How are you welcoming friendly insects to your urban farm or garden? Do you know who you're looking for? Join us on Thursday, February 23, 2023 at 12 PM on Zoom to talk about incorporating plants into your farm or garden that provide food and shelter for insect predators and pollinators.

Brooklyn Queens Land Trust and Brooklyn Grange invite you to create customized flats for your garden in this not-your-typical seed sowing workshop with Kwesi Joseph, Urban Garden Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension's Harvest New York.

Learn to sow seeds in a commercial greenhouse setting and leave them to grow for eight weeks while the Brooklyn Grange Farmers lovingly tend to the seedlings. This workshop is aimed at gardeners of all experience levels. Please come if you want to grow plants that are not usually found at traditional plant giveaways, local hardware stores, or nurseries. Participants are encouraged to bring (and share!) seeds, especially ancestral seeds, culturally important seeds, or seeds with a story. Brooklyn Grange will also supply seeds the day of.

Do you have strong opinions about which bugs you like and don't like in your garden? Join Sam Anderson, CCE Urban Ag Specialist, and Saara Naticic of Red Hook Farms who also have strong opinions for an educational and participatory rant about some of the most interesting, wonderful, and despicable arthropods we encountered last year. Participants will learn how to identify some of the most important and/ or most mysterious arthropods of NYC farms and gardens, where to find them, their life cycles, and their predators (or prey). For the pests, we'll touch on ways to manage their presence, but the emphasis here is more about getting to know these helpful/unhelpful/ otherwise-interesting arthropods and understanding how they operate.

Restored floodplains limit the amount of flooding after extreme storms. Join Orange County Soil and Water Conservation District and CCE Orange County to see a restored floodplain along the Wallkill River.

This workshop will combine an indoor classroom presentation along with a tour on a nearby farm to help participants understand the benefits of incorporating diversified agroforestry systems with an eye for resilience. During this offering, participants will learn how these types of buffers intentionally combine water quality protection with sustainable food and forest production. Presenters will touch on a variety of topics including basic stream function, buffer assessment and establishment, species selection, and marketing using our newly developed Multifunctional Riparian Buffer Guide. Join us to understand ways to incorporate native, perennial, and beneficial species into fruitful buffer systems that promote freshwater ecosystems.

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) uses a variety of ecologically-minded techniques and approaches for the long-term management of pests. In this workshop we'll explore building beneficial insect habitats as an IPM strategy. Participants will learn what to plant, how to design their pollinator habitats, and how to maintain and troubleshoot the pollinator habitat within an IPM framework.