This Saturday February 25, 11am-3pm, stop by to help put together our first raised bed. At Prospect Farm we use raised beds for starting seeds and growing small crops of plants we don’t want to grow in one of the main garden beds. Some of us have already started seeds indoors; if you’re interested in joining stop by and let us know.
In addition, our brand new tool shed is now mostly ready, but we’ll be adding hooks and shelves inside.
If you’re anywhere near Brooklyn, you know we’ve been getting more than our fair share of rain this month. For the garden, rain is generally a wonderful thing, but it’s frustrating to know that so much of what falls goes more or less unused. New York City is largely paved over (some would consider that an understatement), so when it rains, water runs over impermeable surfaces like asphalt and cement that can’t absorb it. Often it ends up as combined sewer overflow, merging with our waste water and forcing polluted water into NYC rivers.
Recently Prospect Farm became part of the solution to this problem, while also shoring up our own water supplies, enabling us to store rainwater during a shower and use it later when we need it. We installed a rainwater harvesting tank!
The tank, located on an adjacent property that belongs to the Farm’s founder, can hold up to 155 gallons of rainwater. It is fed by rain gutters that connect to the rooftop of the property. About 500 gallons of rainwater can be collected from a 1,000 square-foot roof when we receive an inch of rainfall, so the tank can easily be filled by a decent rain shower (more info here). The tank, in turn, is connected to a hose that reaches to the garden. (The tank is raised on a platform to provide water pressure.)
So far, our garden seems to love the harvested rainwater (as does the water bill!). Good thing, too, since it looks like there’s plenty more headed our way.
Here are the numbers from harvest week 6 (August 7-13):
Tomatoes: 24 lbs
Cherry tomatoes: 10 lbs
Cucumber: 3.75 lbs
Kale: 2.25 lbs
Collard greens: 1 lb
Mark Bittman has a series of recipes designed to make the most of summer’s best tomatoes. Good thing, because we’re still raking them in, though the rate is beginning to slow down.
This week we harvested:
My harvest take this week
Hi everyone,
Students from my high school’s Environmental Club and I have been working on some designs for the concrete wall at the back of the farm during the spring and summer. As we’ve worked we’ve shown the sketches to some people in the farm, but I figured that now that we have two designs pretty much finalized I’d show them to everyone and we can have a vote to determine which one we should paint.
I hope you like them!
—Yasmin
Check this out: Prospect Farm Gazpacho! Joseph gave us permission to add this to the Prospect Farm website.
Photo & Food by:
joseph brancaccio | chef | owner
3011 Fort Hamilton Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11218
Tel: 718.435.1997
www.brancacciosfoodshop.com
Farmers, our long national nightmare is over: after months of watering day and night, watching the tomatoes torture us with their stubborn greenness, imagining they would never ripen (ok maybe this was just me)… it is finally tomato time. Real tomato time, not silly little cherry tomato time.
After taking their sweet time through June and the first half of July, the tomatoes now can’t seem to stay on the vine. We went from zero tomatoes on July 20th to more than 20 pounds on July 30. And wouldn’t you know, they’re just delicious? I’m just starting to explore what to do with my bounty – luckily, the New York Times anticipated our dilemma and put out this series of summer-tomato recipes. I’m making the tomato stracciatella tonight!
It wasn’t all tomatoes, of course. Here’s a rundown of Prospect Farm’s harvests over the last two weeks:
July 20 & 23
July 27 & 30
On July 23rd we also sold a little of our harvest to neighborhood restaurants like the Brooklyn Commune and Crossroads Cafe:
Weekly harvest totals:
Week 3: 43.2 lbs
Week 4: 60.6 lbs (WOW!)
Other exciting developments: We have planted eggplant, a gift from a kind friend of the Farm. And the peppers have finally started to grow in!
Another fantastic week for harvesting at Prospect Farm! The cherry tomatoes are coming in like gangbusters and the garden has been generous with summer squash as well, including some massive zucchini! Most exciting for this novice farmer has been the basil, which is so much lovelier than any basil I’ve ever bought, whether from a grocery store or a farmer’s market. We’re growing types of basil I’d never heard of, including lime basil, with a fragrance will bowl you over!
We’re still waiting for the big tomatoes to ripen, but the first comer is starting to announce its arrival. And! – a new sight in the last ten days has been blackberries! No one was sure whether the blackberry bush would yield anything this year and it’s exciting watching them grow in.
We did not eat for free – a harvest day usually means a work day as well. We put in a few hours staking unweildy tomatoes and cleaning up the beds a bit, making sure the little things like basil don’t get completely shaded by giant things like squash leaves. It feels good to work for my food, but this tiny taste of agricultural labor is giving me a new appreciation for the effort that goes into making food on the scale of a true farm!
Here are our totals for last week’s harvests (July 13th and 16th):
Cherry tomatoes: 15.5 pounds (plus half a pound of green cherry Ts that had fallen from the vine)
Zucchini: 8.5 pounds
Cucumbers: 3.75 pounds
Kale: 1.6 pounds
Collards: 1.5 pounds
Peas: 1.55 pounds
Fennel: 1 pound
Basil: 1 oz
Total food harvested: 33.4 pounds!
It’s been 2-3 months since seeds/starter plants went into the ground, and by last week the Farm was finally ready to beginning harvesting some of the bounty! The members harvested on July 7 and July 9 (see many more pictures here).
For me – a new Prospect Farm member who had never set foot in a garden until this spring – the harvest was a chance to draw connections in my brain between the soil, the labor I’ve put in, and the delicious food I get to eat. I also learned a lot about process – how to tell when the peas are ready to pick, the proper technique for pinching leaves off of kale or collard plants, and that it’s okay to eat the green cherry tomatoes that have fallen off the vine prematurely.
All year long Prospect Farm will be recording the bounty of its harvests for a project called Farming Concrete, whose goal is to measure how much food is grown in NYC community gardens. We’re keeping a tally of how much of each crop we harvest. Here are the first week’s approximate totals (July 7 and July 9 combined):
Cherry tomatoes: 4 lbs 3 oz (about 180 cherry tomatoes)
cucumbers: 3 lbs 10 oz
zuccini: 10 lbs 12 oz
curly kale: 10 oz
regular kale: 1 lb 7 oz
collards: 12 oz
chard: 3.5 oz
mustard greens: 5 oz
peas: 1 lb 4 oz
basil: 2.5 oz
sage: 0.25 oz
oregano: 0.75 oz
squash blossoms: 0.6 oz
Total food harvested in week one: about 23 lbs 6 oz.
Each farm member chose to take evenly divided shares of some or all of the crops harvested on either Wednesday or Saturday. For my part, I left on Wednesday evening with 15 cherry tomatoes, a few sprigs of basil and sage, a few pea pods, half a large cucumber and more greens than you could shake a stick at. I enjoyed the food all week long in tomato sauces, sage-buttered pasta, sauteed greens with garlic and lemon juice, salads and more. It’s been a delicious week and I’m looking forward to my next harvest!
Hi,
This i my first post and my first year as a member of the Prospect Farm. I hope everyone enjoys the pictures of the harvest.
