Just wanted to give you an update on the status of our garden project at the Flatbush Reformed Church. We’ve had a little bit of a rocky start, with soil high in lead and other toxic materials, as well as addressing the concerns of local residents.

Church Garden visioning meeting (photo by Alexandra Corazza)

That being said, we are persevering and have  some recent developments that we’re very excited about!

SO, here’s what we’re looking at for the garden right now:

We’ve recently partnered with Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s Brooklyn Urban Gardeners (BUG) program; BUG is providing us with five students to collaborate on community outreach, garden design, and resource assessments this fall/winter. We welcome the participation of community members in these projects; if you are interested in helping out at this exciting stage in the development of the garden, please email me at emily@sustainableflatbush.org.

We will also be partnering with the Flatbush Farm Share CSA and Brooklyn Food Coalition‘s Flatbush neighborhood group to provide interested community members with workshops and events at the future garden site and other locations. Save the date on October 10th for the  first of these collaborations: a Garden Cleanup and Potluck! This event will be part of 350.org’s Global Work Party, an international campaign of local actions to support climate change solutions. More info on this in my next blog post!

All of this activity, of course, is in preparation for planting this spring. We’re all excited to get our hands dirty!

Greening Flatbush 2010 (photo by Maria Bergenhem)

Hello Sustainable Flatbush community!

Thank you so much to everyone that joined us at the second annual Greening Flatbush event on Sunday, February 21st! I hope you all enjoyed yourselves and learned a lot about what we can do to actively ensure that our food is local–grow it ourselves:) I had a lot of fun spending my afternoon with you all!

Barry's sprouts (photo by Flatbush Gardener)

What was your favorite part of the event? I have to say the food samples excited me the most. Barry’s sprouts were so tasty and fresh, it really proved to me that we can grow quality stuff right in our apartments/homes. And the Moroccan carrot and orange salad was like nothing I’ve ever tasted, I’m going to look up Just Food Chef Nicole Caruth’s blog ASAP to find out more recipes. I’m having people over for dinner next weekend, I’m totally going to try and make it for them! I also enjoyed speaking to Pieranna about composting with worms, I was skeptical before but she made it sounds so doable. She mentioned that Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a hotline you can call for composting questions, so you’ll always have help there if you need it.

Thank you all for making this a great event! I look forward to starting to recognize some of your faces at future events:)

ADDITIONAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thank you to our sponsors: Kings County Nurseries, Flatbush Food Co-op (for providing tasty snacks and ingredients for Nicole’s cooking demo), and Vox Pop for the coffee!

Thank you to our DJ Azmatec for the musical soundscape!

Thank you to our venue, Dorchester Senior Center!

Emily Goodman in Gardening for Children (photo by Flatbush Gardener)

PRESENTERS and WORKSHOPS

Maikel Carder
“Seeds, Soil, and Sunshine”
This workshop will cover what to grow, where to grow it [indoors, outdoors, in the ground, in containers] and how to grow it. Participants will learn how to prepare soil, plant seeds and care for seedlings, and how to grow herbs and microgreens on the windowsill.
Maikel Carder has been gardening all his life [60+ years] and is a confirmed “foodie”. He is active in local urban gardening and other efforts to re-invent daily life on a more simple, sustainable and satisfying basis.

Emily Goodman
“Gardening for Children”
Park Slope resident Emily Goodman never really appreciated plants until she moved to New York City and realized she missed seeing green. She studied horticulture at the New York Botanic Garden, worked briefly as a professional gardener, and is now a full-time freelance writer and editor with a special interest in writing and teaching about plants. Her award-winning children’s book PLANT SECRETS was published by Charlesbridge in 2009.

Nicole J. Caruth
“Cooking Tips from a Just Food Community Chef”
Nicole J. Caruth has been a Community Chef with Just Food since 2009. When she’s not giving cooking demos, she primarily works as a freelance writer and visual art curator. She contributes a monthly food-art column to the PBS-affiliated blog, Art:21; and frequently pens reviews for the contemporary art e-journal …might be good. Her writing has been published by the Brooklyn Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Fine Arts Magazine, and Gastronomica to name only a few. She is currently organizing an exhibition about food for the Center for Book Arts in New York. Her companion book — a cookbook featuring recipes by contemporary artists and art world professionals — will be the first in an ongoing series. Both projects debut next spring. Caruth resides in Prospect Lefferts Gardens.

Maya Nayak
“The Windowfarms Project”
Windowfarms are vertical hydroponic systems made of recycled bottles and used indoors to grow veggies year-round. The Windowfarms Project combines social media, urban farming and open-source product development to provide city dwellers with the tools to grow food and cultivate their understanding of agriculture and collaborative change-making. Please visit www.windowfarms.org to see photos/additional information.

Pieranna Pieroni
“Composting with Worms in Your Apartment”
Working with residents, schools, community gardens, and other organizations, the Brooklyn Compost Project offers workshops on both indoor and outdoor composting and provides technical assistance to gardeners, building managers, landscapers, and institutions who wish to compost.
Pieranna Pieroni is a Brooklyn Botanic Garden-trained Master Composter and educator who works with New York City public school students around school-community gardening and ecoliteracy.

Barry Schwartz
“Seed for Change”
Barry Schwartz is a recent transplant to the Peoples Republic of Brooklyn, having moved here from being the medical director for a socialist youth movement camp in Liberty, NY, and before that cooking for Ananda Ashram in Monroe, NY. The skills he has learned along the way have culminated in starting “Seed for Change”, a sprouting and microgreen workshop which features “Garden in a Bag”, a simple way to grow sprouts. He also makes fresh tempeh out of many different types of beans and makes wonderful ghee. He is looking to start a collective kitchen in the area if anyone is interested or has feedback.

Lisa Maya Knauer
“How (and Why) to Join the Flatbush Farm Share CSA”
The mission of Flatbush Farm Share is to make fresh organic produce available to any Brooklyn resident, regardless of economic status.
Lisa Maya Knauer is a member of the core group of Flatbush Farmshare. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she is also involved in sustainability initiatives. She is currently helping develop a women’s weaving cooperative and a micro-enterprise incubator focusing on women, immigrants and low-income residents in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Madeline Nelson
“Save the Campus Road Community Garden”
This gorgeous community garden and functioning ecosystem has graced Brooklyn College since 1991. It’s now endangered by the College’s plan to build a parking lot on the garden site. The gardeners welcome you to see why we want to save the peaches and mulberries, azaleas and daylillies, a refuge for people, bees, and Brooklyn parrots.
Madeline Nelson is a freegan, bicycle activist, forager and avid gardener. She’s especially interested in growing plants native to Brooklyn, as well as no-cost and very-low-cost food gathering and growing.

Sustainable Flatbush is proud to be part of Project LeafDrop: “a volunteer-run, neighborhood-based coalition of gardeners and greening partners who are harvesting residential leaves for compost this fall.” The Flatbush CommUNITY Garden, a project of our Urban Gardens and Farms Initiative, will hold leaf collections on Sunday November 8th and Saturday November 21st from 11am til 1pm, and there will be a shredder on hand to create leaf mulch “while you wait.” So bring your fall leaves to 1550 Albemarle Road (at Buckingham Road) and be part of the movement for less garbage and more gardens!

Here’s a little background:
Until 2007, the NYC Department of Sanitation collected leaves in the fall and brought them to a municipal composting site in Staten Island; this compost was made available to urban gardeners at pickup sites throughout the city in the spring. However, in 2008 the Department of Sanitation discontinued this program and New York City’s leaves were carted to landfills along with the rest of our garbage, where they represent both a major addition (20,000 TONS) to the city’s waste management burden and a missed opportunity to create free, high-quality gardening fertilizer for NYC residents and community gardens.

photo by Flatbush Gardener

Last fall one pioneering Brooklyn community garden, the 6/15 Garden in Park Slope, conducted its own leaf collection and was overwhelmed with leaves from literally all over the borough (apparently some were even brought by subway!).

Several weeks ago Sustainable Flatbush participated in the brainstorming meeting that created Project LeafDrop. With 6/15′s experience to draw from, representatives from Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Compost Project, Earth Matter, East New York Farms, and several community gardens created a blueprint for how to collect and compost leaves locally all over the city.

More information about the project and leaf collection locations is available at the coalition’s website NYCLeaves, and also at the blog of our own Flatbush Gardener, where he includes a map of all the sites in Brooklyn. The leaves will be composted at community gardens for use onsite.

(Note: Flatbush Daffodil Project 2009, originally scheduled for November 7th, 8th, 14th and 15th, will now take place on the 14th and 15th only.)

Due to budget cuts, in 2008 New York City discontinued both its autumn leaf-collecting project and free compost pickups in the springtime. This was a big step backwards for the city, from the standpoint of both urban gardening and Zero Waste advocates: huge quantities of leaves (potentially soil amendments) are once again being sent to landfills.

The good news is that a group of Brooklyn compost advocates are meeting this Saturday to come up with a community-led initiative for collecting leaves to create compost and mulch for urban gardens! Read on for more info (the message quoted below has been making the rounds in community gardening circles).

Greetings,

Please join your fellow community gardeners and our friends from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a brainstorming session that will focus on how we can expand and improve community leaf collection and recycling this fall.

As you know, the City will not be collecting leaves separately from regular trash, again, this fall. That means that it’s up to us to find ways to take this rich source of garden nutrients out of the waste stream and bring it into our gardens, where it will do the most good. Building on a very successful leaf collection and recycling project that was implemented at 6/15 Green garden last year, we hope to coordinate a Brooklyn-wide project that will enable local community gardens to be collection points for bagged leaves from their neighbors for use in the community gardens….and possibly even distributed back to the community in the future.

This is truly a win/win for everyone. Gardens will benefit from the addition of wonderful leaves that they can use as mulch or make into “brown gold” compost and residents will be able to recycle their leaves knowing that they will not be wasted clogging up our landfills. Please join us for our first planning meeting to get the ball rolling. We’ll be brainstorming on the basic strategies of how we can work together, coordinate dates and collection methods, create a unified press release and outreach and the ways we can avoid duplication and confusion of efforts. We really need your voice and your ideas right from the start!

Feel free to forward this information to any community gardens or other folks you think would like to be part of this project.

Date: Saturday, October 3, 2009
Time: 12:00 Noon
Location: Ozzies’ Coffee 249 5th Ave. Bet Carroll & Garfield Brooklyn, NY 11215 (718) 768-6868
Subways: M. R to Union St Buses: B63 along Fifth Ave B37 & B103 along Third Avenue B71 along Union St.

We’re looking forward to a lively discussion. If you can’t make it to this meeting and want to be kept informed about upcoming meetings, please RSVP to this email or contact me directly and I’ll put you on the email list: Jessica Katz bklyn.nighthawk[at]gmail.com 718-788-8287

Best wishes, Jess — Jessica Katz Brooklyn, NY ************************************************************

“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” “To forget to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” – Mahatma Ghandi

Related links:

NYC Department of Sanitation Leaf Composting page
Brooklyn Botanic Garden “What is Composting?” page

Energy Solutions: Solar One
Livable Streets: Transportation Alternatives
Urban Gardens and Farms: Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Greenbridge Program
Zero Waste: Educating Tomorrow and Brooklyn Compost Project

The Frolic is produced by the Flatbush Development Corporation and our Environmental Fair was sponsored by the Flatbush Food Coop. A big thank you to everyone involved! It was a great day!

Photos by Keka Marzagao