BBG is the Brooklyn partner for the NYC Department of Sanitation’s Bureau of Recycling and Sustainability’s NYC Compost Project hosted by Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which helps to reduce waste in NYC and rebuild city soils by giving New Yorkers the knowledge, skills, and opportunities they need to produce and use compost. Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Community Greening...
Urban soils are particularly prone to contamination. 50 years ago, your yard could have belonged to a farmer, who, perhaps not knowing any better, disposed of old bottles of anti-freeze or contaminated diesel in a hole out behind the tractor garage. Or perhaps the remains of a fallen down outbuilding, long ago coated in lead-based paint, was buried on your property...
“These farms aren’t your traditional sprawling upstate acreage tended by laborers or a guy on a tractor in bib overalls. Set up near where Jay Z grew up, they’re 10 steel shipping containers converted into hydroponic vertical farms, meaning crops grow in tower formation with recycled water and without soil. Inside the LED-lit modular containers are rows...
The Brooklyn Grange is an urban farm that sits upon a high-rise in Brooklyn Navy Yard. Teamed with it’s sister farm in Long Island City, Queens, the two farms are producing more than 50,000 lbs. of fresh vegetables and herbs in just 2.5 small acres of space. “This is truly seed-to-plate agriculture, with no use of fossil fuels,” says Anastasia Cole...
Remember when rooftop farming might have been viewed as a trend that would soon blow over and pass? People who yearned for open spaces to grow food but couldn’t imagine giving up their urban city life or loft? Well good news, it seems as if rooftop farming isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, it’s “staying power” has been said to have the potential to...
When someone mentions urban farming, you probably picture vertical farms in large empty warehouses, however one company believes it could very well take on a spherical shape. Recently a new prototype has been released and people can’t stop talking about it. The new Urban Farm Pod is a futuristic look at what growing your own food might look like. It can...
This post is originally from munchies.vice.com If you walked along the Manhattan side of the East River sometime in the last 100 years and cast your eyes across the water, you likely saw it: a grimy white building adorned with a big, yellow “Domino Sugar” sign—an emblem of another time. At the height of its success, the Williamsburg factory refined over half...
A 7-month time lapse documenting the first full growing season at the Brooklyn Grange’s farm in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At 65,000 square feet, it’s the largest rooftop farm in the world. Brooklyn Grange – A New York Growing Season from Christopher St. John on Vimeo. For more info, check out brooklyngrangefarm.com Shot and edited by Christopher St. John A big thanks to Ratatat for...
Imagine seeing this truck driving down your street. Fast food, eh? Well, the story goes Mr. Curt Ellis grows his good out of the bed of his truck. Pretty interesting way to garden – to say the least. Watch the video below to check out more of his “Truck Farm” in Brooklyn. http://www.truckfarm.org/ Watch the video here: ...
I asked my Grandmother what her thoughts on me moving out to LA were. She is not one to hold back what’s on her mind. Before answering the question, she wanted to make sure that she was camera ready and asked if her hair was combed and looked decent. Then she chimed in with, “I don’t like to see you go, but if you think you are going to be happy there, I will be glad for that.” She then got distracted by some “shmutz” that was on the floor that had to be picked up at that exact moment. After she remembered...
I learned another lesson when making an outdoor compost bin – don’t start it in the middle of the winter. Yea that seems to be pretty obvious and common sense now, but it wasn’t two months ago when I started. Due to the freezing weather, I haven’t been able to turn the compost at all because, well, it’s been frozen. That makes it kind of hard to turn. Now that I’m moving out to LA, I’ll need to get rid of this compost. I’ll likely just dump it on the garden beds like I did the rest of the...
Now that the weather has warmed up a bit and the containers aren’t frozen, I was able to finish breaking down the self watering containers in Brooklyn. Since I’m moving out to LA, there is no need for me to put the remaining soil and plants into the outdoor compost bin. The soil was just tossed into the gardening beds that I had planned on using. My guess is that it’s likely the most healthy and nutrient dense thing that’s been put in those beds in years. My Grandmother’s gardener is supposed to be coming...
Since I’m still new to this gardening thing, I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my first year. I’ve also had many successes as well, with the most memorable being my first lettuce harvest. For this post, I’d like to share the Top Five Gardening Mistakes that I’ve Made. Life ain’t perfect and neither are my gardens. I know hard to believe. I’ve made these mistakes, learned from them and have become better at gardening (and life) because of it. Putting too many food scraps in the compost bin. This...
Now that I’ve gotten some advice on planning for the garden beds in my Grandmother’s backyard, I made a call to obtain some horse manure. I definitely want to add things to the soil to mineralize and amend it. One reason that I want to do this is because Brooklyn soil is known for being flat out nasty and on the border of toxic. The other reason that I want to is because I’ve seen the crap that my Grandmother has put in her soil and I wouldn’t want it anywhere near my stuff. The 60+ years of what’s been put...
This spring season, I plan to use some of the garden beds in the backyard vegetable garden at my Grandmother’s. I got her approval and documented in the video below, but I’m sure that she’ll still have some complaints about it. There are four beds that measure approximately 4×2, 4×6 (which has a little bit of moss growing on it), 4×4 and 4×4. I’ve seen some of the stuff that my Grandmother has put in her soil, so I’d definitely like to mineralize and amend it. The plan that I had was to...
The kind people at SeedsNow.com have contacted me and offered to help me out with some seed packets to get my garden started. I’ve never started from seed before and I like experimentation (with growing vegetables that is). My plan is to continue the fire escape gardening, backyard vegetable gardening and potentially expand that to the garden beds. I’m...
I decided to make an undercover outdoor compost bin at my grandmother’s for my backyard vegetable garden in Brooklyn. Why is it undercover? It is because my Grandmother would flip out if she knew I was composting in her backyard? Why would she flip out? I dunno. She’s 90 and does that kind of thing. We are talking about the woman who freaked out when I brought my first harvest into her house. Making this outdoor compost bin was very similar to the aerobic compost bin in my kitchen. This bin also had no cost in putting together...
My winter container gardening ended in December, so I started to break down the self watering containers at my Grandmother’s. Once the sun went down the cold became freezing and I had to stop. When I woke up the next morning to finish breaking down the containers, they were frozen solid. All of the soil that I had been storing in the wheelbarrow was frozen as well. Unfortunately, I can’t do much until the soil defrosts, which I don’t see happening in the next few weeks. So I’ll have to wait to break down the rest. There...
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