In 2008, due to budget cuts, the NYC Department of Sanitation discontinued its program to collect fall leaves for composting, instead taking them to landfills as garbage. A group of community gardeners felt that this was both an outrage and an opportunity, as anyone who composts knows that leaves are a valuable resource and shouldn’t be wasted! Residential leaves 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.

In 2009 a citywide coalition called NYC Leaves was formed to keep fall leaves out of the waste stream by composting them at local community gardens through a program called Project LeafDrop. Locations to “recycle” leaves can be found all over the city. So don’t put your leaves on the curb where they’ll become trash; bring them to the nearest Project LeafDrop site, where the gardeners will thank you for your gift!

Sustainable Flatbush joined the NYC Leaves coalition in 2009, and since then we’ve diverted many tons of leaves from the landfill. Join us for Project LeafDrop 2011 at our new community garden project, the Church Avenue Communal Garden, located at the historic Flatbush Reformed Church! Our Community Composting program at the garden is growing, so we need your leaves!

Fun with leaves at the Church Avenue Communal Garden

We’ll accept leaves brought by neighbors and collect leaves from the church property, run as many as possible through a shredder, and store these carbon-rich “browns” for our winter compost collections.

WHAT: Project LeafDrop at the Church Avenue Communal Garden
WHERE: East 21st Street at Kenmore Terrace, Brooklyn (map)
WHEN: Saturday November 19th from 11am until 2pm

We welcome volunteers for this project!

Project LeafDrop is a great opportunity to get your hands dirty at the garden and learn more about compost, gardening, and urban soil remediation. If you’d like to volunteer, contact us at volunteer@sustainableflatbush.org or 718-208-0575.

Here are some additional Project LeafDrop sites in Kensington, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and Windsor Terrace:

Compost for Brooklyn
Newkirk Avenue at East 8th Street
Sunday November 20th
2-5pm

East 4th Street Community Garden
East 4th Street between Caton Avenue and Fort Hamilton Parkway
every Saturday and Sunday through November 20th
10am-12pm

High School for Public Service Youth Farm
600 Kingston between Rutland Road and Winthrop Street
Saturday November 19th
11am-4pm

Prospect Farm
Prospect Avenue below the Seeley Street Bridge
Saturdays through December 3rd
11am-1pm

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

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.)