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Queens County Farm Compost Project

We are planning to create an interactive compost site at the Queens County Farm Museum which help visitors connect with the farm in a direct way way while providing the Farm with rich vermicompost.

Leader

Aleksander Jagiello

Location

73-50 Little Neck Parkway Queens, NY 11004

About the project

 

The project is a volunteer-based project managed primarily by two Master Composters, with advice and guidance from staff of the Queens County Farm Museum.  Our goal is to provide an interactive/educational food waste drop off location in Far East Queens and to provide the Queens County Farm with an abundance of high quality vermicompost. Our immediate goal is to raise $150.00 for materials to build two "pickle barrel" compost tumblers, for “Stage I” of the project. The tumblers will be essential elements of the larger project which aims to meet two complimentary goals:
 
a-         The project strives  to connect visitors to the QueensCountyFarmMuseumin direct and meaningful way, and provide a drop off location for others who live in far eastern queens. We will, through outreach, encourage visitors & local residents to bring their vegetable and fruit scraps with them on their visit to the farm. Visitors will learn about composting by directly incorporating their food scraps into the tumbler systems that we are planning build. We will also be providing information about composting at home using vermicomposting and as other options such as outdoor bins.
 
b-         Our second goal is to  produce high quality vermicompost for use at the farm. Our planned compost system will replicate some aspects of the Added-Value Community Compost model in Redhook Brooklyn: The materials introduced into the tumblers will, after a few weeks, be introduced into worm bins to create rich vermicompost.

The Steps

We will begin outreach to visitors by tabling at the farm beginning in mid-June on a weekly basis through the end of the 2011 growing season. We will engage visitors by providing information about compsting at home, and encouraging folks to bring food scraps to the farm. We will also be creating colorful signs to educate visitors on the basics of composting and outline/specify the types of materials which we will be collecting. Simultaneously, as our funding becomes available, we will construct the two Pickle/Olive barrel tumblers (as used by the folks at the Western Queens Compost Initiative) using design plans that have been made available to us. The Queens Farm already has two small wooden vermicompost bins in place which will suffice for the time being, while we carefully gauge the volume/input of materials coming into the farm as a result of our outreach efforts.

Why we‘re doing it

We feel that the diversity of visitors to the farm offer us an ideal audience that will benefit from learning about the ecological principles which composting teaches. We want to simultaneously expose visitors to this information and also give them an opportunity to connect with this place that many of them love in a deeper and more direct way (by bringing what they may have considered “waste” to provide an important nourishment for soil and vegetables grown there). We are excited by idea of implementing a tumbler system as a key ingredient in the community drop-off, as it provides visitors with a hands-on experience of composting. Additionally, as volunteers, we are excited about the opportunity to provide the Queens Farm with rich, premium vermicompost.

$262.00 / $262.00