It’s a balmy Tuesday morning and a dozen local youth are busy plucking vegetables from some of the dozens of raised beds in the FRESH New London community garden off Mercer Street, in the heart of downtown.

The vegetables are picked, cleaned and later portioned out into containers on picnic tables that on this day are lined with garlic bulbs, lettuce, kale and an assortment of other green produce. The tomatoes, beans, cucumbers squash and corn will be ripening in the weeks ahead.

The harvest is part of FRESH’s Community Supported Agriculture program, a pilot program this year in which community members pay a flat fee that allows them to pick up weekly supplies of fresh vegetables – something akin to a private farmer’s market, said Julie Gray, assistant farm manager for FRESH.

FRESH expects to grow about 5,000 pounds of vegetables this year at the FRESH Urban Farm and Education Center, at the corner of Mercer and Williams streets.

The program goes to the heart of why FRESH started more than a decade ago — introducing locally grown produce into the food system while educating the public on ways to build a sustainable, accessible and healthy local food system.

“It’s about education and inspiration,” said FRESH Director Alicia McAvay said. “We’re a model of how people can do this themselves.”

New London is just 10.5 square miles so the one-third of an acre of former parking lot being used by FRESH for their raised beds is cherished property for the non-profit.

FRESH hosts about 160 planting beds at the Mercer Street location, renting 60 out to community members and maintaining the rest with the help of a summer youth program that helps to not only employ local kids but more importantly helps to educate.

“We consider this an urban farm,” Gray said. “It’s smaller scale – we don’t have the tractors and other stuff you might find on a farm but we still work the land.”

Cristian Quinones, 15, of New London, with his friend Tonny Dominguez, 13, were members of the crew working to clean the veggies. Quinones is one of the lucky few this year being paid through the New London Youth Service, whose state funding for summer youth employment programs was drastically cut this year.

Quinones said he’ll work about 15 hours a week earning about $300 for the summer, a good opportunity he said to do something different and maybe face a few new challenges.

The community garden is just one aspect of FRESH New London, which will host a series of workshops and skills sharing sessions throughout the 2017 growing season. They have also worked closely with the school system, helping to establish vegetables gardens at various schools.

FRESH this year Edible New London initiative, finding spots across the city to establish community gardens to benefit the neighborhoods where they are located. A garden sprouted from a formerly neglected patch of blacktop in McDonald Street this year and is attracting youth in part by establishing is as a spot for the school system’s popular free summer meals program.

For more information visit: http://www.freshnewlondon.org/.

g.smith@theday.com