Gardening classes are back after a few years of hiatus due to the Front Common Area updates.

​A small group of students are breathing in, observing, composting, planting, weeding, watering...and experiencing time in the garden.  These classes were offered to waitlist and volunteer families; and this 2025 series filled up quickly. The last of a series of four summer classes will take place on July 13th. 

This cohort loves the compost critters as well as planting! They like weeding, too.  Thanks to Debbie in C section they have a place to grow potatoes, pole beans, corn, melons and a cucumber. They have also planted radishes, bush beans, and tomatoes alongside the kale in part of D-12. 

This week they had a surprise lesson on "Garden Salsa" when they learned a few steps to begin this "dance" with Associate, Nicolas Corona. 

On Sunday June 8th, Susan, Bonnie and her granddaughter, Carolina, and Jack spent the day with our extended community from Roosevelt Island and beyond.  

• Children decorated pots and plant flower or vegetable seeds. 
• People of all ages learned about ecosystems and our wildlife habitat with games and beautiful photos of the birds of Roosevelt Island. 

The RIGC table was right next to the Haki Compost table and volunteers were also sent over to the iDig2Learn planting space. Community gardeners, compost advocates, and bird photographers make life so beautiful. 
See our thank you note from RIOC community liaison office below. 

Recent events in the garden have included sun prints & watercolors for all ages, an afternoon visit from a Roosevelt Island Day Nursery class, and the first of a short series of garden classes with 9-13 year olds on Sundays from 4-5 p.m. ​

So good to be back outside together! 

Dear Devin and Big Reuse Team,

Compost is really cooking at RIGC! 

We were so happy to welcome one toter 275 pounds of RI food scraps to the RIGC compost system yesterday! We built bin four and can start monitoring the temps there now. A very welcome addition to our winter spring materials that are mainly browns.

Our team was all about this with Morgan, Carolina, Jérôme, Julia, Halima, and Jorg present for the main event. Jorg said he looks forward to continuing with this plan regularly...every month to six weeks.

We plan to continue to pilot this collaboration for local, local diversion of food scraps and compost creation in 2025 with our RIGC system and volunteers.

Many thanks to the hard working team from our maintenance crew who are working on borders in this mild December 2024. They were out on good days and on bad days and they made it all the way down the C-10 path!