TIME TO FACE THE STRANGE

Maybe you need some farmers in your life to reassure you of this fact, but it is, indeed, a new year. We’re ordering seeds for the spring season ahead, launching the second season of our sliding scale CSA, rolling out winter workshops, and making some big, bittersweet changes. Read on for a look-ahead at Brooklyn Grange in 2022.

Ceremonies & Celosia

It’s no secret that we’re a little gaga over the events space at our Sunset Park farm. Even as we built it, we eagerly anticipated falling in love with the sunset-and-string light glow of the venue, and while we designed it to be versatile and well-suited to everything from fashion week shows to conferences, we definitely had weddings in mind. Now, as we look back on our first full season of hosting in this space, what strikes us isn’t the stunning setting we’ve created so much as the incredible moments of hope, joy, and connection fostered by the couples who transformed it into their altar, their gathering place, their dancehall. What strikes us is you, our community, who truly warmed this house. Here’s a look back at some of our favorite moments from our 2021 weddings in Sunset Park. First off, our ceremony space proved a perfect spot for you to declare your love. It is truly an honor to be the canvas on which couples express their unique family identities, and we were inspired by the vows we witnessed as you made commitments to the lives you plan to live.

And it wasn’t just the vows you wrote that expressed your values to the family and friends you gathered as witnesses: we loved the creative and unique ways you chose to honor nature in your lives together by incorporating it into your weddings!

We built this space to feel complete and purposeful, letting our extensive wildflower plantings and the skyline beyond put on their dazzling show. But we left plenty of room for those who wanted to dress it up–and boy did you ever! We were blown away by these dreamy floral chandeliers, courtesy of Indy Faso, making use of our cross beams! 

Still, neither the décor nor the setting could distract from the main event: your pure expressions of love. Nothing we’ve grown on this roof has been as sweet and tender as these moments between you.  

So thank you. Thank you to the couples who shared their love with our rooftop in 2021, and to all of you who came and celebrated their futures. Here’s to you.

Our Best Kept Secret

It’s no secret that we farm rooftops and host events, but did you know that Brooklyn Grange’s fastest growing and largest department, with a dozen team members, is our Design/Build arm? When we launched the department in 2013, we focused mostly on urban agriculture work: chicken coops perched on terraces, backyard beehives, and herb and vegetable gardens in every conceivable nook and cranny, from stoop to roof. Since then, we’ve served over 250 (!) clients in spaces high (like the Tata Innovation Center rooftop, shown above, on Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus) and low (these ground-level planters outside Jeffrey’s Grocery in the West Village).

Our services have spanned the field, literally, from planning and building gardens where hobby farmers can flex their own green thumbs and multi-acre green roofs to upgrading and maintaining existing ornamental gardens that busy urbanites don’t have time to tend, and even specialty work like irrigation design aimed at conserving water even as our climate grows hotter by the year. In other words, we are a veritable swiss army knife of green space services! Got a project in mind? We might be able to help–check out our services below.

Of Lifecycles and Leases

On a farm, we ask a lot of our ecosystem. We prioritize birth, growth, fruition. We celebrate fecundity and rarely laud the plant that has reached the end of its season, the stemmy stump left behind once we've harvested away the fruit and leaves. Businesses, as a whole, hold the same values, glamorizing the start-up, the capital raise, the scale-up. Over nearly two years, we’ve had the opportunity to step back and examine the health of our business, our culture, and our ecosystems. We’ve made space and time to explore what sustainability means at Brooklyn Grange: to our ecology, to our team, to our community. And what we’ve discovered is that in order to support healthful growth in certain areas of our business, we have to allow for dormancy and actively reduce our output. In nature, plants grow, then die back, and during these periods of withering and decay, ecosystems build themselves and balance is restored. 

In this spirit of natural cycles, we’ve made the decision to radically scale back operations at our Long Island City farm in 2022. While the space won’t go completely dormant (we’ll still be holding open houses for you to get your hands dirty!) it will not be operated as the same commercial farming juggernaut like it has for the last dozen seasons. We will not be growing dozens of market crops, setting up a weekly Saturday farm stand, or distributing CSA shares at that location. Rather, we will plant the roof with a low-maintenance mix of sunflowers, cover crops, and peppers for our hot sauce. We will dramatically reduce the time we spend on that roof, and increase focus on our various other endeavors: farming and programming at our Brooklyn Navy Yard and Sunset Park farms; our new operation at the Javits Center and Staten Island’s Corporate Commons 3, and our various Design/Build projects all over New York City.

All the while, we will continue to hone our vision for our Long Island City roof and explore the multitude of ways that the location can best serve Brooklyn Grange, our neighbors in Western Queens, and New York City's ecosystem at large. We invite you all to participate in this revisioning, and to reach out with ideas, proposals, or simply thoughts on what that farm has meant to you over these past dozen years. We’ve got many of our own, to be sure, and while it feels like we're closing a chapter for Brooklyn Grange and for our very first rooftop farm, we are confident about our progress. For farmers, no matter how long you've been doing this, there is always a moment of self-doubt when your soil is bare, and you need to trust that, in time, the seeds will germinate, and the buds and leaves will come back again. There is a pause before the regrowth occurs, and patience and trust are key to this work.

Thanks to all of our neighbors in LIC for your support, patience, and trust, as we rest this field.

Winter Workshops!

Introduction to Beekeeping | February 1, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Not-So-Basic Indoor Plants 101 | February 8, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Planning Your Urban Vegetable Garden | February 22, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Seed Starting & Propagation 101 | March 1, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Design Principles for Urban Landscapes | March 22, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Introduction to Green Roofs | May 10, 6:30pm - 8:30pm