It’s the height of the growing season and the Demo Garden is bursting with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and lots of other amazing produce.

On July 31 we held an herbal chai workshop with local tea educator Timothy Chacko. Karen, who organized the event, reports:

Tim showed us how they craft and brew masala chai-inspired herbal teas, as well as the traditions and histories of masala chai in South Asia. Attendees had a blast harvesting fresh herbs from the garden and creating their own personal chai blends to take home!

For those interested in community tea events from Timothy, keep up to date with @3lakka_chaaya on Instagram.

Networking and collaborating with other community organizations is an important part of our mission. On August 1, Shayla, Carla, Hannah, and Georgia tabled and made pesto from the garden at the annual Kingsland Wildflowers Festival in Greenpoint

Potluck Dinner on August 6 was delicious

and Family Day on August 8 was fun!

What’s Coming Up?

🌷 Regular Garden shifts are Sundays 10am-12pm, Tuesdays 8am-9:30am, and Thursdays 6pm to 7:30pm.

🌷Pop-Up Clinic: Growing Healthy Greens August 23 at 11:00 am. Learn how to grow healthy greens in your little patch of urban outdoors and even inside on a sunny windowsill.

🌷Evening Garden Social: August 27 at 7:45 pm at Pete’s Candy Store. Grab a drink with community gardeners!

🌷 Potluck Dinner: September 3 at 6pm. Share food with friends old and new!

🌷 Family Day: September 19, 10:30am-12:00pm. Bring the kids for fun and enriching activities in the garden!

Don’t forget to check out our Instagram for the most up-to-date info on our upcoming events and clinics. Partiful links will be posted in Instagram stories, and in our link in bio closer to the event.

How Can I Get Involved?

Follow us on Instagram and bookmark our website.

Sign up for a shift using our volunteer calendar! The schedule helps us plan, but it’s absolutely fine to show up for a shift without signing up in advance. Be sure to bring sunscreen and water with you.

Do you have an idea for an event or collaboration with us? We’d love to hear from you! Join our Slack and the #mccarren-demo-garden channel to connect.

*CALL FOR CONTAINERS AND JARS*

Please bring your empty clamshells, berry boxes, and any other plastic containers to the garden to reuse as packing supplies for our harvests. We also need glass jars for flower harvesting.

We have been filling the North Brooklyn Mutual Aid community fridges with blueberries, zucchinis, cucumbers, beans, radishes, arugula, cilantro, basil, collards, and chard.

The tomatoes and peppers are ripening and soon we will be harvesting these garden favorites into the early fall.

Mindful of the cognitive, social, and emotional benefits that children derive from gardening, we host a monthly Family Day to encourage young ones to explore our garden. Children of all ages thrive on garden activities, but the cohort that we generally host on Family Days is toddlers, a.k.a incredibly cute anarchists. We make various tools and supplies available to them, and they get busy with their own agendas. Watering is a perennial favorite – even if they are just watering themselves!

Sensory exploration like digging in the dirt, touching leaves, smelling flowers, and handling unfamiliar tools like trowels, cultivators, and watering cans supports brain development and motor skills. Sharing tools and taking turns at the hose build social skills. And harvesting veggies creates a new awareness of where food comes from. One little boy was dismayed when he pulled up a carrot from the ground. “It’s dirty!” he said with disgust. “I don’t want to eat that!” We explained that most vegetables have some field dirt on them when they are harvested. Farmers wash the dirt off before they send their produce to market. And usually we rinse vegetables at home, too, to remove any residue. After the carrot was cleaned thoroughly with the hose, our skeptical gardener was persuaded to take a bite, and he gave it a thumbs up!

On July 12 we held a Pop-Up Clinic on diseases and pests in the garden. Participants learned how to deal with fungal diseases and various bugs that kill plants. The event culminated with a demonstration of how to inject the beneficial bacteria bT into zucchinis infested with squash borers and a ladybug release. Fun Fact: little ladybugs are apex predators in the insect world. They can be very helpful if you are struggling with aphids!

Come See Us Sometime!

What’s Coming Up?

🌷 Regular Garden shifts are Sundays 10am-12pm, Tuesdays 8am-9:30am, and Thursdays 6pm to 7:30pm.

🌷Herbal Tea Workshop: July 30 at 6:30 pm. Forage for herbs in the garden and learn how to brew tea!

🌷 Potluck Dinner: August 6 at 6pm. Share food with friends old and new!

🌷 Family Day: August 8, 10:30am-12:00pm. Bring the kids for fun and enriching activities in the garden!

Don’t forget to check out our Instagram for the most up-to-date info on our upcoming events and clinics. Partiful links will be posted in Instagram stories, and in our link in bio closer to the event.

How Can I Get Involved?

Follow us on Instagram and bookmark our website.

Sign up for a shift using our volunteer calendar! The schedule helps us plan, but it’s absolutely fine to show up for a shift without signing up in advance. Be sure to bring sunscreen and water with you.

Do you have an idea for an event or collaboration with us? We’d love to hear from you! Join our Slack and the #mccarren-demo-garden channel to connect.

*CALL FOR CONTAINERS AND JARS*

Please bring your empty clamshells, berry boxes, and any other plastic containers to the garden to reuse as packing supplies for our harvests. We also need glass jars for flower harvesting.

Volunteers have been busy in the garden since planting day, and we are already harvesting strawberries, chard, collards, arugula, radishes, zucchini and herbs for the North Brooklyn Mutual Aid free fridges in Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

A workshop on May 2 introduced participants to the basics of container gardening.

Subscribe now

The first potluck dinner of the season was held on June 4. As usual, our green-thumbed chefs pulled out all the stops!

We started a new educational series called Pop-Up Clinics. These are sessions designed to introduce participants to intermediate-advanced gardening skills that we don’t cover in our spring orientations. The first Pop-Up Clinic, on pruning, was on June 7. The tomatoes in the Garden were pruned and staked to ensure a long and healthy harvest.

What’s Coming Up?

🌷 Regular Garden shifts are Sundays 10am-12pm, Tuesdays 8am-9:30am, and Thursdays 6pm to 7:30pm. Soon we will add a Saturday morning shift.

🌷 Potluck Dinner: July 9 at 6pm. Share food with friends old and new!

🌷 Pop-Up Clinic on Disease and Pest Control: July 7 at 11am. (Ladybugs could be involved 🐞. . .)

🌷 Family Day: July 11, 10:30am-12:00pm: Bring the kids for fun and enriching activities in the garden!

Don’t forget to check out our Instagram for the most up-to-date info on our upcoming events and clinics. Partiful links will be posted in Instagram stories, and in our link in bio closer to the event.

How Can I Get Involved?

Follow us on Instagram and bookmark our website.

Sign up for a shift using our volunteer calendar! The schedule helps us plan, but it’s absolutely fine to show up for a shift without signing up in advance. Be sure to bring sunscreen and water with you.

Do you have an idea for an event or collaboration with us? We’d love to hear from you! Join our Slack and the #mccarren-demo-garden channel to connect.

*CALL FOR CONTAINERS AND JARS*

Please bring your empty clamshells, berry boxes, and any other plastic containers to the garden to reuse as packing supplies for our harvests. We also need glass jars for flower harvesting.

Turns out, the same produce we drop off at the free fridges each week can also be transformed into the most exquisite vegetable paper and collages. Earlier this month Jennifer Shin visited the garden to teach us how.

Jennifer collected plants like carrots, beets, and leafy greens. Then, she sliced and prepared them so we could make collages and paper. “We didn’t make the sheets ourselves, but we learned how: slice vegetables thin with a mandolin, rinse, and layer them between paper towels,” said garden volunteer Iain. “Press them under something heavy, like a book press (a brick will do in a pinch), and keep them in a dry place so they don’t mold. After some time, you’ll have colorful delicate sheets ready for collaging and other craft projects. They’re beautiful enough to be art pieces on their own.”

“Making vegetable paper collage requires light fingers and care,” said garden volunteer Carlo. “It’s good to have a vision of what you want to create, but it also calls for flexibility and spontaneous creativity as a vegetable or a leaf may have a natural contour you want to preserve and highlight.”

I’ve always thought vegetables were beautiful, but after seeing these collages, I have a new appreciation for radishes and zucchini! Jennifer started making paper with vegetables so that she could combine her studio and kitchen time. She tried dumpling wrappers, seaweed sheets, and white sandwich bread before turning to vegetables. The trickiest part is the drying process, which “requires a lot of attention and care, similar to changing a baby’s diaper every few hours.”

Her favorite vegetable to work with is the radish, from pale white Daikon radishes to the colorful watermelon radishes in the winter. “Growing up in Korea, I was only familiar with Daikon radishes, so discovering radishes with pink, purple, and green flesh was both exciting, and the paperized versions are equally as mesmerizing,” she said. “I think it’s exciting that even a single variety can give you so much, which allows me to appreciate nature.”

What else we’ve been up to:
In July, we kept busy to fight off the summer doldrums. On July 13, Louis Vassar Semanchik returned to the garden for another Grow Your Own Mushrooms event. We combined oyster mushroom spawn with chopped straw and filled buckets with the mixture. Oyster mushrooms should be growing any day now! Check out the buckets in the shade behind the shed the next time you’re volunteering to see if any are starting to peek out.

On July 19, Amy led her annual pickling workshop, using cucumbers, zucchini, beans, and dill grown in the garden.

We had a table at the Kingsland Wildflower Festival on July 26, showing off cyanotypes made from plants in the garden.

We’ve also been keeping up with our regular volunteer shifts, which are now four times a week to make sure our thirsty plants get enough water to drink. Sign up for a shift using our volunteer calendar!

What’s happening next:
Here at the garden, we usually focus on flora. But in August, don’t miss out on our Urban Animals speaker series, where experts on birds, bats, and rats will teach us all about the fauna of NYC.

Wednesday August 6 at 6:30pm: Urban Animals: Bats!

Saturday August 9 at 8:30 am: Early morning breathwork in the garden led by facilitator, Ryann Reynolds.

Sunday August 10 at 10am: Family Harvest Day is filled with educational experiences in the garden. Hang around for garden reads, art activities, and of course garden tasks such as weeding and watering!

Tuesday August 12 at 6 pm Build Your Own Bouquet with Megh. Tour the garden and harvest beautiful blooms to build an arrangement with. After harvesting you will learn how to process and arrange flowers simply so that you can do this at home with flowers you find at the farmers market.

Wednesday August 13 at 6:30 pm: Urban Animals: Birds!

Thursday August 21 at 6 pm: Urban Animals: Rats!

Don’t forget to check out our Instagram for the most up-to-date info on our upcoming events. Partiful links will be posted in Instagram stories, and in our link in bio closer to the event. Are you interested in helping out with our events and social media? We’d love to hear from you! Join our Slack and the #demo-garden-social and #demo-garden-events channel to get involved in garden planning.

*CALL FOR CONTAINERS AND JARS*
Please bring your empty clamshells, berry boxes, and any other plastic containers to the garden to reuse as packing supplies for our harvests. We also need glass jars for flower harvesting.

See you in the garden!

The sun is setting after 8 pm, the McCarren Park pool is open, and we’re starting to harvest zucchinis as big as our forearms. It can only mean one thing: we’re in peak summer season, and the garden is lush and abundant.

Speaking of zucchini, our volunteers Anita, Amy, and Jen have been leading the fight against squash borers, which destroyed our zucchini crop last year. The squash vine borer is a moth that lays eggs directly into the plants’ stalks. Then, caterpillars grow and eat the stalk from the inside out, killing the plant. This year, we’ve sprinkled diatomaceous earth around our zucchini and wrapped the stalks in tin foil to prevent egg laying. Unfortunately, we have still seen signs that borers are among us. We’re now injecting the zucchini with Bacillus thuringiensis, a beneficial bacteria found in soil that the squash borers can’t tolerate—it’s like a probiotic for zucchini! Join any upcoming volunteer shift to help us protect our zucchini.

It’s been a hot summer, and starting in July we’ll be adding a Saturday shift to the volunteer calendar so our plants can be watered more frequently. Harvesting bush beans is exciting, but don’t forget to help your fellow volunteers with watering every shift! The Saturday shift will be from 10 am to 12 pm. Please remember to sign up by adding your name to the volunteer calendar; this helps the shift leader plan the day’s activities.

What else we’ve been up to:

On May 18, NYC mushroom cultivator Louis Vassar Semanchik taught us how to grow oyster mushrooms in buckets! We also learned all about how fungi reproduce, and the environments where they thrive.

A regular Tuesday morning volunteer, Tamara, sent me this picture of a mushroom that grew some weeks later. What a beaut! We’ll be having a repeat Grow Your Own Mushroom Event in July, and sign ups will be posted on Instagram.

On June 5, we held our first monthly potluck after the Thursday evening shift. Everyone brought delicious food to share, and some friends from North Brooklyn Mutual Aid talked about the ways they’re helping out and engaging with our community. If you like volunteering at the garden, don’t forget to check out the rest of NBK Mutual Aid’s projects!

On June 21 we hosted a Girl Scout volunteer day, and welcomed troops to talk about the history of the garden, plus watering, harvesting, weeding, and looking for bugs. June 28 was our first summer gardening skills orientation session! Margaret and Shayla taught new gardeners how to weed, water, prune, hunt pests, and harvest. We’ll have another orientation session coming up in July. And on June 29 we hosted Harvest Family Day with The Mommy Archives. Tiny volunteers descended upon the garden to paint new signs for the garden beds and water the thirsty plants.

What’s happening next:
Have you seen how much lavender is growing along the back fence of the garden? It smells amazing, and it will taste even better in a collaboration with Paloma Bakery. On July 12th and 13th only, Paloma will be featuring the garden’s lavender in a unique pastry that will benefit the garden. Get there early before it sells out!

• Tuesday July 8 at 6:30 pm, we kick off our urban animals speaker series on… bats! Nic Comparato, a wildlife biologist with NYC Bird Alliance and the Urban Bat Project will be in conversation with Shayla discussing surprising bat facts and where to see bats in NYC.

• Wednesday July 9 at 6 pm: Volunteer Orientation: Summer Skills. Are you planning on volunteering in the garden this summer? This workshop will introduce you to the garden and help you practice basic gardening skills you will need.

• Thursday July 10, at the end of the Thursday shift: Monthly Potluck! We’re pushing the potluck back a week because of the July 4th holiday.

• Saturday July 12 and Sunday 13th, don’t forget to go to Paloma and try the lavender pastry!

• Sunday July 13 at 9 am: Grow Your Own Oyster Mushrooms. Louis is coming back to the garden for more mushroom growing.

• Saturday July 19: Pickling with Amy! Time TBA.

• Sunday July 20 at 10 am: Harvest Family Day with a scavenger hunt.
  

  Check out our Instagram for Partiful links to all upcoming events. They’ll be posted in Instagram stories, and in our link in bio closer to the event. And don’t forget to join our Slack and the #mccarrendemogarden channel to get involved in garden planning. See you in the garden!

Gardening usually requires patience. We wait for seeds to grow into seedlings or for sugar snap peas to climb up a trellis. That’s why our annual planting day is so thrilling—it’s a fervor of activity where a lot happens all at once. Thanks to everyone who came out this year and helped. Volunteers planted dozens of plants and seeds into the dirt, tidied up the tree beds on Leonard street, and cleaned the Lot Radio free fridge to get it ready for harvesting.

Planting so many things at once can be overwhelming. Should we put the tomatoes along the fence, or is that a better spot for zinnias? Our horticulture working group has been deliberating such questions for weeks. How did they decide? I asked some of the garden planning team to give us the scoop.

Behind the scenes of planting day

At the start of the season, all the garden beds are like a blank slate. How do you begin to think about what goes where?
Before the layout starts, there’s a lot of planning ahead of time. Since our produce is going to be donated to the community fridges, we like to focus on produce that’s more expensive in the stores, like tomatoes and peppers, versus something like onions, that are relatively cheap. Plus we want to balance that out with flowers and produce for our educational events, like pickling cucumbers for the pickling workshop, and things that are fun or we haven’t tried before. We also want plants that are easy to grow, since we’re not expert gardeners by any means. -Jen

One of the first things we consider is how much sun certain beds get. Most of our plants need direct sun all day and there’s not too much we can plant in the partly sunny areas; mainly herbs. Then, we have to figure out what kind of structure the plant will need to grow. Tomatoes need trellising, so we use our border fence as a trellis. We also have an arch we built to support the butternut squash. Beans and cucumbers also grow upward—that makes room for plants that don’t need support like our greens, carrots, radishes, and zucchini. Flowers are planted throughout to encourage pollination and we keep perennials together. -Megh

We often put different plants together in the same bed—how do you know which vegetables, flowers, or herbs will be good roommates? Are they any plants that do not get along?
People and plant folk alike enjoy companionship! A classic example is the traditional Native American practice with "three sisters" (corn, squash, and beans) where corn provides a trellis structure, beans put nitrogen back in the soil, and squash blocks out weeds.

There’s simple ones we’ll do at the garden like using basil as a pest deterrent for tomatoes and it’s easy to remember because they go great together in a sauce. This year we planted borage, an edible blue flower, with our strawberries because the flowers are particularly attractive for pollinators that can make the strawberries produce more and taste better. We love nature-based mutual aid.

We watch out for plants that don’t get along too. Mint can take over so we will keep it separate or place it with other highly competitive plants. Pumpkins and potatoes compete for the same nutrients and are vulnerable to the same diseases. - Carla

What are we not growing this year that we have grown before—and why?
We decided not to plant okra for a few reasons, one being a space issue as they need a lot of space and that limits what other things we can grow. Another being okra needs to be harvested before they become too big which makes them woody and basically inedible. It was easy to miss the ripe okra! This did not negatively affect the plant, but lantern flies seem to love hiding under okra leaves, so it was more unpleasant for the harvester. -Margaret

We’re also not doing marigolds this year, since there’s new research out that they inhibit the growth of plants near them. Even though they are typically planted to keep pest insects away, it seems that the costs outweigh the benefits. -Jen

Are there any new plants we are growing this year you’re most excited about?
I am most excited for the pole beans. We grow it in-between the butternut squashes in the trellis beds and it’s always so fun harvesting them. It feels like like a bean hunt. -Margaret

Not a plant, but some bacteria? I’m excited to see if inoculating the legumes (beans, peas) with bacteria will make a difference in their growth. Legumes are symbiotic with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, meaning the bacteria has the ability to convert nitrogen from the air into a form usable by the plant. We bought a bag of inoculant that contains the bacteria mixed into some peat that we added to the seeds prior to planting. It should help the plants grow and add some nitrogen to the soil for future plantings. I think the peas that are already up might be looking healthier than last year. -Jen

Interesting varietals of some plants that we’re growing from seed, including heirloom tomatoes, funky carrots and jewel toned radishes. We’re also attempting to grow bigger pumpkins this year, which is exciting! Growing a jack-o-lantern from seed to harvest would be really rewarding and fun. -Mara

What else we’ve been up to:
We had a plant sale at Edy’s Grocer to sell leftover seedlings and raise money for the garden and North Brooklyn Mutual Aid. We still have some plants! Feel free to stop by the garden during a regular volunteer shift to trade a donation of your choosing for a baby plant.

What’s happening next:

• Our volunteer shift calendar is up and running! Join us every Tuesday 8-9:30am, Thursday 6-7:30pm, and Sunday 10am-12pm. Sign up here.

• Sunday May 18: Grow your own oyster mushrooms event. Waitlist only (Sorry if you weren’t able to get on the list this time. If there is a lot of interest, we can do another mushroom event soon, or find a similar event with our friends at Biotech without Borders.)

• June 5: Our first potluck of the season! Break bread with your fellow gardeners at the end of the first Thursday shift of the month.

Reminder to join our Slack and the #mccarrendemogarden channel to get involved in garden planning, and follow us on Instagram for the most up-to-date garden info. See you in the garden!

Yesterday, some new volunteers stopped by the garden for our spring gardening skills orientation event. More than one person said that their reason for showing up was a desire to “touch grass.” This reminded me of a Margaret Atwood quote that you’re welcome to adopt as a mantra for the coming season: “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

By the end of the hour, we had followed her advice. Three of our volunteers—Anita, Margaret, and Shayla—demonstrated how to prep the soil for spring, hack the fire hydrant, as well as plant, water, and thin seedlings.

Fun fact: Some of the seedlings that we planted started to grow in the garden over the winter. In January, we scattered seeds in plastic containers and half-buried them in the raised beds, creating a greenhouse-like effect. After a long and windy winter, they’re ready to be planted properly in the dirt—and us humans are ready to be rooted in the garden again too!

This newsletter will be the new home for recaps of what’s been happening in the garden, as well as shout-outs for upcoming events (our Instagram page will still be your best resource for up-to-date RSVP links). This newsletter will also occasionally tell you stories about Greenpoint’s environmental history, gardening tips and tricks that we’re trying out, and intel about insects, plants, fungi, rat management, labyrinths—anything that we’re learning along the way as we grow food for our community.

What we’ve been up to:
On April 15, we had our general interest meeting at ParkHouse. Thanks to everyone who showed up!

If you missed the meeting, this season’s garden leads—Megh, Mara, Jade, and Shayla— talked about our garden’s history and how we’re organized. We have four working groups: Horticulture, Events, Tools, and Education.

• Horticulture organizes the garden planning—what goes in the dirt and when—and is led by Mara.

• Events, led by Megh, coordinates our many free events and workshops throughout the season, as well as our Harvest Dinner.

• The Education group puts together educational events and partnerships for kids and adults, spearheaded by Jade.

• The Tools team, led by Shayla, works on social media (with Marissa), the volunteer calendar, this newsletter, merch (with Yefim), as well as other resources to keep us all in communication about what we’re planting.

If you’re interested in helping out, join our Slack and the #mccarrendemogarden channel. From there you can direct message any of the leads to be added to a working group’s channel. We also announced our planting day, on May 3, and the start of our volunteer season, on May 6. We will begin with three shifts a week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. To sign up, add your name to the volunteer calendar.

What’s happening next:
Saturday April 26: Gardener Orientation for Spring Skills 15 spots available
Saturday May 3: Planting Day! (Rain date: May 4.)
Tuesday May 6: Regular volunteer shifts begin
Saturday May 10 and Sunday May 11: Plant sale at Edy’s Grocer
Sunday May 18: Grow Your Own Oyster Mushrooms
Check out our Instagram page for links to RSVP closer to the event.

We are so excited for the upcoming season, and to see new and old friends. See you in the garden soon!