Sumit Som from the Vajradhara Center in Boerum Hill will be leading meditation in our garden on Tuesdays in August beginning this Tuesday August 2.
Tuesdays in August
7:00-7:45 PM
Free! (donations are encouraged)
Location: Prospect Heights Community Farm
252 St Marks Avenue
Enjoy a relaxing meditation and brief dharma talk in a beautiful community garden. Just as plants can grow and bloom, so can our wisdom and compassion. We will learn about Buddhism basics and then take time to meditate and discuss. Come join us!
Come on out to PHCF’s Annual Plant Sale on May 21 & 22 from noon – 6 pm! We’ll be offering PHCF home grown tomatoes, herbs, vegetables, annual & perennials plus houseplants too! See our varieties offered HERE
We will be PHASING OUT our large scale FOOD SCRAP COLLECTION at the Farm as soon as Grow NYC resumes collection at the Grand Army Plaza Farmers Market on Saturdays.
Anyone who is able to drop their food scraps on Thursday mornings, please use the Grow NYC collections at the 7th Avenue Q/B station (8 am – 11 am) or the Franklin Avenue 4 station at Eastern Parkway (8:30 – 11:30 am).
PHCF’s Community Composting Team, led by the indefatigable Brian T, received the Green Thumb 2020 Community Composting Award!
Garden members Pamela, Traci, Brian T and Dave (pictured above from left to right) attended the ceremony on October 13th to accept the award. In 2020 PHCF served 2,366 community members, diverting approximately 17,000 pounds of organic material from the waste stream and providing an immeasurable service to the community.
Here’s the full story:
When COVID-19 hit NYC in March 2020, 90% of the City compost budget was cut, eliminating curbside brown-bin pickups and an extensive network of programs via GrowNYC which provided food scrap drop-off sites at Green Markets and subway stations. The response from the PHCF Compost Team was immediate. Only six weeks later they debuted a Community Compost Program, bringing to the neighborhood its composting knowledge and expertise (not to mention extreme enthusiasm).
It began quietly with a pilot program to collect food scraps from the community at the PHCF garden gate, masked and socially distanced. Instantly popular and soon beyond the Compost Team’s capacity to process, they forged partnerships with two nonprofit organizations, first NatureBased and then BigReuse, to accept most of the scraps collected from the community.
It took the proverbial village to provide these services. In 2020 Community Compost Team members worked almost 80 shifts and logged well over 200 hours. Community composting also had leadership from garden member Brian T, who saw possibilities where others saw problems, and from PHCF garden coordinator, Martha E who brainstormed solutions to the many challenges implementing a community composting program presented, and carried more than her share of food scrap buckets!
The Prospect Heights Community Farm crew welcomed the official changeover from summer to fall with a seed saving workshop. Our master gardener Traci led the group through a two hour session on how to make origami seed packets with the chance for everyone to take home seeds.
Seed saving is an important way to maintain and safeguard seed and heritage varieties, which are important for a robust and diverse ecosystem and food culture. In the last century or so, the world has lost 75% of its edible plant varieties. Seed saving also makes sense economically. Saving seeds is free and seed libraries and exchanges are a great way to offer seeds at a lower price (or free) to folks who need them.
Some featured seeds from the garden’s workshop were Zinnia, Cosmos, Okra, Fennel, and Arugula!
If you’re curious about saving seeds, check out these resources:
PHCF hosted a Compost 101 Workshop on Open Garden Day 2021, an annual event sponsored by GreenThumb. The workshop covered the basic science of composting and then treated people to a tour of our 4-bin system which takes in about 20,000 pounds of food scraps each year and turns them into compost, aka black gold, the gardener’s best friend.
Prospect Heights Community Farm is now home to two native bee condos courtesy of The Bee Conservancy. With the help of garden members and their families, we installed the homes in two bee-friendly locations in the garden with plenty of morning sun and ample bee forage. Native bees are different from honeybees. They don’t produce honey or wax, they live solitary lives (no queens here!), don’t sting and are even more efficient pollinators than honeybees.
Come visit the condos and see who has checked in. We are expecting several varieties of native bees including mason, leafcutter, and carpenter bees.
See the photos from the event and of the bee condos
The Prospect Heights Community Farm (PHCF) welcomes you to this year’s edition of our annual Pumpkin Smash on November 7th from 12-4 pm.
Because of the unprecedented times and to preserve the safety of community members, we will not be having our usual potato bake or refreshments this time around. However, you are still welcome to bring your pumpkins to smash your COVID blues away and to enjoy the garden.
