Announcement
NRCG Collage
Photo: Sheryll Durrant
The Queens Community has truly made the garden on 69th Street their home during the 2022 Spring-Summer Farming season! As a safe space for collective gardening and community engagement, the New Roots Community Garden (NRCG) has beautifully flourished and become firmly rooted in the Queens Community.
Have you seen the incredible abundance of vegetation produced in the Garden this year? Our Fig tree has grown to great heights! Our Moringa tree, planted from seed this spring, has now grown eight feet!
New Roots Queens is a farming garden focusing on educational and nutritional awareness to inspire our local community to live healthy lives. Our community includes immigrants and refugees, who both learn new urban farming strategies to integrate in their homes, and who teach strategies that they’ve used in their homelands to Queens residents. We are also passionate about giving back to the community! We’ve organized free grocery pickups and food distribution for the local community at the site. To prevent deterioration and protect food harvested from the Garden for the community, we created a makeshift farm stand where we sit harvested veggies for the community. This has been a game-changer!
The Garden has been able to optimize space through creative initiatives. Community members have added personality and style to the Garden, which is entering its second year of open hours for the Queens Community. Take a peek at how the Garden has evolved to offer so many harvests!
Community is an important value at the Garden! For this reason, we have opened the space to host a party for the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) NY’s Leaders in Training. Early this summer, IRC youth students came to space and helped us design and color signs in various languages, such as Mandarin, Spanish, or Bengali, to give a warm welcome to our diverse community members!
While we have much to celebrate, we are also focusing on improving our systems. For the past two years, we’ve relied on neighboring homes and apartment buildings as well as the water from nearby hydrants to water the beds and fill reserve tanks located in the Garden. We are working diligently to get a stronger watering system in place. This is very important for the protection of the Garden’s ecosystem.
Compost is also a challenge at the site. Our vision is to design a compost and rain catchment system soon. We are working to mprove the greenhouse structure since it gets affected by strong storms. These improvements can support the development of more workshops - Keep an eye out for a Squash-Vine Gardening series soon!
Farm open hours are:
Mon: 2p-7p / Tue: 9a-11a / Wed: 6a-8p
Thu: 9a-11a and 2p-7p / Fri: 9a-2p / Sat: Closed / Sun: 11a-2p
Inquiries re: the Farm, to volunteer and requests to be added to our general email announcement distribution may be directed to: [email protected]