It’s time to flex those green thumbs, Bushwick!
April 14th is National Gardening Day, and the weather gods have finally decided to send some spring to get you outside and gardening. Not sure where to go to commemorate the day? Bushwick has plenty of options for you.
Bushwick has 14 community gardens, which is just about average for Brooklyn. That totals about 2 acres, or 1 acre per square mile, of garden space in the neighborhood. Considering the size of Bushwick, that actually means that the neighborhood has about 40 percent more per square mile than the average district in Brooklyn.
These small tracts of land play an important role in urban environments, offering a necessary respite from the crowds and concrete of city life. Community gardens give people access to green space where they can come together to maintain the land, grow fresh produce, and enjoy a small taste of the great outdoors.
Located on the border of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, the Linden-Bushwick Community Garden is one of the larger ones in the neighborhood; volunteer farmers have grown everything from jalapenos to strawberries. They even sell some of their produce at the Bushwick Farmers Market.
But public and private development is putting community gardens in NYC at risk. Mayor de Blasio has aggressive plans to scale up the city’s affordable housing to 300,000 units by 2026, and private developers seem to be squeezing new properties into any open space they can find.
So that’s your Bushwick Fun Fact of the week. Have a question about the neighborhood that you want us to try and answer using data? Leave a comment below!
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Cover image by Alix Piorun.