I’m very excited to announce that Artfully Unforgotten has embarked on its first creative “green” adventure and has partnered with Sure We Can (SWC), a recycling facility, and Musgo, a food justice group, to build The Recyclers’ Farm & Garden!

Through a ton of hard work and cooperation on the site of the SWC facility in Bushwick, we have helped grow a luscious community garden using almost solely re-purposed materials and un-recyclable bottles, all of which would simply otherwise have been dumped in the local landfills.

Interestingly enough, most of the garden is “mobile,” meaning that the plants are grown in milk crates that are transportable as necessary. The raised flower beds also ensure that the soil in which the edible plants are grown is clean and clear of toxins that have infiltrated the land for years.

These are just a couple of the important best practices on urban gardening that we’ve learned from organizations who have helped spear-head the local community garden movement in NYC including Greenthumb, Compost for Brooklyn and even the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. And it’s truly incredible to see how many hard-working groups have their hands in this metropolitan green movement and how eager they are to share what they’ve learned and forge partnerships to make the movement even stronger.

In addition to the ton of vegetables and plants that we’ve planted and are now slowly reaching for the sky, we have also built a greenhouse to ensure that the venture can continue during the colder months, as well as a chicken coup for the six hens that we received as a donation from the Peter Maurin Farm in Marlbough, NY. We can proudly say that the chickens are happy and healthy and didn’t even skip a beat in terms of laying eggs, which often happens when there’s a change of habitat.

But what we are most proud of us that by bringing together people from the local community, the canners and in particular, the hard-working students of the Brooklyn Latin School across the street, we have been able to create not only a vibrant garden, painted and colorful, but also a venue where educational and arts workshops are taking place and also where people of the community come to spend time, check on their plants, tell stories about the foods they ate as children and share knowledge about their cultures.

We look forward to finding other creative ways to use this space and imaginative ways to “up-cycle” everyday items to be the basis of arts projects in the Recyclers’ Urban Farm & Garden. By organizing local neighborhood events and workshops in the garden, we are not only strengthening the local community, but also continuing to discover how one man’s refuse is another man’s treasure.

Let us know if you’d like to join us.