Posted August 06, 03:08 PM CST by sandramc
Dear Members and Friends of SFNYC:
We are starting our sixth week of programming at our Neighborhood farm’lets’ and we’d love to share with you the work that we have been doing and the fun we have been having this summer. We have been working with over 60 children throughout the summer who live in areas where there is a high risk of diabetes and there is very little access to fresh, healthy food.
Please visit our Blog:
neighborhoodfarmsnyc.wordpress.com
and check out the NY1 Story that came out this week:
www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/123185/kids-give-brooklyn-garden-green-thumbs-up
On the weekend of September 25th and 26th we will be hosting a workday and a big potluck at our Ujima site. Stay tuned. We’d love to have you come out and share the weekend with us.
Happy Summer!
Sandra,
Slow Food NYC Chair
Posted June 04, 10:06 PM CST by sunil2
School Librarian Leads Edible Garden Efforts
Press Release (), published online 05-27-2010
PARK SLOPE – P.S. 295, Studio School of Art and Culture, nestled between Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park, is about to get a whole lot greener.
The school’s librarian, Susan Weseen, is spearheading several initiatives to educate all students at the school about gardening and the importance of knowing where nutritious food comes from.
Through Ms. Weseen’s efforts, P.S. 295 was recently adopted by Slow Food NYC to participate in its Harvest Time Project, which provides schools with financial assistance to support good food education.
Beginning June 5, P.S. 295 will be building 10 raised garden beds in the schoolyard and creating a mobile kitchen cart that will enable students to plan, grow, harvest and cook the food and herbs they’ve grown.
In addition, she continues to co-facilitate a gardening class in the school’s after school program, which has planted and tended to two local community gardens.
In addition to providing funding and hands-on support, Slow Food NYC also connected Ms. Weseen with Hans Hesselein, a Park Slope-based landscape architect who designed the garden beds.
“Through the Harvest Time program, each one of our students will learn about the process of growing food from the ground up,” said Ms. Weseen.
“This is so important for so many reasons: learning about where their food comes from; developing a new palate for healthy food and hard work; developing all the skills it takes to grow produce successfully; and experiencing the pride and joy that comes from working together to accomplish a goal. All of this doesn’t stay in the garden — it transfers back into the classroom in terms of motivation and engagement, not to mention the development of a wide range of skills from problem-solving to understanding cause and effect.“
Ms. Weseen, gardening students and volunteers including parents and members of Slow Food NYC will begin the build-out of the raised beds on Saturday, June 5. Compost will be delivered later in the month and starting in the last few weeks of school, students will begin planting the first crops including lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, nasturtiums, cilantro, swiss chard, peppers and basil.
The Truck Farm is also visiting P.S. 295’s current school garden on Thursday, May 27 at 9 a.m. as part of their east coast tour to encourage students to think about where their food comes from and to get excited about growing food themselves. All students at P.S. 295 who have been involved with gardening over the past four years will be meeting with the filmmakers and will then share their experience with the rest of the school later this year.
See original story:
www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=31&id=35717
Posted May 26, 08:05 PM CST by sunil2
A note from Sandra McLean, Slow Food NYC Leadership Committee Chair:
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Dear All!
Ujima Youth Garden, the flagship Slow Food NYC Neighborhood Farm, is halfway built! Last Friday and Saturday we welcomed close to 40 volunteers who helped for 2 days. They came on foot, by bus and car, subway and bike. We were an eager and diverse group which included staff from Slow Food USA, Slow Food NYC members, WATCH High School students, interns from the Clinton Foundation and neighbors from the community, all who lent us their hearts, minds and backs.
We spent our first day cutting brush, digging out stumps, clearing rocks and chopping down trees. At the end of the day, we were left with a beautiful 40′ x 100′ open space graced with a 30′ birch, 2 flowering rose bushes and a towering northern pine that we couldn’t bear to chop down. We spent our second day grading the land and digging the beds in preparation for our soil, mulch and compost delivery. East New York Farms! donated all the tools for the volunteers to use and Brooklyn Botanic Garden donated plants and planting mix.
Kate Ortenzi, Sonya Kharas and Lisa Chodorkoff, our inspring lead educators, started work on Monday. We made plans for community outreach, curriculum writing and assistant teacher training. We will be meeting daily over the next month to write our proprietary curriculum, plan field trips, train the assistant teachers, do community outreach, recruit 12 students for each garden, start our Neighborhood Farms Blog and integrate our Neighborhood Farms program into the three communities where we will be hosting our “Good Food and Gardens” program.
On June 4th and 5th, we will host round two of our volunteer workdays when we will plant our farm. Our day will start with building a 1000 square foot spiral vegetable bed (straight rows are so old school!). Did anyone say backbreaking?At the same time, we will be building a children’s garden in the front of the site which will have a flagstone meeting area surrounded by a “Three Sisters Garden” and bean tepees big enough to crawl inside!
June 6th, we will host our first community open house at Ujima where we will accept applications for the summer program which is for 9 – 12 year olds and starts on July 6th and runs through August 20th. At our other 2 sites, Heckscher Foundation Children’s Garden and McLeod Garden – two gorgeous NYRP properties – we will host open houses on June 12th at 11am.
On June 26th and 27th – our final volunteer days – we will start building a chicken coop and prepare for our bees which will be coming in the Fall. Once the children leave the garden at the end of August, WATCH High School students will be coming in to take over and run the garden through the school year.
Come and visit! Come and Volunteer! We can’t build our Neighborhood Farm without your help!
Upcoming Volunteer Dates:
June 4th; 11am – 4pm
June 5th; 11am – 4pm
June 26th
June 27th
If you are interested in volunteering or want more information, contact Kate at GoodFoodAndGardens@gmail.com
And always, if you can’t volunteer but would like to make a donation to Neighborhood Farms, you can do so at www.SlowFoodNYC.org/donate.
Cheers!
Sandra
Posted December 02, 10:12 PM CST by sunil2
by Ed Yowell
Slow Food NYC is wrapping up the third successful season of a weekly fresh produce stand at The Children’s Storefront, a school in East Harlem, one of the City’s “food deserts,” where fresh food is a scarce commodity.
At the stand, students, aided by volunteering Slow Food members and school staff sell local produce, acquired from Greenmarket farmers, to other kids, parents, teachers, and neighbors. About eight kids will have worked afternoon shifts during the season, from September through November. They learn math, “If carrots are $1 a pound, how much does 1/2 pound cost?” , spelling, “How do you spell Broccoli?”, entrepreneurship, “Hello, please come to our stand.”, and customer relations, “May I help you?, “Thank you for shopping with us.”
And they learn about real, local food, biodiversity, and taste. When they make produce signs, the kids learn that we don’t just have potatoes, we have Adirondack Red Potatoes and Adirondack Blue Potatoes, as well as Russets, Red, and White. (And they can now spell Adirondack.) We have Yellow, Purple, and White Cauliflowers and Butternut, Carnival, Buttercup, Sweet Dumpling, and Delicata Winter Squash. And each week we have at least three different apple varieties, having garnered recently some customer complaints, “Where are those brown apples (Golden Russet) you had last week? They were the best apples I ever ate”.
Grown-up volunteers give cooking advice, “The Calville Blanc apple is the best for pie.”, “Cut the Sweet Dumpling Squash in half, take out the seeds, bake it, and than mash it with a little butter and cinnamon.”
And, perhaps most importantly, apples are becoming one of the more popular after-school snacks. At the end of each market day, unsold produce goes into the school cafeteria to appear on lunch menus during the week..roasted Adirondack Red and Blue Potatoes are popular.
The stand is not a break-even proposition. We can’t sell fresh, local produce for more than the not-as-fresh, not-so-local produce available at a corner bodega or at the nearest supermarket, about six blocks away. The produce stand is part of the Slow Food NYC Harvest Time program. We are also working with two schools in Williamsburg and one on the Lower East Side. The schools all have edible gardens and good food education programs and, at one, kids sell produce they grow.
The funds that support Harvest Time have been almost solely the result of the support received through your attendance at Slow Food NYC events. With the continued support of Slow Food NYC members and friends, the produce stand will be back in East Harlem next year. If you’d like to support the Slow Food NYC Harvest Time program, you can click here, make a donation, any amount is a great help, and designate it for Harvest Time.
Posted June 29, 10:06 PM CST by Matt
Looking for a little bite of something good, clean and fair? Check out the Slow Food NYC Snail of Approval website to find out what’s local, sustainable and delicious in the Big Apple. Our newest Snail of Approval winners are: Smith Street favorite Lunetta, Ditmas Park outpost The Farm on Adderley, Williamsburg winners Diner, Marlow and Sons and Marlow and Daughters, Park Slope newcomer Get Fresh Table and Market, East Village eateries Momofuku Noodle Bar and Momofuku Ssam Bar, and green restaurant innovator Rouge Tomate. Congratulations and thanks for everything you do.
And if you don’t see your favorite Slow foodists on the list, nominate them! Slow Food members can nominate any food enterprise that contributes to the quality, sustainability and authenticity of our food supply for a Snail of Approval by simply filling out the online nomination form. You’ll be helping them to get through these tough economic times, and you’ll be helping your fellow members to find the food that’s best, cleanest and fairest.
Posted March 19, 09:03 PM CST by sunil2
Over 50 Restaurants, Over 25 Nations Represented
New York, NY (March 17, 2009) – The second annual Village Voice “Choice Eats” tasting event is now officially sold out. The event, which takes place on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan, features only restaurants reviewed by celebrated resident food critics, Robert Sietsema from his column “Counter Culture” and Sarah DiGregorio from her weekly column “Fork in the Road.” This year, the amount of restaurants has doubled with over 50 restaurants and over 25 nations being represented under one roof for only one night.
Last year, hungry New Yorkers gathered at the historic Puck building to navigate through over 25 restaurants from all the five boroughs where they experienced a diverse culinary landscape and enjoyed tasty treats that would otherwise require days of travel. New York Magazine proclaimed it “…a global cheap-eats summit. No self-respecting New York gastronaut should consider doing anything else that night.”
“Choice Eats” will be benefiting Slow Food NYC, who will also serve as host of the event. The New York City chapter of Slow Food USA is a non-profit, member-supported organization dedicated to counteracting the industrialization of our food supply. A portion of ticket sales will go to their new program, Harvest Time which promotes programs of good food and nutrition education, including hands-on food preparation and communal dining, edible school gardens, and student operated farm stands offering local farm-fresh produce at three schools in East Harlem and Williamsburg, neighborhoods identified as food deserts by the City’s Health Department with high rates of food related diseases like obesity and diabetes.
Official sponsors for “Choice Eats” 2009 include Whole Foods who will be setting up a storefront and serving local mini brownie sundaes, Southern Wines featuring Antinori, Castello banfi, Pallini Limoncello, Gosling’s Rum, Boru Vodka, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Ramazzotti, Distillerie- Brusnel, Nando, Francis Ford Coppola, Frederick Wildman, Palm Bay International, Partida tequila, Prairie Organic Vodka, Tommy Bahama, Michael Collins, Cognac, Svedka Vodka, Fcognac Ferrand, Union Beer featuring Victory Brewing Co., Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Magic Hat Brewing Co., Brewery Ommegang, Left Hand Brewing Co., Samuel Smith, Lindeman’s, Chimay, Smuttynose Brewing Co., Allagash Brewing Co., and Blue Point Brewing Co., Volvic natural spring water, Likeme.net, New York Bartending School, The Brooklyn Kitchen, Extremely Hungary, Smart Car, and Action Carting who is the official green sponsor.
All utensils, cups and compost bags are made from annually renewable plant derived plastic resins; all plates are made from sugarcane fibers; napkins are made from unbleached, recycled paper.
“Choice Eats” tickets will not be sold at the door. You must be 21+ to attend, the event starts at 6:30pm and concludes at 9:30pm. The 69th Regiment Armory is located at 68 Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th streets in Manhattan.
For More Information Please Contact:
Christina Pettit / The Village Voice
cpettit@villagevoice.com
212-475-6836
choiceeats.villagevoice.com
