Announcement
View of the blossoming garden and its abundance of foliage and crop
Photo: NRCG: IRC in NY
This year, the IRC in New York’s New Roots Community Gardens (NRCG) in Queens is celebrating its second year since its grand opening during the pandemic in 2021. The garden has come a long way, providing a safe space for members to make new friends, harvest veggies/herbs, and connect with the land.
Community Shelf at the New Roots Community Garden
Photo: NRCG: IRC in NY
The New Roots Queen staff is proud to provide a green space with fresh vegetables, flowers, and gardening activities for the Woodside/Sunnyside community. The garden serves everyone in the local community including large family households, food insecure individuals, and those with limited access to fresh food or a kitchen.
Community members can always swing by during garden hours to pick up food items on the Garden’s shelf. Members of the local community are often involved in other organizations within Queens and they encourage people to volunteer and see the garden. Running a community garden takes a lot of effort and resources. Without the community, the NRCG would not have been possible.
Anita Gitta, our Food & Agriculture Coordinator shares:
where we are in Queens is so diverse, being able to communicate with people is so important. Many community members speak Tagala, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, and more. They rely on the NRCG’s translated support from volunteers to help translate harvested crops and education resources. Overall, we want this garden to be a space of rest and to play a role in mitigating food insecurity in the area.
This year, the NRCG hosted exciting workshops such as culinary demos, bokashi compost, and herbal medicine workshops which focused on using medicinal herbs from the garden like Tulsi, lemon balm, and passion fruit leaves into a tincture. Some fun vegetables/herbs that were planted and harvested at the garden were: Bengali pumpkin, Huacatay, spicy Nepali peppers, native flowers like roselle (hibiscus), pigeon peas, and more! Community-based organizations continue to play a key role as partners. The Green Guérillas came to the garden to host a fall garlic and bulb giveaway. This was a community favorite!
Omar, tending to the garden bet.
Photo: NRCG: IRC in NY
Community Potluck
Before we closed the garden this season, we had our last big community event: the NRCG Community Potluck & Mini Harvest Festival on Sunday, October 8! About thirty community members attended the mini-harvest festival. Community member Yobana, gave an excellent cooking demonstration, showing people how the use the abundance of the space. The cooking demo spotlighted a recipe utilizing Huacatay also known as Peruvian black mint. After that, Sebastian (a long-time garden member and former IRC Food and Agriculture Assistant) led the herbal medicine workshop. It was a day of laughter and storytelling at the celebration!
Abundant harvest at the Garden
Photo: NRCG: IRC in NY
Find out what’s next for us at the New Roots Community Garden in Queens...
Anita shares: “Currently, we are preparing for the winter, focusing on planting cover crops like oats and peas as well as red clover. We try our best to be efficient and sustainable. These crops add fantastic nutrients like nitrogen and organic matter back into the soil after the growing season. We are continuing to use a crop rotation to not deplete the soil with nutrients. Moreover, we are excited to create our vision for 2024 -- starting with outlining different ways to outreach and creative new offerings that support the community’s needs.”