Now he works at the farm part-time in addition to his work as a social worker/sex therapist and writer.
Noah Bogdonoff, 30, started off participating in the work share last year but started working more hours, so Wolfe insisted on paying him with the other type of green. Hocus Pocus uses a sliding scale for pricing and offers a work-share program, where customers can trade a few hours of work a week for produce. Like the produce, customers who want those add-ons pay up front and get a portion of what is grown and baked over the season. While currently the farm cannot physically expand beyond its leased acre of land, Hocus Pocus is expanding the products it offers, adding flowers - Wolfe’s “babies” - and bread to the CSA program. Last fall, Hocus Pocus welcomed the farmers’ families and friends and CSA members to celebrate Sukkot, a Jewish holiday surrounding the fall harvest, and they placed a sukkah - a type of temporary hut used during Sukkot - in the planting field. Gleaning - the process of picking through crops left over after a commercial harvest - is something Jewish people have been doing since ancient times. Wolfe is also interested incorporating Jewish traditions into their farming. Though the region somewhat limits what they can grow, they can also add different plants to their repertoire: This year, they are trying some dry beans and Romanesco broccoli, also known as Roman cauliflower. “There are so many different ways to farm,” Wolfe said, explaining that growing one vegetable can be done using several different techniques. Harrison said that although a lot of people see farming as something “rooted in the past, with pitchforks,” they feel like there’s so much to experiment and try. One of Harrison’s first jobs was working as a farm hand for a CSA that their parents belonged to when they were growing up, and they have been farming ever since. “It’s hard to make money,” Harrison said, “but easy to make friends.” They said it can be difficult to explain they are a full-time farmer when people often think it’s only a hobby or a phase “because it’s so economically difficult.” “It just kind of rotted,” Wolfe said.Įliza Harrison, 28, who also uses they/them pronouns, manages the farm with Wolfe. In Wolfe’s first year, the farm experienced “serious drought,” but the next year the fields flooded, wrecking the squash crop. “It’s always a toss-up of how the weather will be,” Wolfe said.
The model also spreads out the risk to the producers and consumers, which helps when successful farming is often left to chance. “We don’t have a lot of money left over at the end of the year.” “We don’t make a ton of money,” Wolfe said, laughing a little. The CSA model works for Hocus Pocus because of the tight margins. Some of the farm’s offerings, with Noah Bogdonoff, a part-time farm employee, in the background. They have worked on farms throughout the Northeast since 2014. They started their agriculture journey in their mother’s garden outside Boston, but they began to learn about food justice and urban agriculture when they were in college. Wolfe, 29, is in their third season working on the chemical-free farm. Many of the plants stood as tall or taller than Wolfe as they picked a few pods to snack on. “Everything is popping,” Sasha Wolfe, who uses they/them and she/her pronouns, said as they walked through the snap pea stalks on Hocus Pocus’s 1-acre plot at Osamequin Farm at the at the corner of Walnut and Prospect streets.
Across Henderson Bridge and over the Seekonk River, past East Providence, and into Massachusetts, the tree cover starts to thicken, the birds get a little louder, and the air feels cooler, even on a sunny day.Ībout a 20-minute drive from downtown Providence and just over the state line lie more than 400 acres of farmland and nature. And on an acre of those hundreds sits Hocus Pocus Farm, a queer-owned and operated endeavor that embraces tradition, invention, and fun.
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