Jacqueline Briggs Martin - Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table

Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

123

WRITTEN BY

Jacqueline Briggs Martin

ILLUSTRATED BY

Eric-Shabazz Larkin

AFTERWORD BY WILL ALLEN

BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON

Text copyright 2013 by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
Illustrations copyright 2013 by Eric-Shabazz Larkin

READERS to EATERS Books
12437 SE 26th Place, Bellevue, WA 98005
Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.ReadersToEaters.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in
an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

Printed in the U.S.A. by Worzalla, Stevens Point, Wisconsin (5/13)

Book design by Red Herring Design

Book production by The Kids at Our House

The text is set in Walden Font Co. Civil War Press Type No. 1, based on typography
found on recruitment posters and other printed material of the era.

The art is done in ink and pen, and markers to make an image or color,
then digitally matched with scanned textures and objects.

Photograph of Will Allen on page 31 by Darren Hauck
Photographs of Growing Power on pages 31-32 by Vera Chang

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937817
ISBN 978-0-9836615-3-5

To all those whove ever planted a seed and watched it grow
farmers who tend food and flowers and tend the earth. J.B.M.

To my God that gave me this body.

To my parents that fed it well.

To my wife that made it happy. E.-S.L.

FARMER WILL ALLEN

armer Will Allen is as tall as his truck.

He can hold a cabbage or a basketball in one hand.

When he laughs, everyone laughs, glad to be in his crew.

When he talks, everyone listens.

But some say the special thing about Will Allen
is that

Are they right?

When he looked at an abandoned city lot
and saw a huge table heaped with food, was he right?

THE KITCHEN TABLE

hen Will Allen was a boy
bowls of peas, greens,
and his favorite lima beans with ham
covered the kitchen table.

My mother often fixed enough food for thirty, Will says.

We never had a car or a TV, but we always had good food.
He remembers people whod come to dinner

tired and drooped

and leave

Wills family grew most of their food.
Will loved the food but hated the work.

He planned to quit on

,

,

leave those Maryland fields for

basketball or white- shirt work.

And he did.

He graduated from college
and moved to Belgium to

play professional

When a Belgian friend asked him

to help dig potatoes
Will realized he loved digging in the dirt.

that he and his wife Cyndy covered

their kitchen table
with Thanksgiving dinner for
a team of basketball friends.

A NEW KIND OF FARM

hen Will was done with basketball,
he worked a white- shirt job in Wisconsin
and found time to grow vegetables
on Cyndys parents land.

But Will wanted his own place.
Hed seen that fresh vegetables
were as scarce in the city
as trout in the desert.

Will believed everyone, everywhere,

had a

to good food.

could Will farm
in the middle of pavement and parking lots

One day, driving in Milwaukee,
Will spotted six empty greenhouses
on a plot of land about the size of a large supermarket,
FOR SALE!

He could see kids,
whod never eaten a ripe tomato,
never crunched a raw green bean,
sitting at his table, eating his vegetables.
Will Allen bought that city lot!

THE DIRTY SOIL

ill had a start on his table. He had the land.
But the table was empty.
The problem was Wills soil
dirty with chemicals and pollution.

He had no money for machines
to dig out the bad soil,
for truckloads of good soil.

In Belgium, Will had learned to
make good soil with food garbage.
They called it composting.
But he needed lots of garbage.
He asked his friends to save food waste
apple peels to old zucchinis.

Will collected those scraps in big white buckets
and dumped them into piles.

He added
hay,
leaves,
newspapers,
red wiggler
water.

Every now and then he turned the piles
to get air into the mix.

Neighborhood kids stopped by to ask what he was doing.

Will told them about the piles
and the red wiggler worms
that would help the garbage become compost.
The kids came back day after day to help.

Next page

123

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table»

Look at similar books to Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Darice Bailer

Ski Superpipe

Sandra Markle

The Case of the Vanishing Honeybees: A Scientific Mystery

Arie Kaplan

American Pop: Hit Makers, Superstars, and Dance Revolutionaries

Patrick G. Cain

Moto X Best Trick

Matt Doeden

The Final Four: The Pursuit of College Basketball Glory

Jacqueline Briggs Martin

Alice Waters and the Trip to Delicious

Gail Gibbons

Penguins!

Jacqueline Briggs Martin

Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix

David A. Adler

A Picture Book of George Washington Carver

Jacqueline Briggs Martin

Snowflake Bentley

Jacqueline E. Briggs

Strikes in Politicisation

Martin Jacqueline Briggs

The Chiru of High Tibet

Discussion, reviews of the book Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.