Soil Not Dirt

Recently I attended the 3rd Annual Urban Soils Symposium. Scientists are looking at urban soils as a distinct field of study that has nomenclature and characteristics different from soil science in general. I have written blog posts about soils in urban gardens outlining the awareness urban gardeners must have about the soil in their gardens. The presenters at the symposium and the questions and comments from attendees were often targeted to the urban soil issues of heavy metal contamination and what could be done. The blog post linked above gives detail about precautions to be taken. As with many issues when you get 2 or more experts discussing a topic you will have at least as many opinions as discussants. In this case the opinions ranged from - there is nothing you can do to outlining precautions that have been recommended by many scientists. The point is that there is more research to be done and that we don't have all of the answers.

Soil, water, seeds and sunlight are the essential ingredients for growing anything. Growing plants in urban areas maybe have a more difficult time with all of these factors but gardeners have always grown lush gardens in urban areas. The point for me is that we can't look at any of these factors in a vacuum. It doesn't help to look at these factors as a chicken or egg question - what comes first? It doesn't really matter what comes first if you see them all as interrelated and interdependent on each other. We can plant a seed in the soil, water the seed and let the sunshine do the job of providing the light and heat the seed requires to grow. The problems arise when one of the factors is out of balance. Too much rain, not enough rain, too much or not enough sunshine or non-viable seed are easily understandable problems usually with simple fix.

The issues with soils are much more complex and often not easily remedied. Commercial agriculture's quick fix is to just add 3 nutrients Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (NPK) to soil to grow crops. This ignores the fact that healthy soil is a living thing. Besides NPK, soils contain many micronutrients, sand, gravel, loam and living organisms both micro-organisms and larger insects. Unfortunately soils also contain poisons such as pesticides and herbicides that usually throw off the natural life in the soil. Urban soils have human made materials that make these soils unique. The important thing to remember is that we have to pay attention to our soils and be caretakers of the soil.

Community Gardeners might just consider Soil as another member of the garden community. The Soil doesn't have a voice although we tend to pay attention to the Soil only when there is a problem. A better way is to cultivate a relationship with the Soil. Give the soil compost to help it replenish its nutrients. Plant things that encourage insects, pollinators and mycelium growth to encourage the health of the soil. It is a Native American custom to give gifts back to the earth as thanks whenever something is taken from it. We should all be adopting this practice. We have to stop treating our soil like dirt.

Honeybees and Community Gardens

Community Gardeners have kept honeybees in their gardens for many years. As gardens mature and gardeners focus on sustainability and how community gardens impact the environment more community gardeners are becoming beekeepers or inviting beekeepers to set up hives in the gardens.
Beekeeping in NYC and other cities has increased tremendously a cities have created urban agriculture policies that include beekeeping. Some cities like NYC have rescinded laws that made keeping honeybees illegal. In NYC, honeybees were classified as 'venomous pests".

I've been beekeeping on and off for about 25 years. Initially as a volunteer beekeeper at Wave Hill in the Bronx, for many years helping other beekeepers (and learning from them), maintaining hives at gardens run by my former employer and for about the last 6 years keeping hives at locations around Staten Island. I learn something new about honeybees and beekeeping almost everyday. Many people I speak with are fascinated by honeybees and will often grill me about misconceptions they have about bees.

"Are they aggressive? Do they sting?"

No they are not aggressive. Honeybees are searching for pollen and nectar from flowers and you are not a flower. They will sting but you have to be threatening to them in some way. Often when someone is stung it is a yellow jacket, wasp or hornet that is the culprit so don't be so quick to blame a honeybee. There are 3500 species of bees in the United States and 20,000 throughout the world. The vast majority of bee species are solitary bees, often they nest in the soil or in cavities in trees,  shrubs and even our homes.

Bees have evolved along with the plants they pollinate. A variety of bee species are responsible for pollinating one third of our food crops. Bees also contribute to biodiversity by cross pollinating native species. There are many benefits that bee species provide to various ecosystems.  The honeybee is the only species that are managed by humans to pollinate food crops and to collect honey and other hive products.

"Is there really only one queen? Why don't they have more than one queen?"

Yes there is only one queen per hive. She lays all of the eggs that eventually populate the hive after the larvae are fed by the female worker bees. The male drones sole role in the colony is to impregnate a virgin queen. The social structure of the hive and their defenses are well served by having a solitary queen. All of the bees in the hive carry the scent of the pheromones of the queen on their bodies. The guard bees defend the hive from any invaders that don't have the queen's pheromones.

Why are honeybees having a hard time surviving?

There are many factors. Climate change often disrupts the hive with severe weather such as extreme heat, extreme cold and intense storms. Pesticide use, in particular Neonicotinoid pesticides weaken or kill hives. Habitat loss where honeybee forage sites are developed put stress on the colony. Hive pests which range from the tiny varroa mite to the giant bear.

"What can I do to help?"

My favorite question. As individuals we can help counteract the factors that are contributing to hive loss. First, don't use pesticides or herbicides. As bees forage for pollen and nectar they will come in contact with the residue of spraying. These small amounts of herbicides or pesticides can weaken and eventually kill bees and bee colonies. Second plant flowers, trees and shrubs that bees will use as food sources like some of the plants in the above list. If you don't have a space to plant, you can join a community garden, volunteer with a local herb society or with a local parks department or donate to or join a group whose mission is to help pollinator species.

http://pollinator.org/
https://thepollinationproject.org/
http://millionpollinatorgardens.org/
http://www.pollinator-project.com/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/greening/greenbelt-native-plant-center/bee-watchers

Third, buy local honey and hive products. You will be getting something sweet while supporting local beekeepers efforts to help the bees survive.

Joe Holzka Garden and the Humus Film Festival

Last Fall I met Sara, a young woman from Madrid, Spain, who was visiting New York and asked me to show her a few of the Lower East side gardens. We met, walked around the neighborhood and visited gardens that were open and chatted about community gardening in New York and in Madrid. Sara is a leader of a community garden in Madrid, Esta es una Plaza .  We talked about another organization in Madrid, La Casa Encendida that was sponsoring The Humus Film Festival of short videos about community gardens along with the Humus Revolution, a 3 day fun event about community gardens.

Now I realized that she also had an ulterior motive, to ask me to submit a short video about a community garden to the festival. I agreed. I thought it would be a fun project. But the winter came and I wouldn't be able to get any interesting footage in the winter. I did have some nice photos of the Joe Holzka Garden and when I looked through them I realized they could tell a story about the garden.

I've written about this garden before. It is close to my home and I'm an honorary member. I led a  project to build a shade structure/ rainwater harvester. I also worked on a expansion of the garden which added raised beds that would be used to grow produce for a local food pantry. Recently I helped the gardeners rebuild some of the raised beds that needed replacement.

We also organized a fun event to celebrate the release of a new book, Eat Less Water by Florencia Ramirez. Florencia visited the garden with me a few years ago and was so impressed by the garden that she mentioned the visit in the book. We read an excerpt from the book and shared food prepared by the gardeners, Kelly Morris and Aralis Munoz. It was easy for me to tell a story about the Joe Holzka Garden.

Thankfully there are computer programs that can take still photos and pan and zoom through the picture creating something called the Ken Burns Effect. My phone has a setting on the camera called Live Photos which captures several seconds of video when I take a still photo. So I made a movie using these photos with help from my son and my wife. It wasn't action packed, did not have dialogue but hopefully will show the world this wonderful garden. Enjoy!

A Community Garden in Cambridge, England

Community Gardens exist is some form in many places around the world. They may look different in Cuba than in Mexico than in Sweden. Part of the beauty of community gardens are the cultural influences that manifest in the way they look or are organized.

I recently had the opportunity to see a community garden in Cambridge, England. I was not able to connect with any of the gardeners as I visited on a Sunday morning when no one was around. The garden was open which right there might be an unrecognizable feature to a New York City community gardener. I was only visiting Cambridge for a short time so I couldn't visit again or arrange to meet a gardener.

Cambridge is a university town. Basically the university is surrounded by and intermingled with the town. There is a Botanical Garden that is affiliated with the University. Just south of the Botanical Garden are an Allotment Garden and the Empty Common Community Garden which I visited. Allotments have been a popular type of opportunity for city dwellers to be able to garden somewhere close to the city. In some cases they look like backyards. There is a rental fee or in the case of a allotment I visited in Malmo, Sweden in 2005, the plots are owned and can be sold much like any other home or property. The Cambridge Allotments are rented on a yearly basis.

The interesting thing to me was that the Allotments and the community garden in this case were adjacent to each other. There wasn't a very clear delineation between the allotment and the community garden. The garden did have some plots , a greenhouse and a number of common areas.  The common areas are what seemed to distinguish the garden from the allotment. The seating areas were made from repurposed logs and there were other fun and interesting features to the garden, I tried to capture these details in some of the photos. The land for both is owned by the City Council but it is not clear to me what the procedure is to join either one. Perhaps I will learn that on a future visit. 

It seems analogous to me to the difference between Community Gardens and Urban Agriculture projects in New York and other American cities. An Allotment or Urban Agriculture project are individually controlled while the Community Gardens are, well...