Revamp of Friends' Garden & Compost Site

Over the last several years, the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park have expanded our Garden and Compost Site making it a vital component of our programming efforts.  Currently, we have over 800 square feet of raised beds where we donate the vast majority of the produce we grow, two 3 bin compost systems which can handle weeds from the garden and limited food scraps and 3 closed compost bins for food scraps.  Our first 400 square foot raised bed was built in 2008 and the wood is starting to rot and fall apart.  In addition, we have been using the same tools and wheelbarrows for over ten years now and they are breaking at a rapid rate.  We are asking for funding to revamp and our Garden & Compost Site and bring it to level that our community deserves.

Our garden programs strives to 1- introduce students to social environmental topics such as composting, gardening, and healthy habits 2- provide a place for community service opportunities, and 3- provide a hands on work site for our interns to grow food for us to sell at our summer farm stand and donate to local food pantries.  Each year, we work with hundreds of school children teaching them about gardening and composting and have hundreds of volunteers help us maintain our site.

Funding from this project will be used to purchase new high quality lumber and brackets to rebuild our 400 square foot bed, replenish soil in our bed, purchase new tools and wheelbarrows and purchase new storage container to keep our tools out of inclement weather. 

In March of 2015, we will purchase all the items associated with this project. We will also plant seeds in our office and work with school groups to plant in their classrooms. In April of 2015, we will host a volunteer day to rebuild the raised vegetable bed and to assemble and begin to fill the new compost bins. Then in May of 2015, volunteers will join us to plant a newly built bed and our other beds at the garden. We will purchase any additional plants needed for the garden- certain plants usually do not grow very well inside from seed. From June to November, we will work with volunteers and school groups to tend to our vegetable beds, maintain our compost bins and harvest produce.

The Friends' work to "Bring Youth, Community and Nature Together" and our Garden and Compost Site is a great place to do that. Every aspect of our garden links back to teaching about and exposing youth to nature. 

The three sections of our garden work together to teach students large environmental concepts through introducing them to the smaller topics that interconnect in nature. Students witness food webs and decomposition in our compost bins while honing their observation skills. Our vegetable bed lends itself to conversations about fruits verses vegetables, pollination, and organic horticulture. The pollinator garden offers a chance to observe pollinators at work among native plants and flowers that illustrate the parts of a plant and the need for insect pollinators.