This past Thursday I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn – for a garden.  Yeah, there were a bunch of other reasons, but I did some serious downsizing for the opportunity to be an urban gardener.  But more on that in a minute.

Moving in New york, if you’ve never done it, is a real big pain.  In a city where you can’t normally find parking, where are you going to put a 14-foot rental truck while your friends (for the price of some pizza and your eternal gratitude) help you load all your worldly possessions?  All things considered the move went pretty well until we showed up at my new apartment with all my stuff to find my new bedroom only half painted and an apologetic note from the new roommate.  So settling in was going to have to wait until the painters could finish the job – Saturday.  So with my life boxed up in the living room, I decided to head over to the Brooklyn Food Conference, which was free and a convenient walking distance from my new digs.

Besides, my new yard needs a lot of work and I really needed some advice and help in how to turn a scrappy piece of a Brooklyn backyard into a lush bountiful garden.  And I was rather interested in learning more about composting.  At last year’s Hazon Food Conference participants were treated to a demonstration on how to compost with worms, and in February, the New York Times ran an article about urban composting – both had really gotten me thinking about my own organic waste.  I’m a member of a Tuv Ha’Aretz and I do a lot of cooking, and with my new garden why shouldn’t I be composting?  But how to do it?

The Brooklyn Food Conference was the right place to learn.   The schedule seemed overwhelmingly crammed full of amazing presenters and discussions – everything from the future of food policies, farmers markets and local food .  But I hit up the advertised 120 vendors filling two school gymnasiums with tables promoting organizations, local farms, new products and of course really good food.  The Jew and the Carrot, a conference partner, even had a table  where a few of us writers (pictured above is Nina Budabin McQuown and Amanda Melpolder) volunteered some time to talk about our blog and other Hazon programs.

There were several booths ready to talk about composting, even selling complete kits to compost in your own apartment.  Apparently there are several ways to compost, so I got several names and numbers of organizations to follow-up with to help me figure out what was the right fit for my needs (turns out there is a community garden just down the street from my new apartment).  I also signed a petition to encourage the City of New York to restore funding for the NYC Compost Project, which apparently got slashed in recent budget cuts.

All in all I wished I could have stayed at the event longer (but sadly I had to go home and unpack).  There were so many great resources available to the public,  I really hope they do something like this in the future (and I’m not just saying this because I won a raffle prize – a gift certificate to the Blue Apron).