NEW YORK—Gardeners from all five boroughs swapped seeds, stories, and gardening tips at the 28th Annual GreenThumb GrowTogether at Hostos Community College in the Bronx on Saturday. About 1,200 community gardeners and greening professionals led and attended over 50 workshops, from gardening how-tos and grant-writing workshops to environmental film screenings.
“Everyone at GreenThumb is a doer,” said Helen Ho of crowd-funding resource nonprofit ioby. “They’re all neighborhood community members, they’re all involved in their community gardens, they’re all activists on their blocks, and so everyone here that we’ve been talking to is interested in getting more money [for their gardens and projects].”
A hallway of exhibitions highlighted green projects from hyper-local neighborhood composting to statewide resources.
Louise Bruce started a neighborhood composting project in Parkville where now 200 families drop off their food scraps and the compost is used for local public projects.
“There was a vacant corner lot that had great sun and I was just completely enamored with the plot and so I contacted the owner and pitched the idea,” Bruce said.
“What’s special and what works, I think, is that people start composting because they care about the environment, but they keep composting because they’ve met their neighbors composting and they feel safer and it’s that kind of energy that can’t be generated by putting a project on a neighborhood, it has to come from them,” Bruce said.
People have become more aware of eating, growing, and using resources locally in recent years.
