In honor of National Poetry Month, our blog Poetry Greenhouse welcomes submissions of poems honoring our Paulownia tree (soon to bloom). Submit up to three pages of unpublished poetry, no more than one poem per page. Include a brief bio and your neighborhood of residence. Send as a word doc or pdf attachment by May 15, 2013 to greene.acres at gmail.com.

The Kate Newby sculpture which we had hoped to acquire last autumn has been installed in the garden. Last week, rather than moving the piece from Ft. Greene Park
as initially planned, Kate created a new version especially for Greene Acres.

Longtime member Suzan Kwateng helped install the work, and reflects:

Save the dates! On Easter Sunday, March 31, we will have an egg hunt at 9am in the garden. On April 21, we will have a member potluck from 1-4pm to celebrate Earth Day and the growing season. Then, June 1 is our annual block party. Everyone is welcome.

During the season, garden meetings take place the second Monday of each month at 7pm in the garden. Work days take place the Saturday following the meeting from 11-3. New members are always welcome.

Join us Sunday at 2pm to celebrate a great season at Greene Acres. Carve a pumpkin, meet our new chickens and design them costumes, and take a whack at a scary pinata. We will be serving home-baked snacks, hot cider, and teas from the garden. Go on, ghoul!

NYRP will be hosting a phytoremediation workshop in the garden next Monday at 6:30 pm, before the meeting. All are welcome. Kaja Kühl will be speaking and will plant some portion of the communal bed with cover crop. More information:

http://www.nyrp.org/Calendar_Programs/Calendar/vw/3/itemid/927/d/20120910

Hope to see some of you there!

Join us tomorrow, June 2, for a block party and Unity Fest. 11am-6pm on Franklin Avenue between Clifton and Greene. Meet your neighbors and enjoy food, fun, games, educational events. Please move your cars from that block by 9am Saturday.

Looking for a place to drop kitchen scraps? You can join Greene Acres as a composting member. You won't have to attend meetings or host open hours, but you will have to help on at least one composting work day per year. If you actively help maintain the bins and turn the compost, you can take a bit home for your own use. A compost membership gets you a key to the garden and costs $5 per year, which we use to pay for keys, signs, outreach and hardware.

M E M B E R S H I P

Greene Acres is part of the New York Restoration Project, and we are a Greenthumb garden, which means that we are open to the public at least 10 hours a week during the spring, fall and summer. Everyone is welcome to stop in or sit and read under a tree when the garden is open. Children are always welcome, but they must be supervised. Dogs are welcome but must be on leashes.

Greene Acres is an organic garden -- we don't use chemical pesticides or fertilizer anywhere in the garden.

You must be a member of Greene Acres to have your own plot, but lots of people are members just so they can get into the garden whenever they want. Members are required to help maintain common areas, attend most monthly meetings, and host open hours at least 10 hours per season. Membership costs $10 a year, but before you can join the garden you must complete six hours of garden work during public hours. Once you have spent some time working in the garden you can join at any garden meeting. Once you are a member, you can get on the waiting list for your own bed, but if you don't have your own bed or don't have time to care for a whole bed yourself, 2/3 of the garden is set aside as common space that everyone can tend.