Please bring:

• fruit and vegetable scraps
• coffee grounds and tea bags
• egg shells (with no egg residue)
• bread and grains
• fresh leaves, flowers, green plants and garden trimmings
• shredded newspaper or brown paper
• manure and bedding from horse, hamster, rabbits or guinea pig
• food soiled paper towels / napkins

Please DO NOT bring:

• meat or fish scraps
• fats, grease or oil
• cheese or dairy products
• non-compostable materials such as Plastic, Metals or Glass
• pesticide-treated plants, grass clippings, deceased or pest-infested plants
• dog and cat waste

TIPS:

* You can save your food scraps in the refrigerator or freezer to bring to the garden; freezing will kill any food flies and bugs often found on the skin or shell of most fruits and vegetables, and the added moisture helps in the compost decomposition process.

* Carrying your food scraps in a reusable (and rinsable) container means no yucky plastic bag to get rid of at the garden!

* Please shred or chop materials into small pieces (no bigger than your pinkie finger). The smaller the materials, the easier and quicker they will decompose.

* If you are unable to chop your scraps beforehand, tools will be on-site to chop the materials before we put them in the compost bin.

Winter Compost open hours will be hosted at the Flatbush Reformed Church on the following dates:

Saturdays January 7th and 21st, and February 4th, from 11am until 1pm
Please check our calendar to confirm Saturday composting schedule.

* Please DO NOT leave compost around the bins or by the gate. Compost will only be accepted during open hours!

See you at the compost site!

Serviceberry bush on Church Avenue

Brooklyn Native Plants Tour May 15th, Spring Planting at the Garden May 21st, and Celebration with Flatbush Farm Share CSA June 8th!

Thanks to all who came out for our first spring planting at the garden on April 30th! We were able to score some beautiful native plants from the 12th Annual Wildflower and Native Plant Sale at Westchester Community College for the first installation of the Church Avenue streetscape, including a beautiful Serviceberry (Amelanchier) bush. The edible garden also looks great, and we’ve now planted okra, cauliflower, collards, cherry peppers, green beans, and more in sub-irrigated planters created from reclaimed materials!

There are several exciting events in the works for the garden over the next month, please save the dates! Events will take place at the backyard space of the Flatbush Reformed Church, at Kenmore Terrace and East 21st Street, unless otherwise noted.

Sunday, May 15th, 12-3pm

special off-site event: Native Plant Garden Tour

As part of NYC Wildflower Week, our own Chris Kreussling (aka Flatbush Gardener), Director of Sustainable Flatbush’s Urban Gardens and Farms Initiative, will partner with Compost for Brooklyn to provide a tour of two native plant gardens in the neighborhood. The self-guided tour begins at Compost for Brooklyn, Newkirk Avenue and East 8th street, and continues to Chris’s home garden.
Register here for this free event (and for directions).

Planting the Church Avenue streetscape

Saturday, May 21st, 11am-4pm

Spring Planting and Potluck: Native Plants Edition!!!

Join us for a special spring planting day and potluck meal!

This is our second installation of spring planting days at the the Church Avenue Communal Garden. We’ll focus on beautifying the Church Avenue streetscape and preserving our urban ecosystem with plants that are native to the New York City region.

Enjoy a beautiful day outdoors at the historic Flatbush Reformed Church! A composting demonstration and workshop will be held from 11-12. Bring food or drinks to share with your fellow gardeners.

Wednesday, June 8th, 4-8pm

Spring Planting Celebration and Potluck with the Flatbush FarmShare CSA!
Join us for a potluck social at the Church Avenue Communal Garden to celebrate our spring plantings and the first day of the season for the Flatbush Farm Share CSA! We’ll have info tables, wine tastings, live music, and more. Bring finger food and/or drinks to share.

See you at the garden!

(photos courtesy of Alexandra Corrazza)

The Church Avenue Communal Garden is a new community garden located on the grounds of the historic Flatbush Reformed Church property at Church and Flatbush Avenues. The project is a partnership between Sustainable Flatbush and the Flatbush Reformed Church, and will include a rain garden and community space, an edible garden, and a native plant streetscape along Church Avenue. As we begin our first planting season this spring, the garden will become a community space for Flatbush residents to participate in workshops and events around nutrition, composting, container gardening, native plants, and local food, including special activities for youth. For more information email emily@sustainableflatbush.org or call 718.208.0575. Come get your hands dirty with us!

Choosing Seeds (photo by Alexandra Corrazza)

Join us on June 8th for a Spring Festival and Potluck Social at the Church Avenue Communal Garden to celebrate our new spring plantings and compost system, and the Flatbush Farm Share CSA‘s first produce distribution of the season!

After just a few months our newly-established community garden project at the Flatbush Reformed Church has a lot of accomplishments to celebrate: planning meetings and workdays that have engaged dozens of community and church members; an after-school gardening program for youth; the beginnings of a native plant streetscape on Church Avenue; a vegetable garden growing in containers made from recycled materials; and a 3-bin compost system we’ll use to create our own soil amendments as well as for community composting education.

Now that the school year is ending and the CSA season is beginning, we wanted to create an opportunity for youth (as well as other neighbors) to learn about the CSA and CSA members to learn about the garden; so we’re co-hosting a Spring Festival and Potluck with lots of fun activities. We’ll have ice-breakers and nametags to help mingling, and Sustainable Flatbush and CSA core-volunteers will be there to host.

Everyone is welcome to this family-friendly community event, come celebrate with us!

WHERE:
Flatbush Reformed Church backyard
East 21st Street at Kenmore Terrace
Brooklyn, NY  11226

WHEN:
Wednesday, June 8th (not June 1st as originally announced!)
4 – 8pm

ACTIVITIES:
–Info tables and workshop topics will include community gardening, composting, recycled art, CSA volunteering and more!
–Wine tasting provided by CSA wine supplier T.B. Ackerson Wine Merchants
–Live music (to be announced)

WHAT TO BRING:
–Please bring some finger food and/or drinks to share. Any cups, plates, utensils, or napkins as needed would be welcome.
–A picnic blanket might be helpful to set up your goodies.
–If you choose to make something, you might like to include a recipe card and info on whether the food is vegetarian/vegan/gluten-free etc.
–CSA members, don’t forget your grocery bags and egg cartons, since you’ll be picking up your veggies/extra shares too.

Come for a tour of the garden, check out the CSA (it’s not too late to join!), and make new friends!

Back in November we collected over a ton of autumn leaves from the community during Project Leafdrop at the Flatbush Reformed Church. Not only did we divert over a TON of organic matter from landfills, we will turn what would have been garbage into a valuable rich compost and mulch for our community garden project.

Now we need money to build a 3-bin compost system and buy a shredder to create leaf mulch. We posted a fundraiser on ioby, a fantastic micro-inancing website for grassroots NYC environmental projects, and have raised about one third of our goal.

What does this have to do with Valentine’s Day? TODAY ONLY, donations to our compost bin project at the Church Avenue Communal Garden will be DOUBLED! Your $5 donation becomes $10! Your $50 donation becomes $100!

So be our Valentine and show our compost bin project some LOVE!

Planting Experimental Tree Plots in Marine Park

My name is Lou Wright, and I’m incredibly excited to be working with Sustainable Flatbush on their projects at the Church Street Communal Garden. As a gardener, a composter, an urban forester, and a Flatbush resident, I hope that I can bring skill and enthusiasm to the work we’ll be doing in the upcoming months. I suppose, then, that this is where I should say a little bit about myself.

I am a Junior in the Environmental Studies and Sustainable Design program at The New School, where my work focuses on urban ecology and architectural design as well as the fields of wetland restoration and urban forestry. I have worked in the Union Square Native Plants garden and am a certified Citizen Pruner thanks to Trees New York. I  also helped run and maintain a very large community garden when I was interning at a conservation lobby in Anchorage, Alaska. I’m an active cyclist, and I love hiking, fishing, heavy metal and trees.

So that’s about the score. I look forward to meeting everybody and helping my community out by doing something I love – getting my hands dirty and growin’ stuff.

On top of getting so many leaves for composting, we planted a lot of daffodil bulbs around the grounds of the Flatbush Reformed Church. Come spring, there will be a lovely display of daffodils lining the church grounds, and enough compost for the community garden!

Brooklyn College Community Partnership Leaf Stompers! (photo by Elisabeth Deogracias)

Autumn Leaves (photo by Flatbush Gardener)

As we did last year, Sustainable Flatbush will be participating in Project LeafDrop, holding two opportunities for Flatbush community members to get rid of any pesky leaves that have been cluttering up their lawns this fall. This is a great opportunity for residents to help us Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle these leaves, which will otherwise end up in a landfill.

Project LeafDrop is a volunteer-run coalition of Brooklyn residents and organizations that collects residential leaves and uses them as compost. Rather than the leaves uselessly wasting away in a landfill, the project takes advantage of the opportunity to create compost to fertilize local community gardens.

Collection of leaves will take place at the Flatbush Reformed Church, near the parsonage house on East 21st Street and Kenmore Terrace, on Saturday, November 6th and Saturday, November 13th from 11AM to 1PM. Any leaves that you might have would be very much appreciated and will be of great help to us with the community garden we are working on at the Flatbush Reformed Church. We are working on setting up this garden on the church grounds, and compost from leaves collected at Project LeafDrop will be used on site for the garden.

More information about Project LeafDrop is available on their website; a report from last year’s LeafDrop is on the Flatbush Gardener blog written by our own Chris Kreussling.

Don’t Forget:
WHAT: Project LeafDrop 2010, Leaf collection for compost
WHERE: Flatbush Reformed Church parsonage house, East 21st Street and Kenmore Terrace (one block south of Church Avenue
WHEN: Saturday November 6th and Saturday November 13th, 11AM to 1PM

Photo opp for 350.org!

As part of 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party campaign to fight climate change, Sustainable Flatbush hosted an event in partnership with the Flatbush Reformed Church, the Brooklyn Food Coalition, and the Flatbush Farm Share CSA to clean up our new garden space at 890 Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

We were very excited with the amount of new faces we saw on Sunday, from long-term residents to new community members to youth who came to help after church! There were also several participants who found our event through 350.org and wanted to be part of the Global Work Party campaign. Big thanks to everyone for making the event such a success!

During the event we were able to clean up the two spaces reserved for gardening, rake and create mulch beds for trees and bushes, and collect leaves and twigs to contribute to our future compost. The cleanup was followed by a potluck/meet-and-greet in which community members met, chatted, and discussed possibilities for the new garden space. We’re very happy to have taken part in 350.org’s global day of action, and we look forward to next year!

To see photos from 10/10/10 events all over the world, check out 350.org’s Flickr slideshow.

During the event we will clean up the church grounds, which by next year will be transformed into a simple and beautiful garden and greenspace for the community to enjoy! The cleanup will be followed by a potluck meal where everyone can meet, eat, chat, and hear what’s been going on in the garden.

This event was organized as part of 350.org‘s Global Work Party day to celebrate climate change solutions. From their website:

“On 10/10/10, in every corner of the globe, we will implement solutions to the climate crisis. From solar panels to community gardens, wind turbines to bike workshops, we’ll start to change our world from the bottom up. At all of these events, we’ll take a moment to shoot a group photo with a call to action for our political leaders. We’ll tell them ‘We’re getting to work–what about you?’ “

Please visit our event page at 350.org to learn more and RSVP. For more information, contact Sustainable Flatbush at info[at]sustainableflatbush[dot]org, or call us at 718.208-0575. See you there!