The Alchemy of Green at Flatbush Community Garden

Yesterday, we took you to the Flatbush Community Garden (on the corner of Albemarle and Buckingham/E 16th St) and introduced you to a couple of members and their projects. Today, meet Joanne Sachs and Dionne Bernshtayn.

Joanne Sachs shares this 4×4 bed with her sister. She has planted her fall crops, from left to right: Arugula, lettuce, Swiss chard, kale, and beets.

A Brooklyn native, Joanne Sachs had never gardened before she joined the Flatbush Community Garden.

“I was pretty intimidated at first,” she says. “I thought there was some alchemy” to making plants grow. But other more experienced members were there to help and her enthusiasm made up for her lack of experience.

“Everybody has given us guidance,” she says. In her excitement, she planted so much in her bed that “it was a jungle by the middle of the summer.”

Dionne Bernshtayn breaks apart frozen kitchen scraps that she has just dumped into the compost bin.

Dionne Bernshtayn and her daughter are in their first year of membership. “It’s been really, really nice just to be a member here,” she says as she empties frozen kitchen scraps into the proper compost bin. “It just allows us to connect with another part of the community” with a common interest in organic food and gardening.

Ditmas Park Corner will be introducing you to members and plants of the garden every day this week.

Elizabeth Whitman is a freelance journalist living in Brooklyn. She has written about issues ranging from participatory budgeting in New York City to the uprising in Syria and has also reported for Inter Press Service out of the agency’s United Nations bureau in New York.