Meet Beryl: Farming Concrete Trainer
While we do our winter number crunching, Farming Concrete Trainer Beryl Benbow has offered up stories, photos, and histories from her trainings in NYRP gardens this past summer. Thanks Beryl! These photos make us nostalgic for last summer and excited for 2012.
Reposted with permission from http://janebaileymg.com/farming-concrete/. All photos are by Beryl Benbow.
My first demo was at Gil Hodges / Carroll St. Garden; where I discovered a family of parrots in the Mulberry tree. Here are some photos from the garden.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Jane Bailey MG & Cedar Tree Gardens
Saturday, July 2nd, 2011 – I explained the farmer’s concrete program and how to weigh the veggies & fruit that gardener’s from my own gardens, Jane Bailey MG and Green Thumb’s, Cedar Tree.
McLeod
Saturday, July 9th, 2001 – Lisa and I visited two NYRP gardens in Brooklyn to demonstrate how to weigh their produce from their gardens. The first garden was on Liberty Ave and Powell. The garden was beautiful and had it’s own flavor with a gazebo covered in wisteria, wonderful seats designed somewhat like the shape of a canoe with individual bbq pits.
Landscape architect Lee Weintraub was commissioned by NYRP to partner with the community and Goldman Sachs to enhance this beautiful space. Design features include gravel paths, vegetable and ornamental planting beds, a wisteria-covered gazebo in the garden’s center and an area in the back for grills and tables for food preparation and family-style dining. In addition, NYRP planted many beautiful trees and shrubs, including dogwoods that bloom in the spring, junipers that keep the garden green in winter and a grove of graceful river birch that accentuate the garden’s frontage. In September 2007, community members, NYRP staff and representatives of Goldman Sachs celebrated the restored garden’s opening with a neighborhood barbeque and ribbon-cutting ceremony.
The Heckscher Foundation Children’s Garden
The Heckscher Foundation Children’s Garden is the other garden Lisa and I visited on Saturday. From the NYRP site: In 2006, the Heckscher Foundation for Children provided New York Restoration Project (NYRP) with a $300,000 grant to transform the site from a weathered and worn community space into a vibrant, outdoor classroom and learning experience. The grant also provided essential funding to support the garden’s dedicated and multi-cultural group of neighborhood gardeners.
At the back of the garden, a large shed with a porch allows visiting students from eight neighboring schools and members of a local community center to work on-site, alongside their teachers and NYRP educators. In partnership with the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment and local New York City schools, NYRP offers a wide variety of educational programs in this green space, including after-school nature tours that explore the garden’s green features and seasonal workshops that instruct schoolchildren on composting, planting, harvesting and cover cropping.
Greene Acres Garden
July 17th I met with a member from the Greene Acres Garden. From the NYRP’s site: Greene Acres is one of NYRP’s largest and busiest Brooklyn sites, the Greene Acres Community Garden encompasses five lots containing numerous ornamental plantings and a wide variety of vegetables – including tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, peppers and squash – that greatly contribute to the revitalization of the surrounding area.
Leave your response!