Urban Gardening Blog
Mindful Gardening: Protecting Your Trees
More than a month after superstorm Sandy, New Yorkers are still addressing the extensive damage to the city’s trees. Fallen trees blocked streets, limbs lay scattered on roofs and cars, root balls had pulled apart sidewalks—we saw just how vulnerable these giant plants can be during storms. Now seems like a good
Gardening Like Our Life Depends on It
What makes New Yorkers so able to bounce back from disaster? Community horticulturists know: We live in relationship, not isolation. Brooklyn gardeners collaborate and learn to respect each other, though it’s not always easy, as well as Mother Nature. A survey of 70 flood-zone community gardens in the GreenBridge
Much Ado About Mulch
Spring is a terrific time of year to remove salt-sprayed, winter-worn mulch and treat your street tree to a fresh dressing. And Hurricane Sandy left Brooklyn with an abundant surplus of wood chips to use. For small quantities of free mulch, shovel as many bags as you can take from Green-Wood Cemetery. Enter at 25th Street
New Native Flora Garden Grows Local
When it comes to living and eating more sustainably, we’ve all heard, “Go local.” Brooklyn Botanic Garden will embody this edict when the Native Flora Garden expansion opens later this spring. The one-acre expansion features more than 150 plant species that evoke rapidly disappearing wild ecosystems in New Jersey,
Look, Up in the Sky!
Living roofs have been sprouting up all over New York City lately—on luxury apartment buildings, public housing units, schools, office towers, and at BBG, of course! Some are park-like retreats, others look more like windswept prairies, some even support thriving vegetable farms. BBG's latest handbook, Green Roofs and
Recipe: Chile Pepper Sambal
Chile peppers grow readily in NYC—a simple urban garden can sometimes out-produce a gardener’s ability to use them while fresh. Luckily, preserving them is easy. They can be air-dried, dehydrated, or pickled in vinegar brine, but making homemade hot sauce is one of my favorite techniques. Hot sauces play an integral
