Warren St. Mark's Community Garden

First Garden Day of 2008

Amy showing new members around

About forty people turned out for this season's first Garden Day on Sunday, April 6th.  Chris, the Garden Coordinator, wrote these comments afterwards:

"At this time of year the garden offers few hints of its potential; just scattered daubs of color from the crocuses, hyacinths, narcissi and daffodils that we planted last fall. But these weeks offer a great opportunity to see the bones of the garden and to look at the clean slate on which we'll start planning the changes that will take effect in 2008.

"Our first garden day was a huge success. We signed up loads of enthusiastic new members, got a great start on tackling the early-sprouting weeds and organized the composter to begin receiving regular deliveries from the Park Slope Food Co-op."

If you're on the WSMCG listserve, you can also check out a Garden Day message sent on Monday by Mical, who's serving as an ad-hoc officer.

(Click thumbnails to enlarge)

Weedspotting

Back in mid-August, master gardener Mary G. of the Brooklyn Bears Community Gardens (that's her holding the book) led a weed identification tour at Warren-St. Mark's.   About a dozen people from our garden and others turned up to learn how to spot a weed -- and what to do with it when you've identified it. 

A weed is any plant that you don't want in your garden, but many of the growing things that we commonly dismiss as mere weeds can serve as food, medicine or both.  Mary gave us a good survey of some of the garden's more common unintended plants, and provided background about their uses and invasiveness.

We're using pictures taken during the tour as the basis for a weed identification photo gallery in the column at right.  It's a work in progress, and we plan to add to it as time goes on.