Eastie Farm: Where The Ground Never Sleeps
Author: Britt Bowker
Jose Manuel and the salanova lettuce he grows inside Eastie Farm's new freight farm. – Photo by Britt Bowker
In East Boston, a geothermal greenhouse and community-driven nonprofit are reshaping how this part of the city grows, eats, and connects.
Drive into East Boston from downtown — through the Callahan Tunnel and into a dense neighborhood of narrow streets and tightly packed homes — and you might miss it at first. But look closely: tucked underneath billboards and in between row houses is a sleek, glass-walled greenhouse filled with seedlings and tropical plants. It’s a warm, green refuge on even the coldest New England days, and more than that, it’s a space for gathering, learning, and community connection. It’s also the region’s first greenhouse powered by geothermal energy.
This is one of several hubs run by Eastie Farm, a nonprofit rooted in this immigrant-rich neighborhood since 2015. It all started when a group of East Boston neighbors noticed an empty, overgrown lot at 294 Sumner Street and proposed transforming it to a community farm so that it wouldn’t be turned into another development. From the beginning, Eastie Farm has followed a simple ethic: care for the land, and care for the people who live on it.