What a Difference a Water Tank Makes: Rain Relief for Community Garden

A Harlem community garden goes green with new eco-friendly water system.

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By Poppie Mphuthing

To get their spinach and collard greens watered, members of Harlem’s St. Nicholas Miracle Garden have had to run a hose from their city lot farm to a fire hydrant on the street.

Next season, farming will be a lot easier. A non-profit group has bought a new two-gallon water tank that’s sitting in the garden, giving the community gardeners an independent water source. In the coming weeks, garden members will connect it to a rain catchment system.

The narrow communal plot used to be an empty lot facing St. Nicholas Avenue near busy West 125th Street. The new rain catchment system will make the garden more self-sufficient, said Amanda Monzon, a garden leader.

Rainwater and residual water from an adjacent apartment building will be diverted into the water tank through a pipe system. Once water has been collected, hosepipes can be attached to water the vegetables, which include collard greens, spinach and beets.

Monzon said it’s a “blessing” to be near a building, because constructing a rain-only water catchment structure is expensive.

Justin Moore, the garden’s grant coordinator, said its 26 members, who all live in the neighborhood, primarily fund the garden but needed outside contributors for the new system. Change by Us NYC, an organization that helps eco-friendly garden projects, provided the necessary $485. Because St. Nicholas Miracle garden is a city Park and Recreation Green Thumb community garden, it’s eligible for grants.

Aside from fundraising, the garden members contribute $20 a year to sustain the communal plots. They harvest vegetables every few weeks and share them equally; garden leaders don’t keep tabs on how much produce the plot produces.

Aiming to increase yields next year, the garden also added a new compost system, to reduce reliance on commercial topsoil and fertilizer.

“Soil is the most expensive thing we buy,” said Monzon. She said the garden has spent $800 on soil since it opened.

Moore said the new compost bin is also part of a bigger mission: eco-friendly waste management. “A huge amount of resources go into collection of garbage and a lot of it is organic waste,” he said.

Monzon said the environmentally friendly rain-catchment and compost systems are good ways to recycle material. The rain-catchment system uses “gray water” or unfiltered water for plants and vegetables, though gardeners will still use the city’s fire hydrant during harvesting. “You wouldn’t want to clean the vegetables with the gray water,” said Monzon.

To prepare for cold weather, the garden’s members have laid down wine bottle-raised soil beds in a small section of the garden. The rows of wine bottles help to maintain warmth as they retain the heat of the summer sun. They have also constructed a basic automatic irrigation system made from hosepipes and old pieces of gutter that run along the soil bed. Once the rain catchment system is built, it will be connected to the automatic watering system.

With planting continuing until November, the gardeners hope the rain-catchment system will be ready to use next month. The compost soil will be ready next spring.

 

(Photo by Poppie Mphuthing)

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