Soil remediation, sifting and trench composting at Prospect Farm.
A Farm Grows in an Empty Lot in Brooklyn

By Monique Peterson
Civil Eats
October 6th, 2010

Excerpt:

Since the inaugural groundbreaking, Prospect Farm has rooted into a community project, with a mission of producing local food as an alternative to industrial food—with diversity in both food production and membership. But even before future crop growers (and eaters) could think about what kinds of things to grow and where and how there was the issue of taking a hard look at what was underneath all that land and cleaning up what had long been buried there.

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Photos by BK Farmyards.

A severe hailstorm that wiped out 80-90% of our crops

By Nona Brooklyn
NonaBrooklyn Blog
October 14, 2010 

Excerpt:

On Monday night, as a line of powerful thunderstorms moved across Brooklyn, something that rarely happens in these parts began to unfold. Updrafts in the storm front’s giant cumulonimbus clouds pushed massive amounts of rain thousands of feet up into the atmosphere, where the raindrops began to freeze and coagulate into marble-sized balls of ice which quickly grew heavy enough to fall back onto our streets as hail. Millions of Brooklynites gawked in disbelief as close to an inch of ice pellets coated many neighborhoods in a matter of minutes, creating a fleeting (if unsettling) wintery fantasy. For most, it was all over in a matter of minutes. But for some of our urban farmers, it was a living nightmare and it was just beginning.

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