Garden Report - May 2023

Kale, lettuce, spinach, onions, strawberries, garlic and beets are growing in their beds. Peas are reaching for their trellis and cucumbers are moving from the greenhouse to the garden this week. Carrots and squash are coming in next. New batches of seed trays will continue sprouting in the greenhouse and these successive waves of plantings will make for an extended harvest season. 

A big shout out to our volunteers who got us off to such a fast start this year.  The crew shows up regularly on Tuesday mornings and we can always use another pair of hands this time of year.  Please feel free to join us for an hour or two of friendly garden maintenance. We learn something every time we meet.

Hope to see you at the plant sale!

Maribeth Fuchs

Daphne Shuttleworth

Notes from the Compost Pile May 2023

Community composting is the talk of the East End.  And it’s not just talk! We’re actually scaling up and starting to compost on a community-wide basis. This is big news!

On Thursday May 11th, Riverhead became the first East End town to kick off the community composting era with a ribbon cutting ceremony at their new facility on Youngs Avenue, where they’ll accept drop-off food scraps from town residents.  Riverhead intends to mix the collected food scraps with yard waste to make their own compost.  This is the first 100% homegrown solution of its kind on Long Island (as far as we know). in which a town has been forward-looking enough to do something other than burning or burying its food waste.   

The Town of Southampton is not far behind and will launch a pilot program this summer. It will run out of their Westhampton Beach transfer station. As in the Riverhead program, Westhampton residents can bring their food scraps to a designated drop-off at the transfer station, where on-premises staff will mix in brown yard waste to create Southampton’s black gold.  

ECI will be working with the Town of Southampton to help launch this pilot project. Our primary responsibility will be to recruit and educate Westhampton residents who want to get involved. Pilot participation will initially be limited to 75 households.  If you are interested in learning more and would like to join the program, please click here and we’ll get back to you with more information in the next few weeks.

Tony Romano

Joe Lamport

Notes from the Compost Pile

Everything keeps decomposing very nicely this spring on the ECI compost piles - which is just the way we like it.   While the daffodils and tulips are bringing life back to the garden, we are working on our own colorful display of orange and banana peels, intermixed with wilted greens of every variety.    

As usual for this time of year, our stockpile of Black Gold (or finished compost) has been almost fully depleted, last year’s harvest having been spread onto the garden beds to freshen them up for spring planting.  But a new compost season has just begun and the volume of food scraps we collect each week continues growing.  We are on track to divert more than 15,000 pounds of food waste from the Southampton solid waste stream in 2023!

This year we are very pleased to welcome our first restaurant to the community compost program - the New Moon in East Quogue has started sending their kitchen scraps our way, rounding out the cycle of garden to kitchen back to the garden, which is so vital to maintaining the health of our environment.  Our volunteers are also still working closely with the East End Food Institute picking up some of the very tastiest food scraps from their test kitchen for delivery to our lucky local chickens. It’s not too late to sign up yourself, if you’re looking for an easy way to reduce your carbon footprint and improve local sustainability. Click here to sign up.

We’re also very excited to announce that ECI is in the process of finalizing arrangements with the Town of Southampton for setting up a pilot program this summer for community composting at one of the Town’s transfer stations.  This would be a first of its kind effort on Long Island to adopt best practices by adopting a 100% home grown solution.

The Garden Report - April 2023

As of the beginning of April we had 20 trays fully seeded in the green house, including assorted lettuces, spinach, basil, beets and kale.  You can almost taste the crunch of the first summer salad straight ahead!

By mid-April we will be preparing the next batch of seed trays with peppers and tomatoes. Followed soon thereafter by squashes, cucumbers, melons and more. Some root vegetables get sowed directly into the garden. In fact, the peas and onions are already beginning to take root in several beds along with a healthy crop of garlic. The green world doesn’t waste any time but gets right down to the task of performing more magic.

In the meanwhile, our volunteers have started laying down the spring layer of compost to make ready the beds. Seven out of our 18 beds are fully set for transplanting seedlings from the greenhouse, which usually begins around May 1st, weather permitting. That transplanting will continue, from greenhouse to garden, throughout May.                                                                                            

We have a good feeling about how the growing season is shaping up. We’ve made a couple improvements in the garden layout, including the installation of a few climbing trellises to see if we can get better production from our peas and melons. We are also in the process of making a major upgrade to the irrigation system, which should help improve the overall yield.  

Who says gardeners aren’t a competitive bunch?  Once again our sights are set on another record-breaking harvest, hoping to far surpass last year’s mark of 1,080 pounds of fresh food.  As usual, whatever we do harvest will be donated to Saint Rosalie’s food pantry in Hampton Bays. 

And let’s not forget the arthropods, or the birds for that matters.  Just adjacent to the vegetable beds, with a generous grant from ReWild Long Island, and help from a group of Hampton Bays home schoolers, we’ve been able to double the size of our pollinator garden this year, in the hopes of keeping all those essential garden helpers well fed and happy. 

Those of you who are interested in volunteering, we can always use another pair of hands, if you’re ready to get a little dirty and lend a hand with some digging and weeding. We usually manage to have some fun too. You’ll find us in the garden at St. Joe’s Villa on Tuesday mornings, from 9:30 to 11:30. 

And otherwise, please mark your calendars and try to join us for our Earth Day celebration on April 22nd, from 1:00 pm-5:00pm at the Villa, 81 Lynn Ave., Hampton Bays NY. We will have a large assortment of seeds on hand ( $1.00 requested donation per pack) so you can choose your garden favorites.

See you in the garden! 

Regards, 

Maribeth Fuchs and Daphne Shuttleworth

Garden Managers