terms of their ideas, their actions and their policies,” she said. “It couldn”™t be a more interesting time to understand. There are so many similarities and parallels between then and now, it”™s uncanny.”
She said crowds are up lately as Americans and visitors from around the world seek better understanding the turmoil of the Depression and World War II.
“An amazing array of people come here and see exhibits about FDR and Eleanor and find out what they can learn,” said Ewing.
She particularly admires FDR”™s credo of using “bold persistent experimentation” to craft policies that might not work, but must meet his admonition, “Above all, try something.”Â
Also a fervent believer in the value of local food, she and her husband of 25 years Arthur Weiland are trying to teach people how to raise their own vegetables and chickens.
“My husband and I both grew up on farms,” she said “Growing vegetables and plants was sort of in our blood and when we met, we started gardening together.”
“Recently, in the last year or so we started growing more vegetables and more plants,” she said. “We believe very strongly in locally grown food and organic principles and felt we had something to teach people.”
Last fall, they began arranging for persons seeking to learn how to grow their own food to get some hands-on experience in their one acre of various crops on their 20-acre plot. They also raise chickens and bees. “We call them garden volunteers, but it is kind of an intern program,” she said. This is their first season and they can accommodate four volunteers at a time, and will likely have a dozen or more volunteers staying with them over the course of the growing season. Â
The volunteers “tend to be in their early20s, with a bit of time on their hands,” she said. “They want to spend outdoors and connect with where their food comes from.”
The are generally well educated she said and thus far include a classical flautist, a woman who received her MFA in poetry from the Iowa”™s Writer”™s Workshop and an attorney who has just passed her bar exam and wants to get ready for a long-distance bike trip by working outdoors.
A woman with a dry sense of humor, Ewing notes, “I tend not to be doing the digging, I am in the harvesting department and doing the cooking.” She adds she is now resolved, or resigned, to getting in better shape. “All these frightfully fit people have inspired me,” she said.
Volunteers are found largely through word of mouth but are carefully screened before being invited in. “These people are going to come and live in our house and eat dinner with us and we want to be sure it”™s a good fit,” Ewing said.      Â
She said they are now cultivating a variety of exotic potatoes, and using various techniques themselves, for example, planting the Native American Three Sisters: corn, beans and squash ”“ a synergistic planting where the bean”™s fix nitrogen in the soil for the other plants and the beans can climb up the corn and the leafy spreads of low squash help the soil retain moisture. She said theoretically their foliage “Creates a tangle that is a deterrent to critters. Whether that is true remains to be seen. It can be seen from our porch however so I can yell at them.”
She said the endeavor might expand at some point into a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm to help make even more locally grown food available. She said she will also seek ways to teach canning and freezing ”¦ “all the ways that you can have your own locally grown food for as much the year as possible.”
“Another thing that informs what we do, I am on the board of Dutchess Outreach, whose mission is feeding the hungry and helping people in crisis,” Ewing said. In 2007 the group served 86,000 meals; in 2008 that figure leapt to 166,000 meals. “I am interested in making sure people have food. And growing food locally is part of what we need to do for a sustainable existence.”
