On a warm day in April, the sun is high near Old Chatham and you can hear the quiet rush of the nearby creek. After a winter-long hibernation, Gentle Time Farm is coming back to life.
“Spring is this big waking up,” says Salt Wang, worker and co-owner of the trans and queer cooperatively owned vegetable farm, which specializes in East Asian crops. And as the season begins, so does the tireless work of soil preparation and planting.
“It’s, like, ‘Oh, we’re doing this again?’” jokes Kaija Xiao, Gentle Time’s other co-owner, and its founder.
Lifting a tarp, Wang points out the garlic chives starting to grow back strong. The 27-year-old’s long legs take them farther down the field, the grass brushing against baggy pants, a curly mullet peeking out from under a baseball cap. Wang, Xiao, and the two other farmers on their team have spent the last couple of weeks planting the scallions by hand, while their nursery is filling up with a rich variety of seedlings prepped for planting. Rows of potted shishito, fushimi, and gochujang peppers are lined up alongside trays of sprouting a-choy, ginger, Thai chilis, Thai basil, and Japanese cucumbers. This season, they’re also hoping to grow some beautiful persimmon trees.
“You’ve come at a time where everything is really small,” laughs Wang. “But it gets so crazy.” In the summer, when the sprinklers are pumping hard and the farm’s entire acre of Mohican land is covered in tens of thousands of luscious greens,
the field is abundance realized.
As Wang describes, they harvest a bounty of “pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of peppers and pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of tomatoes.” Their whole face lights up as they say this, proud to have been able to work with their body to help produce truckloads of food—which feed their friends and chosen family in the city. A portion of this also goes to local restaurants and markets. But about 75% of their fresh produce goes to food pantries, mutual aid distribution, and other programs for the food insecure—at absolutely no cost.
“There’s a ton of Asian people in New York and we all need to eat,” says Xiao, who founded the farm with the idea of reconnecting—and helping others connect—with East Asian vegetables, like the flat cabbages that her grandmother used to enjoy in her native Taiwan. (Xiao consults her grandma—who originally moved from Kaohsiung to Ohio, before ultimately settling down family roots in California—about the vegetables since migrating.) “We all deserve to eat agricultural foods together, grown in a local way.”
Xiao, Wang, their team of farmers, plus Music the farm dog, have built Gentle Time as an avenue not only to nourish those who belong to New York’s Asian diaspora (especially as the population faces rising food insecurity), but as a way to preserve their cultural memories associated with food. And in the process, they’ve grown not just vegetables but a flourishing community around them.
HANDS IN THE SOIL
As a graduate student at The New School, Xiao studied food systems and food sovereignty, organized webinars and met with international organizations addressing food insecurity. “I just fell in love with how foundational food is as a building block of culture and of life,” she says. But, “It wasn’t my hands
in the soil.”
In 2021, she went to work as part of the crew at the rooftop farm and sustainability center Brooklyn Grange, which at the time was diverting a lot of its food to mutual aid. This was where she met Wang, who was working there as an educator.
“Being a part of that really emboldened me,” says Xiao. “I want to do it with my friends, working with other trans people and other Asian people, grounded in these lineages of food and culture that I’ve also been disconnected with through my
own upbringing.”
Xiao moved out of the city and started a solo venture in a friend’s front yard, not too far from where we’re standing. The name Gentle Time was inspired by her intention to establish a farming practice detached from the culture of urgency rooted in capitalism, instead following a rhythm that is a “more cyclical, more gentle way of relating to the land and each other.”
It was a rough start. “Everything got eaten by the deer the first year, and it was just a whole mess,” Xiao says. “I was really determined, but also very devastated.” Luckily, friends would sometimes drive up from the city to hang and help out. Wang, who, as a Chinese and white trans queer person, felt strongly about Gentle Time’s cause, came for a weekend every month. They eventually quit their job to come on as co-owner. Together, Xiao and Wang relocated and scaled the two-plot operation into a 19-plot field with their own hands.
Every year, things at the farm have gotten noticeably better. They’ve gotten better at growing gai lan and ginger. They’ve also gotten better at holding other people’s ancestral memories through the food they grow.
“We have this friend who came and saw this water spinach that we were growing and was so emotional. Cried a little bit: ‘This fed my family for so long!’” Wang recalls.
TOMATO, LETTUCE, AND COMMUNITY
Beyond regenerative farming methods, tricks they learned on YouTube, and hard physical labor, what really got the farm up and running (and keeps it running) are the relationships they’ve built in the Hudson Valley.
Less than 1% of the country’s 3.4 million farmers identify as Asian, and less than 0.01% identify as LGBTQ+. So it was natural for Gentle Time to band together with other queer Asian farmers. Along with Choy Division in Chester and Star Route Farm in Charlotteville, they are part of farm cooperative Choy Commons—sharing knowledge and tips, as well as resources like trucks and cooler space for distribution.
Last August, when Wang suffered a concussion (from an errant, airborne kabocha squash), the owners of Star Route helped out. One of the workers from multi-racial, queer-, and trans-led cooperative farm Rock Steady also filled in for Wang
a couple of days a week until they were back on their feet.
“There’s not enough local food, and there’s not enough queer BIPOC [Black/Indigenous/People of Color] farmers at all,” says Xiao. “There’s always room for more, and just figuring out ways to lift each other up along the way has been invaluable to us.”
When it comes to support from local restaurants, Café Mutton’s James Beard Award–nominated chef, Shaina Loew-Banayan, is one of Gentle Time’s loyal partners. This season, Loew-Banayan is very much looking forward to getting their
hands on the farm’s bright red plump tomatoes. Over the past couple of years, these have become essential to the restaurant’s famous tomato and mayo sandwiches, a summer menu staple.
The farm’s arugula is also something that the chef can’t get enough of. “I’m always trying to be first in line to get it. It’s just so delicate and so spicy and so good,” Loew-Banayan raves. “This might sound cliché, but I don’t really want to do too much to it, because it’s just so good on its own. So we just barely dress it and just serve a huge pile of it for a salad.”
Chef Halo Kaya Perez-Gallardo of Lil’ Deb’s Oasis—another James Beard Award nominated Hudson establishment—values Gentle Time for more than their Chinese lettuce and broccoli. “They also show up,” the chef says. “They come to the restaurant, are friends with our cooks, and they’re really good at building and sustaining community.”
SHARING SEEDS AND SPACE
Gentle Time’s work and care goes beyond their small circles in the Hudson Valley, too. Working with the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement (CCSM) on its Comida Para La Gente Food Security Program, they’ve been providing fresh produce for food boxes for Hudson’s Bangladeshi community.
B. Kennedy, food justice co-coordinator at CCSM, gave Gentle Time a list of ingredients that representatives from the local Bengali community requested for their culturally relevant meals. The farmers didn’t blink. In fact, Kennedy will soon meet Wang to hand over some seeds from a community member to grow a plant known as lal pui shak, or red malabar spinach.
“[Their work] is expanding what could be even grown here in the Northeast,” says Kennedy. And, they add, Gentle Time is expanding the practice of farming by welcoming other people who are typically excluded from it. “There’s a way that the land feels, I think, when queer, trans, BIPOC folks are stewarding it.” Xiao echoes these sentiments. More than growing special foods, the farm is about creating a special place where people can show up as they are. She adds, “To be trans and outside is something beautiful we can share.”
