Khalid Said and Cong Trinh were on a scavenger hunt of sorts. They stalked through rows of tomatoes, lifting leaves, peering past the ripening vegetables looking for their silent but voracious enemy – the tomato hornworm.

After an hour in the garden on the Meserve Farm Friday, their white gallon bucket already held nine wriggling, fat green worms.

For Said and Cong this was a welcome break from weeding the quarter acre Cultivating Community is farming. The Meserve garden is actually just one part of the project. Its main gardens are not out in a large field like the Meserve Farm, but are grown in Portland’s affordable housing area, Kennedy Park.

When an overly wet spring destroyed Cultivating Community’s plans to grow at Tidewater Farm in Falmouth, the new tenants of the Meserve Farm, Stacey Brenner and John Bliss, donated some of their land.

Brenner and Bliss recently applied to the Scarborough Land Trust to farm at Meserve. After the trust purchased the historic farm, they opened it up to a bidding process. In early June, the land trust announced that Brenner and Bliss, who currently run Turkey Hill in Cape Elizabeth, would be the new farmers, preserving the farm that’s existed since the 1700s.

Said and Trinh are a part of the youth program run by Cultivating Community, a nonprofit group based in Portland that distributes hundreds of pounds of fresh, locally grown food to low income, often immigrant families and the elderly. The families that receive the food are often immigrants, and often the teenagers like Said and Trinh are from the areas Cultivating Community helps most. For six weeks during the summer they are employed to plant, water, harvest and do whatever needs to be done to ensure a successful growing season.

Part of those duties include worm detail, something Said and Trinh said they prefer over the other chores. But, just because it was more fun than weeding, doesn’t mean the worms didn’t gross them out.

“I thought just the head was the body,” said Trinh as he searched for the camouflaged pests. “But they’re much bigger.”

Said agreed the worms – as thick as a thumb and sometimes twice as long – are a little creepy. “The first time I saw one I almost ran away,” he said.

Even though the bugs had a tendency to try and crawl up Said’s arm as he carefully plucked them off tomatoes, he still maintained they were luckier than the other 10 Portland teens who were busy battling different pests – weeds.

“We got the coolest job. Everyone else has to weed,” he said.

They went about ridding the gardens of the worms with nothing short of glee, nearly trampling other plants in their rush to capture a worm spotted by fellow gardeners.

Watching and running all of this was Craig Lapine, director of Cultivating Communities. “This allows the kids to have a chance to give back and have meaningful work,” said Lapine. “We have two missions that are both sort of nestled under an environmental and social justice umbrella,” he added.

One of its missions is to give everyone equal access to fresh, local food. In the process, said Lapine, the community is strengthened, as its members are the ones partially responsible for growing the produce.

Community and the environment

The other side of Cultivating Community is the environmental aspect. Said and Trinh were removing worms by hand because no pesticides are used.

“That way it’s better for the planet and better for the people who farm it,” said Lapine.

All Cultivating Community gardens, including its plots in Kennedy Park, are organic and sustainable, meaning no pesticides and only using farming methods that won’t exhaust the land. The food they produce goes to about 40 families, and any extra is given to places such as the Preble Street Resource Center and Teen Center and the Wayside Soup Kitchen.

Besides bringing fresh produce to the families, Lapine also sees Cultivating Community increasing environmental awareness. “This makes people more aware of where food comes from,” said Lapine. “They are more connected to the land. The closer people are to their food, the more they get why they should preserve land.”

Youth growers Nasia Ashkir and Ikram Mohamad were covered in dirt. Early morning rain turned the soil muddy, and the two girls were caked in it while weeding rows of watermelon – mostly from sitting down to weed, though the occasional mud fight accounted for a few of the smears.

This summer is 16-year-old Ashkir’s second as a member of the youth group. This year she’s an intern, giving two extra weeks to the program she helps to keep running smoothly.

For Ashkir, it’s not only about helping the gardens to grow, but helping her community grow closer. “I really wanted to do this because I wanted to make a difference, to see a change in our community,” said Ashkir, who added that she often sees the changes she works for when people are out in the gardens at Kennedy Park, helping with whatever chores need to be done.

“Parents, kids, everyone is getting involved and helping out.”

Popular program

According to Program Director Jessica Bean, there are always more applicants than spots. Cultivating Community, now in its sixth year, is so well known in and around Kennedy Park that there is often a waitlist of hopeful teen farmers.

Fifteen-year-old Mohamad cried the first year she was turned down, though that year she was still a year too young.

“I’ve always wanted to work on the farm because it releases stress,” she said. “You meet new people and you learn about yourself. When we came here it was nothing. Now it’s amazing,” she added, looking out over the rows of watermelon, tomatoes, lettuces and other thriving vegetables.

For Mohamad and Ashkir, their time on the farm is a mixture of work and fun. The hardest part, said Ashkir, is the watering. Because the Meserve farm has only a well and no irrigation system, a bucket brigade is set up to water the plants.

“We have to water, one by one,” said Ashkir. “And not just water, we have to soak the plants.”

Still, as their occasional mud fights and the boys’ game of hunting worms showed, they still know how to make their hours of weeding, watering and planting into fun.

“It’s a fun job,” said Ashkir. “It doesn’t even feel like work sometimes.”