October Happenings
Upcoming events
All of our events are free and open to the public.
At garden meetings, you can meet other garden members, learn how to get involved, and become a member. At garden workdays, all are welcome, no experience necessary. Tasks include pruning, weeding, composting, and repairs.
- Saturday October 3, 2pm-4pm: Natural Dyes and Inks Workshop Make your own mini kotodama book and handkerchief. Kotodama means the spirit of words or the soul of language in Japanese. Fabric and paper dip & dye, stencil print, leaf and stamp print, natural ink drawing. Led by our artists in residence. Rain date Sat Oct 10 2pm-4pm.
- Sunday October 4, 11am-12pm: Garden meeting.
- Sunday October 4, 12pm-9pm: LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival. Postponed from September due to weather. Multi-day celebration with arts and music performances in community gardens across the Lower East Side. See lungsnyc.org for up-to-date schedule.
- Saturday October 11, 11am-12:30pm: How to Look at Plants: Observing Your Urban Ecosystem workshop. In street tree beds and parks, along roadsides and inside abandoned lots, within forests and wetlands, the city is full urban plant communities with interesting stories. What are they up to and how do we find out? At the garden, we will look closely at plants together and understand their relationships with their environment, each other, animals, and humans. Rain or shine, cancelled for heavy rain or thunderstorms.
- Saturday October 17, 2pm-4pm: Pam Pier's Memorial
- Sunday October 18, 11am-12pm: Garden meeting.
- Sunday October 18, 12pm-2pm: Garden workday.
- Saturday October 24, 10am-1pm: GreenThumb Fall Distribution
- Saturday October 24, 12pm-5pm: Natural Dye Artist in Residency Exhibit
Some things we worked on last month
- Design and arrangement, purchasing plants from nurseries, and planting for a new native plant garden.
- Continuing the artist-in-residence program, Kotodama: Weaving Words and Nature. Artists have created natural dyes and inks using plants in the garden. They are inviting visitors to contribute a word that expresses hope, wish, memory, or feeling you want to carry with you to the collective Accordion Book of Kotodama.
At the Garden
Spicebush swallowtail caterpillar! It likely came from the plant nursery with along with our new spicebush plant. The spicebush swallowtail caterpillar feeds on the leaves of spicebush and sassafras. This caterpillar is in the prepupa stage, meaning it has stopped eating, become inactive, and is transitioning between the larval stage and the pupal stage. We're looking forward to welcoming a spicebush swallowtail butterfly soon!
See you at the garden,
Catherine