So, I need to return to a previous July post and remind everyone that you (yes, you!) can sign up to get two 40-pound bags of compost for free from the city? This is the happy result of the ongoing (and now curbside) NYC Sanitation Compost Program (you have seen the big orange bins on the sidewalk waiting for your scraps, right? and tried using the NYC Compost app by Big Belly Solar to find a nearby one?). Well, turns out the other part of collecting and giving in your food scraps is that you get them back in the form of soil for your houseplants, and in our case for street tree beds.
The compost bags are distributed using the format of “Giveback Events,” which are days and times when you can pick up your finished compost bags in person, from a compost distributing supervisor, at a local park or other selected venue. When there are events (they’re sadly over for the season, now), you can find a list at https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/programs/compost-givebacks.page#giveback-events. There are other ways of getting compost if you are a non-profit or buying it from the city if you are a for-profit business.
Our first compost adventure (as you might remember from our July 8 post) was to Jackie Robinson Park, where we used our bikes to haul back two bags (one bag per bike), walking the bikes and using them as carts, basically. It was a fascinating excursion: I always loved visiting Jackie Robinson Park, but this was the first time I noticed that it was home to a whimsical sculpture by Eunkyung Lee of a skateboarding cat.
So, even if you are not in need of compost, I urge you to visit the Harlem Sculptural Gardens and pay respect to this very chill cat.
This time around, we pulled out the big guns, got friends to register as well, and traveled out, this time by the convenient Bx11 bus that runs from 181st St out to Crotona Park and beyond, to snag more soil treasure. The amazing Crotona Park was an old stamping ground of mine–yes, I was once, for a brief shining moment, an Urban Park Ranger, and based for the summer of 2006 in the lovely Crotona Park Nature Center, on the east side of Indian Lake, a human-created pond based on local springs that saw some happy days in the 1950s and 1960s when it was a popular canoeing and picnicking destination, and which still hosts Ecology Discovery hikes and other fun events — the park is still thronged in the summers with picnicking and relaxing families.
It’s such a beloved spot that every August, hundreds of “old-timers” (some coming back for this event from far-flung cities and other states) hold a Reunion Weekend in the park. Can you tell this trip was a little emotion-laden for me? I couldn’t find pictures from those days, but I did dig up this pic of me in 2010 as a camp counselor run by the Rangers in Inwood Hill Park–another great park and summer.
Our compost pickup at Crotona netted us 6 bags (would have been more, but ahem one of us forgot to register!), which we brought back by Lyft. Some of that beautiful soil is being put to use in the beds–we added two to our previous count, updated map forthcoming! Some is also being used to nurture next year’s babies in a windowbox over the winter.