The Sunday before Halloween was another big day in the garden. We had organized a pre-Halloween crafts workshop. We got pumpkins to carve and learned how to fold cool origami bats that flap their wings.
Because we had listed this event on the Parks Department website, people came from all over New York. We welcomed a family from Harlem, one from Queens, tourists from Taiwan and some of our neighbors. The weather was perfect and we all had a blast. At one point, we ran out of pumpkins and had to rush to buy more.
No further words needed, the pictures speak for themselves:
At the end of the day, we proudly displayed three pumpkins near our gates. Equipped with a battery light, they glowed every evening for a couple of weeks.
This was such a fun event that we decided to make it a tradition for every year.
Aside from beautiful flowers, our garden grows a variety of fruit and vegetables. Everybody who has the tiniest bit of land wants to grow their own delicious tomatoes. Some of our gardeners plant much more than that: different varieties of cucumbers, okra, tomatillos, asparagus, kale, asian squash, carrots, radishes, many different herbs and even zucchini. We also have raspberries and blackberries and a few fruit trees of which the fig tree is the most prolific. Nothing beats the sweetness of a fig that has ripened on the tree.
Beautiful red raspberries and tomatoes and ripe figs tempt everybody to pick them. And so it happens that strangers can’t help themselves from helping themselves to the juiciest fruit. When gardeners come at the end of the day to harvest what they planted, it is often gone. That’s frustrating. Even more frustrating is when not only fruit and some flowers disappear, but also entire plants. This was the case this summer, and it made us sad and a little angry. Don’t people know that a public garden is there for everyone to enjoy and that the plants, flowers and fruit are not up for grabs? Don’t people know that the gardener who plants a flower and takes care of it wants to see it thrive? — Maybe people don’t know these things.
This is why we decided to put a gallery of pictures at our fence that explain what this community garden means to us and why it is special and should be treated with respect. We installed this exhibit on a weekend in September when the community garden association LUNGS started their annual Harvest Arts Festival.
The contributions were poems, photos, drawings and thoughtful texts by gardeners and visitors.
Passersbys stop to take a look and read. We don’t know if this helps with tomato-thefts, but it helped us feel better and happier about our little piece of green.
As in previous years, Johannes, our butterfly expert, collected eggs and small caterpillars of monarch butterflies to let them grow up in a safe environment (his apartment), free of predators and parasites. This is not an easy feat! Each little larva needs fresh milkweed to eat all the time; and as we all know, caterpillars are very very hungry. When they have grown up, they need just the right place to pupate. Finally, the adult butterflies needs a safe place to dry out their new wings before they can go out into the world. Considering all of this, it is amazing that Johannes could raise a stunning number of 159 monarchs this year!
Johannes often recruits garden members or neighbors and their children to help him let the young butterflies fly.
In late August and September, when the season ends, monarchs are preparing for their fall migration. The butterflies that hatch at this time of the year are larger and stronger than earlier ones. They also don’t have developed ovaries or testes. Their entire body is tuned for flying.
For the longest time, it was a complete mystery where monarchs go in winter. Now, we know that they fly all the way to Mexico. Scientists found out about this because people applied a small tag to a wing of tens of thousands of monarchs in the hope that some of them would be found later somewhere else on the migration route. And it worked. A few monarchs tagged in the northern part of America were found in cool mountain forests in Mexico, where millions of them are roosting on the branches of fir trees. They stay there until Spring. Then, they fly back north until they reach a place in Florida or Texas where milkweed is growing. There, the next generation of monarchs grows up. When these are adult, they fly further north. It takes several generations until the butterflies reach New York again. This is why we don’t see them until July.
The mystery of the monarch migration is still not fully solved. For one thing, we don’t know by which route Monarchs reach their winter homes and how they know where they have to go. After all, no butterfly that is embarking on this journey has ever done it before. More tagging is needed to find out.
Of course, the scientists can’t tag so many butterflies all by themselves. They enlist regular people to help with this task. These citizen scientists are often school children and students, but also gardeners at LaGuardia Corner Garden! This year, we tagged about 70 male and female migrating monarchs. If we are very lucky, one of them will be found by another citizen scientists somewhere between here and Mexico. We would be more than thrilled.
A few years ago, one of our gardeners introduced the native passion flower (Passiflora incarnata) into the garden. This plant is fascinating and also a bit of a menace. It seems to really love it in our garden. Thus, it grows very fast and and spreads via root runners underground by several feet every year. But it can be controlled, and the flowers are so unusual and stunning! There is no other plant about which we get more questions and comments than this passion flower.
And boy, do bees love these flowers! In August, we cut back a few passion vines and put the flowers into a vase. Within minutes, half a dozen honeybees buzzed around this bouquet. Unfortunately for the plant, honeybees are too small to pollinate the flowers. They can easily walk to the nectar without ever touching the reproductive parts of the flower.
Carpenter bees love passion flowers, too, and they are big enough to pollinate them (the photo shows a female carpenter bee that was marked by the native bee scientists).
Nevertheless, as far as I know, we still wait to taste a ripe passion fruit from our own vines. They are supposed to be quite delicious and full of vitamins. Maybe next year.
While in Spring and early summer, the color palette of our flowers is dominated by pinks and pale blues, in summer, the garden got really bright with different colors. As soon as the Helianthus, Heliopsis (sunflowers), Rudbeckia (black eyed susans and rlatives) and Coreopsis are blooming, sunny yellow shows up everywhere. Here are some photos to remind us how lovely the garden looked in July:
Ericas Echinacea were just stunning this year.
The patio pots were pretty, too.
We will have to wait for several months to see this display again, but the garden needs to sleep for a while to keep everything happy and healthy.
