Urban Farming

Connecting Africa to Chicago. I’m Beatrice Kamau, founder and owner of Multiple Harvest. I come from an agrarian background in Kenya, Africa where the growing season, the soil, and growing techniques are slightly different than here in Chicago. Every year I gain more knowledge on how to grow these vegetables that I love alot. It takes time to adapt to the various growing techniques and also for the seeds of our special vegetables to adopt to this different environment.

Some of the challenges I face is that growing fresh, specialty vegetables is expensive, and it involves a lot of time, knowledge and hard work. My prices may be slightly higher than that in the grocery store because we grow our produce using the good farming practices and try to preserve nutrients in our vegetables. We are not organic certified, but we try to follow the good food practices.

So why do I do it? I find it enormously rewarding to grow vegetables from seeds. I believe growing cultural foods helps bring people together. Some refer to it as ‘home food’ because it reminds them of how it was grown, eaten and shared back in their home countries. Access to cultural foods also can provide the feeling of inclusion. Access to foods that used to be familiar brings about the feeling of belonging and assimilation to our newer environment. We also introducing these new vegetables to our local community to widen their choice and introduce them to a new flavor.

Growing local vegetables from seeds allows me to provide fresh flavorful produce locally, that would otherwise be imported. It is a great feeling to provide freshy healthy foods that my customers used to enjoy back in their home country.

Culture, accessibility of fresh foods & entrepreneurship are all as important to me as the food itself. I hope these are important to you as well!

Beekeeping

Beatrice appreciates the importance of bees in pollination and incorporates beekeeping with her farming activities. Beatrice is also a Co-founder of African Women in Agripreneurs in Apiculture and Agrobiodiversity (AW3A), which is a group of over 160 female beekeepers from various African countries and Diaspora, who share farming knowledge.

Beatrice is passionate and about plants and beekeeping and is always eager to learn and share her knowledge.