A group of 8th grade Berkeley Carroll students and their teachers delivered a Little Free Pantry to our garden on June 1st as part of a community action project.
The Berkeley Carroll team
The 15 x 15 x 26 pantry was built by the students and will be stocked with non-perishable items for the benefit of our neighbors. The pantry follows the well-known model of the Little Free Libraries seen around the city. PHCF also has a Victory Garden fresh food giveaway every Sunday. The Victory Garden and food pantry are our modest efforts to address food insecurity in our neighborhood.
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
With your help, we have diverted 100,000 LB of food waste into nutrient rich compost since June 2020!
But the Pharm will no longer be accepting food scraps in two weeks. Come by tomorrow or next Sunday (10am-1pm), thereafter you will need to make new plans.
Grow NYC has resumed collection at:
Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, Saturdays, 8 am – 2 pm
7th Ave & Carlton B-Q station, Thursdays, 8-11 am
Franklin Ave 2-3-4-5 Station, Thursdays, 8:30-11:30 am
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:
