LaGuardia Corner Garden

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.