This past Saturday, the Conservancy hosted another GLAM (Gowanus Low Area Mapping) event with help from Public Laboratory and some volunteers. At this event, we took pictures for our seasonal imagery mapping and also began to document the vegetation along the Canal’s banks.

Eymund Diegel led the way, showing us the correct way to set and send the balloon up.

After a test run inside the Salt Lot, some of us paddled off with canoes from the Dredgers and took some shots of the vegetation on the Lot’s waterfront.

Then, the other half joined us on the Canal and we headed up to the Upper Basin. It was a bit windy, but we got some great shots!

We even picked up a superhero along the way!

To close the day out, we went to Washington Park and took some aerial pictures of the Old Stone House. For more pictures from the day, click here!

It was a great day to get outside and have fun. We’re hoping you can join us next time! Float on!

Green Roof Plantings: Spring 2013 Update

A year and half ago, volunteers installed a green roof on top of our Salt Lot storage box using Gaia Soil as a growing medium. At a 4″ depth, the green roof could not retain enough water to support native grasses or asters. However, the Sedum has continued to successfully colonize the bed; even through last year’s hurricane, they are still flourishing in a vibrant red color.

May 2013:

March 2013:

Here are some photos of the green roof in different months last year (some require a keen eye), all taken using balloon mapping methods:

April 2012:

July 2012:

October 2012:

December 2012:

Our green roof is an excellent example of vegetation thriving in a less-than-ideal urban environment such as the Gowanus. Be on the lookout for a new green wall project, coming this Spring/Summer!

Beehive inspection: week 1

Last week we posted about our two new beehives. Here’s what they’ve been up to!

Both colonies have taken to their new homes, building wax comb in every nook and cranny. Fresh wax is pure white and turns yellow then brownish black as it’s used. Bees use honeycomb both to lay eggs and to store food (like pollen and honey).

For the most part bees build their comb on top of the thin sheets of beeswax that we gave them as templates. You can see how the comb on the outer edges of the frame has yet to be “drawn out” (built) compared to the deeper wax on the center of the frame.

 

So where does wax come from? Worker bees secrete liquid wax from glands on the underside of their abdomens. The droplets harden into translucent scales about the size of a grain of salt, which other workers pass like a fire brigade to the part of the honeycomb that’s being built. When bees link together like this it’s called a “festoon,” because the bees hang together between frames like a decorative garland.

Each bee colony has one queen. The queen spends most of her time laying eggs – about one every eight seconds at the height of summer. Her abdomen is longer and more slender than the bodies of the other bees. Can you spot her?

Both of our queens are healthy and productive. How do we know? The oblong white specks at the backs of these cells are eggs, and our beekeepers observed the right number and arrangement of eggs in both hives. Assessing the laying pattern of the queen is one of the beekeeper’s most important jobs. An irregularity in the egg laying is a signal that something in the hive has gone awry.

Held up to the sunlight you can see bellies full of nectar.
 

Beehives can contain 12,000 to 80,000 individual bees, and for the bees to cooperate effectively they have evolved many means of communication. Here we see bees arching their backs and fanning their wings to broadcast the scent of the hive to any bees out foraging for food. Fanning also helps regulate the hive temperature, spreads pheromones, and helps with dehyrdrating nectar into honey.
 

Inspection’s over: everyone back inside!

If all goes well, when we next peek into the hives in a week or two we should see hatched eggs, more drawn comb, and greater pollen stores. Stay tuned! Keep an eye on the newsletter for the next public hive inspection date.

Honey bees at the Salt Lot

In lieu of the Conservancy’s initiative to restore native species, we have started beekeeping! The presence of prolific wildlife near the canal is an excellent biological monitor for a healthy habitat. Honey bees are essential in pollinating a variety of plants, further propagating native species we’ve installed in our gardens.

Honey contains pollen grains collected by the bees within its foraging area (a roughly 2 mile radius); this food source, which also includes nectar, thus reflects the health of the local environment. We plan to test our honey for any presence of heavy metals, which we could then postulate is also present in the plants and soils of the watershed.

The Conservancy is lucky to partner with Emily Vaughn, our resident beekeeper:

Just last week, she received and placed our newly arrived Italian honey bees, Apis mellifera ligustica, in their new fluorescent green homes (more on its creation here), which sit in our berm garden.

Prime canal-side views:

We’ll keep a close eye on our new bee friends–more updates to come!

Edit: Emily will lead a hive inspection this weekend, on Sunday, May 5th from 11am to shortly after noon. Please RSVP at rebecca@gowanuscanalconservancy.org, as space is limited!

Clean & Green and ¡Composting Gowanus!: Earth Day Festivities

Happy Earth Day from the Conservancy!

50 volunteers joined us on Sunday to celebrate the Earth Day weekend by stewarding street trees, maintaining gardens, and composting. The day ended with a barbecue feast, courtesy of Whole Foods. Our wonderful volunteer bunch consisted of ConEdison, Whole Foods, NYCares, GATHER, St. Francis Xavier Action Youth Center, and many community individuals. Thanks so much to everyone for spending their Sunday afternoon with us!

Altogether, we:

• Stewarded 22 street trees
• Stewarded gardens on 3rd Ave and Union St, Degraw St West and East, and 2nd St West, totaling 4,350 sq ft
• Collected 110 lbs of organic waste
• Removed 20 lbs of trash from the gardens
• Composted 9100 lbs of food-scraps
• Turned March’s compost windrow (8,300 lbs of compost)
• Weighed 237 lbs of received sawdust
• Sifted 0.5 cubic yards of finished compost

Compost lasagna in formation:

Volunteers braving the sweet smell of compost turning!

Sifting in action:

Finally, enjoying the end of the day’s delicious eats.

We had an excellent time amongst compost, trees, gardens and friends. Cheers to Earth Day, and make sure to spend some time outside today soaking up the leftover Spring sun!

¡Composting Gowanus!: March Windrow Build

With a freshly laid bed of mulch, who wouldn’t want to layer food scraps, woodchips, sawdust, and leaves all over it? March’s compost windrow build marks the first monthly build of 2013:

Our Volunteer Coordinators and volunteers from Fedex, Brooklyn Law School, Whole Foods, and individuals were so on point that efficiency was certainly the buzzword of the day. Although only 1 out of the 21 volunteers had ever worked with compost before, they quickly embraced the whole raw food-scrap thing and shoveled, wheelbarrowed, and pitchforked their way to compost success.

And we couldn’t have done it without the kids! He was super excited to shovel everything and anything:

The highlight of the day also came from our friends over at DB Co-op, an organization of engineers, designers, architects, and more who create human powered machines. They kindly lent us their compost sifter: an assembly of trommel (a mesh drum), stationary bike, and conveyor belt system. While someone pedaled, the trommel rotates to sift the compost. Here it is in action with our enthusiastic group of Brooklyn Law School volunteers:

We’ll be using the compost in our garden installations around the neighborhood, tree stewardship, and on-site berm and street-end gardens.

After the day’s work, our volunteers more than deserved a lunch consisting of grilled goods, graciously donated by Whole Foods.

Til’ the next compost windrow venture!

Clean & Green: March 23rd Spring Cleaning

After a long, bitter winter, the Conservancy finally opened the Salt Lot gates last Saturday to welcome our first host of 2013 volunteers. We also partnered with our friends at NYRP and MillionTreesNYC for the year’s first Tree Giveaway. What a hoot! It was refreshing to see the Salt Lot brimming with activity and we’re excited for the rest of the year’s events.

Thanks to the immense volunteer turnout from St. Johns University, Whole Foods, Nelson Byrd Woltz, Boy Scout Troop 815, Midwood HS, and many community members, we:
+ Gave away 85 trees
+ Planted 29 Yucca filementosa, 2 Salix flames, 2 Cornus alba, and 17 Juniper virginiana on the berm garden
+ Planted Salix discolor in the 2nd Ave street-end garden
+ Expanded the berm garden with stairs
+ Dewinterized plants in the nursery

Our volunteers laying down mulch:

+ Cleaned 2nd Ave and 5th St, removing 30 cubic yards of trash
Before:

After!

The pile of trash amassed:

And of course, all done in style:

+ Aerated the soil and picked up trash at the 3rd Ave garden
+ Assembled and painted 2 beehives
Boy Scout Troop 815 helped us assemble beehives, in addition to painting them a vibrant green:

+ Assembled mason bee habitats using reeds

As part of our beekeeping project, our lovely Volunteer Coordinator Emily Vaughn and Boy Scout Troop 815 have constructed mason bee habitat using reeds:

The reeds are then bound together with some twine and placed in a tree. We’ll be keeping an eye on these guys.

As always, we are so grateful for all the help from our volunteers. See ya’ll at the next one!

Tree Mapping (some of) the Gowanus Watershed

This summer, we’re excited to start a new project geared towards tree enthusiasts: the NY Department of Environmental Conservation awarded the Conservancy a grant to map all tree pits within 2 blocks of the canal. With this information, we hope to expand green space around the canal, one of the most sparsely forested areas in Brooklyn. We also plan to present the information gathered to the public in August.

Gowanus Forestry Study Area:

To gather data, TreeKIT has developed simple site-surveying methods for geolocating street trees. They aim to map all the tree pits in NYC, which will include the data that we gather. Data such as tree pit size, diameter at breast height (DBH), tree identification, and relative health of the tree will help us better understand the scope of the Gowanus urban forest.

, they rock.

To kickstart this project, we hosted a meeting for many of our Mapping Stewards this past Thursday–the Conservancy is lucky to host such an enthusiastic group of folks to lead this venture. We came out of the meeting ready to tackle tree pits with a clipboard and a measuring wheel (as shown below):

Mapping Stewards will get trained as Citizen Pruners, as well as TreeKIT data collection; they’ll then lead volunteers on four Mapping Days.

Keep your eyes peeled for tree mapping action this summer!

If you are interested in volunteering, email natasia@gowanuscanalconservancy.org. Additionally, more information on getting licensed as a Citizen Pruner can be found on the TreesNY website.

EPA Public Meeting on the Proposed Plan

The EPA hosted a Public Meeting Thursday night in Red Hook, facilitating an open forum to ask questions and state concerns for the Proposed Plan to clean up the Gowanus Canal. The Canal was declared a Superfund site in 2010, and has been contaminated for long over a century before then; needless to say, the Conservancy is itching to get this process started.

The Preferred Remedy will only be passed with Community Acceptance–thus the Conservancy urges everyone to look over the document. The public commenting period will last until March 28th, and can be addressed to:

Christos Tsiamis
Remedial Project Manager
Central New York Remediation Section
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
290 Broadway, 20th Floor
New York, New York 10007-1886
E-mail: GowanusCanalComments.Region2@epa.gov

If you prefer, you can also email comments/questions to the Conservancy at natasia@gowanuscanalconservancy.org. We will be submitting our own formal comments and are interested in additional input from the Conservancy’s constituency.

During the Public Meeting, the EPA representatives distilled the roughly 40 page document into a short presentation outlining the 7 Remedial alternatives, which involve sediment dredging and capping. They additionally addressed source controls of discharges from Manufactured Gas Plants (MGPs), Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs), contaminated groundwater, and from unpermitted pipes.

The EPA highlighted human health risks associated with exposure to Canal waters, including touching or ingesting it (please DON’T do this). These include unacceptable risks to human health from being in contact with PAHs in sediments, ingesting fish and crabs that live in or have visited canals (PCBs), and spreading sediments from storm surges.

The presentation can be found on the EPA’s website here, and is chock-full of helpful visuals.

The Canal has been divided into 3 Remediation Target Areas (RTAs): the Upper, Middle, and Lower. Each of the areas will require different methods of remediation, as the extent of their contaminants varies.

Courtesy: EPA; Closer look at the map here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overall, 600,000 cubic yards of contaminated material will be removed, treated, and disposed. More details about disposal and treatment methods can be found on page 22 of the Proposed Plan.Here is a photo of National Grid taking sediment samples back in December 2012:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

National Grid and the City of New York are two of the Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs) among 20 others. Together, they foot most of the $500 million cleanup bill.

The Conservancy is hopeful for a thorough and sustainable remedy, especially in terms of CSO mitigation and removal. We look forward to input from the Conservancy constituency, and will continue to keep a close eye on the process.

Winter Festival 2012 (…or 2013)

This year’s Winter Fest Fundraiser was replete with psychedelic artwork, local food and beer, and Gowanus merriment in Ray Smith‘s studio. The Conservancy is incredibly grateful for the immense turnout and the support that could only stem from Gowanus Canal lovin’.

Brews were graciously donated by Sixpoint Brewery, and food from Brooklyn Cured, Crock & Jar, Pork Slope, Talde, Mama O’s Kimchi, and Brooklyn Brine. Here’s a peek at part of the spread:

Our merch table featured a new t-shirt design, in addition to donation tags for items such as boots, rakes, and plant material. A silent auction displayed items such as a custom made frame of aerial-shots of the Gowanus (for more information on GLAM, view our past blog posts). If you would like to donate to the Conservancy, you can use our secure Paypal site here!

At 9, we cleared out the tables to make room for Superhuman Happiness and Avan Lava, complete with laser lights as provided by Eastern Effects Lighting. DJ Abby Klein kept the music going before, between, and after sets:

The evening was brimming with conversation, dancing, and all around conviviality. All of the proceeds contribute to keeping our Clean & Green programs alive, as well as Urban Ecology lectures (our next one on February 13th), ¡Composting Gowanus!, and others.

We are grateful for the vibrant community of Gowanus folks and friends for supporting the Conservancy’s projects, and we hope to see you at the start of our Clean & Green/Tree Giveaway Day on March 23rd! Until then, we leave you with the fine faces of the Gowanus:

Cheers,

The Conservancy.