News on ENYF! Newest Site

The last 6 weeks have been busy, but we have a lot to show for it.  On May 1st, HPD transferred jurisdiction of our new farm site to Greenthumb/DPR, and on May 3rd we cut the lock and got to work!

With the help of our youth interns, volunteers, and a surprise visit from Sanitation, we removed all of the trash and weeds from the site and set to work getting it leveled.  Phase one of construction was focused on the long part of L-shaped site.  We laid down landscape fabric to keep out weeds and contaminated soil, put wood chips on top, and started to work on building the beds.

All of our beds are constructed from recycled scaffolding, donated by BuildItGreen!NYC through their BigBlooms Program.  We’ve constructed 25 4’x10’ beds so far, enough to complete phase one.  We did most of the work filling beds on June 2nd on our open volunteer day held in conjunction with the NYCCGC Un-Conference–many thanks to all of the volunteers who worked through that hot day to get them filled!

Our new site is an intergenerational farm focused on growing for the East New York Farmers’ Market. We have two youth and five adult growers in the space who come with farming experience from Jamaica, Nigeria, and Bangladesh, plus many years of growing here in Brooklyn.  Some of the crops we’re growing include bitter melon, long beans, seim beans, lima beans, red beans, cucumber, scotch bonnet, callaloo, celery, parsley, eggplant, fennel, bok choy, and lamb’s quarter.  All of these products will be sold at the two ENY Farmers’ Markets over the course of the season, so come out and support our farmers.

Over the course of this season we plan to build more beds, benches, a rainwater collection tank, and a harvest area.  Down the road we are planning to get bees and chickens at the site–look out for more updates soon, and join us for future volunteer days on the first and third Saturdays to help us move forward.

This farm has been a true community effort, and we’d like to give a special thanks to everybody that has contributed to our progress thus far:

BIG!NYC
Department of Sanitation Compost
Greenthumb
Reid Trucking
Evergreen Tree and Shrub
Green Island Distributors
NYCCGC/OWS Un-Conference
Farm School NYC
The farmers
The youth
Our tireless volunteers