On the second and fourth Saturday of every month,Freedom Greens and Gardens — a community garden at 52nd and Pine Street, directly across from Malcolm X Park — turns into a bustling scene: crates of produce, lively music floating through the air, families weaving through the crowd. People come from all over — from Chestnut Hill and from around the corner, from New York to Virginia — all converging on the same few blocks in West Philadelphia.
This is Philadelphia’s official Black Farmers Market, now in its third year, and the clearest expression of what Get Fresh Daily has built since 2017: a food system rooted in West Philadelphia and led by the people the mainstream food economy has left out. Growers and makers come from across the area — Sankofa Community Farms, Still Rise Farm, Urban Farmer Steve, Adriana Akintobi’s Field of Flowers are anchors — alongside fruit donated from the Philly Orchard Project and produce sourced from Weavers Way Co-op. Black and brown farmers make up less than 2 percent of all U.S. farmers, and founder Jiana Murdic sees the market as a direct answer: a way to put Black growers at the center of the city’s food system, without closing the table to anyone else. Get Fresh Daily’s own farm stand runs pay-what-you-wish with produce grown in their gardens. No one gets turned away.
“It’s Black-led [and Black-centered], but it is absolutely for everyone,” Murdic says.
Murdic founded Get Fresh Daily in 2017, drawing on a background with The Food Trust, where she built the award-winning Healthy You, Positive Energy campaign for over 200 Philadelphia schools. That work now drives a full ecosystem — a garden, a weekly produce delivery program, the market, workshops, and youth programming — built around one goal, making healthy living easy and accessible.
Freedom Greens and Gardens, the ecosystem’s home base, centers on plant-based living, herbal medicine, and connection to the land. That philosophy carries into Fresh Takes, the CSA program they curate with Radical Wellness for All Philly Food Works: for $30 a week, members get a produce box and a whole-food recipe delivered to their door — five ingredients or fewer, built for a fork instead of a whisk, a Nutribullet instead of a Vitamix. The program has grown into a 16- week Food-Is- Healing curriculum with Spectrum Healthcare. “It’s not about learning something new,” Murdic says. “It’s about unlearning all of this noise.”
Workshops and youth camps like Growing + Glowing and Camp Excellence round out the work, mixing plantbased cooking, mindfulness, and movement into hands-on wellness for every age — proof that Philadelphia’s local food movement can be Black-led, radically welcoming, and thriving all at once.
“Being Black and well is a radical act. [We] have to intentionally push back.” — Jiana Murdic, founder, Get Fresh Daily
BLACK FARMERS MARKET
2nd & 4th Saturdays, 10am–2pm
Freedom Greens and Gardens
5200 Pine Street, 19143
www.getfreshdaily.org
Instagram @getfreshdaily
