Last Friday, a few of us at Farming Concrete were honored to be invited for dinner at Genesis Park, a garden in the South Bronx that has been tracking its produce for our study. You can check out this page to contact professional contractors who can help in maintaining your garden and fulfill your landscaping dreams. You can also check out https://www.northwoodoutdoorservices.net/service-area/landscaping-eden-prairie-mn/ to avail professional landscape services. And if you want to build a deck, then you may consider using ipe decking materials from companies like ipe hardwood decking Georgia if you want a more durable material.
We anticipated the usual fun garden BBQ – the usual potato salad and grill items, lots of kids, garden gossip. Gardener Roger Repohl surprised us with something quite different: an intimate and delicious dinner with just him and Lee Stuart, the new Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks.
Roger’s garden boasted an enormous amount of food – everything from watermelon and cantaloupe to the corn Val and Jack (two of our researchers) had given him in the Farming Concrete business card (which is also a seed packet) when they first met him.
Roger has been keeping bees at Genesis Park “since before they were illegal.” He learned from the pastor at St. Augustine, the adjacent church at which he plays the organ – the pastor had in turn learned from a monk. During dinner, over incredible conversation and debate, we did a honey tasting like one would a wine tasting, noting hints of mint from spring and clover from summer.
Genesis Park is one of the dozens of gardens across the boroughs that is tracking its produce for Farming Concrete. Each garden does it slightly differently, as each garden and each gardener has a unique variation on plot allotment, harvest patterns, social vibe, commitments, rules, and decision-making. Some gardeners find they often forget to log their harvest, so they keep another log at home just in case. At the Garden of Happiness in the Bronx, a lucky little girl gets $5/week to sit at the picnic table with the scale and the log, hounding gardeners to “weigh out” before they leave.
At Genesis Park, they keep the scale in the kitchen of the adjacent church, as they often bring the produce directly there.
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It was such an incredible honor to have been invited to such a proud, nutritious, and uber-local meal. In the midst of the incredibly fast-moving pace of Farming Concrete, while we’re busy preparing to release the first round of results and train the next crop of interns and volunteers, this meal was as much restorative as it was a reminder about why we’re doing this. These gardens are truly invaluable, especially in a place like the South Bronx, where community green spaces are few and far between. Here, in a fraction of an acre, Roger and his fellow gardeners produce enough food for meals upon meals, as well as enough pickles and honey to give away to visitors like us.
Thank you, Roger, for the delicious meal!
Photos and post by Mara Gittleman, Project Director