It's My Park Day! POSTPONED!!!

Join our volunteers and friends at Lentol Garden from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on October 25, 2008 for It's My Park Day!

Shucks! Due to rain and other nasty weather predictions, It's My Park Day! at Lentol Garden has been postponed! The rain date in November 8, 2008 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

In the mean time, feast your eyes on the beautiful flyers designed by Jackie G., our intrepid Friends of Lentol Garden volunteer designer/gardener/multitasking busy-bee. Thanks Jackie!

Becoming a Member of Lentol Garden

Unless you become a member of Friends of Lentol Garden, the volunteer organization charged with managing the garden, access to the space is limited to when the garden's gates are open. Sadly, New York City Parks and Recreation requires that a volunteer from Friends of Lentol to be present for the public-at-large to gain entrance into this wonderful neighborhood treasure.

Fortunately, it's easy and fun to join Friends of Lentol Garden! Simply shoot an email to: lentolgarden@gmail.com to set up a meeting with one of our current volunteers. From there, we will take you through a few simple steps that will result in your full-fledged membership.

Though the details are still being worked out within our membership committee, it looks like the process will resemble this:
1. An annual $50 membership fee to pay for operating expenses.
2. A monthly time commitment on Sundays from 1-4 p.m., March 1 through November 15, to keep the gates open.
3. Participation in our bi-annual park clean-up event, coinciding with "It's My Park Day," held city-wide during the spring and fall.

What will this get you?
1. A key to the gate! With a key, you can come and enjoy the park at your own leisure.
2. Gardening privileges! A reserved spot on our horticulture team gives you the opportunity to play in the dirt, propose new projects and beautify the space.
3. An invitation to participate in the collective, crowd-sourced administration process of the garden through our GoogleGroups account.
4. Invitations to member events like cocktail parties, pot-lucks and happy hours.
5. The oppurtunity to become part of Lentol Garden's oversight team.

If you would like to simply play in the dirt without actually joining the garden, it's as simple as showing up any Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. to volunteer your labor. A member will provide you tools and directions and you'll be on your way!

We are always exploring new ways of making Lentol Garden an important part of the community. If you have any comments, suggestions, questions or requests, feel free to leave a comment on the blog or email us diectly! Thanks!

Photos and more!

Hello curious spectators, today we have some spankin' new photos to show off along with our update.

First, the business: Last Sunday a few folks got together and made some wonderful, hand-painted signs to inform neighbors and community members that Lentol Garden is active, thriving and SEEKING VOLUNTEERS!!!! That's right, we're officially starting phase one of our ambitious plan to breath new life into the garden. This first phase, which we will be implementing over the winter months while the garden hibernates, consists of four parts in no particular order:

a. recruiting and organizing volunteers
b. researching and planning a vision for the garden
c. coordinating and facilitating fund raising activities
d. researching and networking community resources



Now the fun stuff:
I walked around the garden yesterday with my camera and made a few photos.

I know, this one is a little too creepy to start with, but there is something hauntingly beautiful about his photo. This poor house fly picked the florets of a broccoli plant to live out his final days, and there he remains, lost to eternity.

Click on the photo to see all the gallery from October 3, 2008!

Milkweed

This email came to us last week from Myriah, one of our garden volunteers, regarding milkweed (Asclepias L.).

"...It's what monarch butterflies lay their eggs on, then the caterpillars eat and build their chrysalis on the milkweed. We've got a ton of monarchs on the butterfly bush by the gate, so I'm sure if we're patient we can have some baby monarchs flying around. Seeing the butterfly "hatch" from the chrysalis is an awesome thing to observe if you haven't see it before.

Anyhow, here's a pic of milkweed, so you know what I'm referring to:
http://www.wildernessrhythms.com/rope/milkweed.JPG

when you break the leaves they drip a milky white substance.
And a bit more on the process
http://ed.fnal.gov/entry_exhibits/insect/monarch.html"

Thanks for the heads up, Myriah!

In other news, we are making some new, hand-painted signage this week to reflect our new online presence and volunteer efforts. We've also completed a very large portion of or Graham Ave. entrance clean up. We encourage everyone to take a look at our progress!

September 14, 2008 Garden Update

Greetings! Here we have some photos of our most recent accomplishment at the garden: a cleared space in the dirt! It may not look like much, but it took two of the stalwart garden volunteers quite a while to clean up this section. As you might be able to deduce, we are pulling all the weeds from from the ground, individually at times, in order to clear some space for beautiful native plant beds! This, the Graham St. entrance, gets quite a bit of foot traffic. We would love to make it look pleasant for our neighbors and the community. Our plans for this section are still nebulous. The parks department has recommended that we "keep it low maintenance" back here, but it is quite tempting to let our botanical imaginations run wild. Hopefully, we can find a pleasant compromise between "weedy lot" and "beloved greenspace."




















From this view, you can really see a big difference from the state of this parcel even one week ago! Too bad we don't have a "before" photo to display.

After working today, we took a little walk around the Bayard section of the garden to look at the "problem plants" that are taking over the front beds. Since we're not experts in this sort of thing yet, we haven't identified what this species is called.



As you can see, it's some sort of vine. We haven't seen it flower as of right now.










And finally, to the left here, you can see some strange aphid-like bugs that were slowly killing this plant. We don't quite know what these guys are called, either.

Mission Statement

So it has been decided that we need to post our plan for little Lentol Garden, or maybe it's better to say our "vision."

First, a brief historical profile. As you might have read in the profile section, Lentol Garden is a memorial to Greenpoint resident Edward S. Lentol (1909-1981): New York State Assemblyman, Democratic senator and State Supreme Court judge. In 1992, Lentol Garden was named into law with the NYC Parks and Recreation and the Bayard Block Association joining forces to transform the site from a "public eyesore" to a beautiful ornamental garden and habitat.

Lentol Garden in it's current state would not exist without community and neighborhood support, and volunteer efforts. In fact, volunteers are Lentol's greatest resource. Since 1992, Lentol has seen various amounts of volunteer support and leadership, that's why the garden can look overgrown and unmaintained one year, then look beautiful and thriving the next.

People often wonder why Lentol's gates are perpetually closed and the answer is simple: According New York City law, a garden volunteer must be present for the gates to be open. And at present, we simply don't have enough volunteers to make that happen most of the time. The nature of volunteer support can be ephemeral without long-term organization and vision. That's something we aim to improve.

Hard-working folks have to sacrifice their time and effort to make anything happen in the garden. To provide incentive, we feel that volunteers need to form a meaningful bond with the space. Whether through digging in the soil, pulling weeds or simply relaxing in the grass, we want to provide our volunteers with a sense of pride, community, and dare we say, ownership. We want people to feel as enthusiastic about the space as we do, and for that to happen, people need to make it their own in their hearts.

Lentol Garden can fulfill our natural urge to form community bonds, while beautifying our streets and educating the public about urban gardening and the importance of sustainability. To make this happen, we must increase our volunteer ranks. As the autumn approaches and the days get shorter, we plan on having standing volunteer hours every Saturday from 1pm to 3pm.

The internet plays a large role in this plan. Sites like this one can provide a rallying point and bulletin board for interested parties, email will connect prospective volunteers with the folks who can get them started. Like a little seedling breaking through the soil, this blog and a new crop of volunteers are trying once again to breath life into this overlooked neighborhood treasure.

Another Garden Update!

The Lentol volunteer squad was out again yesterday, braving the gigantic, swarming Brooklyn mosquitoes in the continuing push to clean up the Graham Ave. portion of the garden. There's no doubt about it, the work is dirty, sweaty manual labor. But it's a labor of love! Here's how it goes down:

First, We simply use a large, flat head shovel to literally scrape the weeds from the ground. Technically speaking, it's not the best method for weed removal but the sheer density of plant life (and the lack of strong backs to manually pull the little plants out by the roots) requires drastic action! Next, we use a rake to separate the plants from the top soil. Finally, we put the dispatched organic matter into the compost pile and redistribute the topsoil to its original location. Sounds fun, right?