Happy We’re Going On Vacay, UESiders!!
Yup… Time for our annual foray into the strange but fascinating world outside NYC borders!!
But, of course, if things of particular note/importance come up, you’ll be kept in the know with one of those special/mini-editions!!
Alrighty then:
Every Friday: 96th & Lex Compost Drop-Off
96th Street & Lexington Avenue, 7:30-11:30am
Likely talking a Mini-Edition when those June and July totals come in…
Year to date (1/7-5/27/22): 9,945 Drop-Offs; 62 Bins; 14,101 lbs.
Saturday, July 23rd: 82nd Street/St. Stephens Greenmarket
82 Street between First & York Avenues, 9am-2pm
Bringing us the best of summer bounty will be the wonderful American Pride Seafood, Bread Alone, Ballard’s Honey, Sikking Flowers, Hudson Valley Duck and Haywood’s Fresh, Samascott, Cherry Lane, Ole Mother Hubbert, Valley Shepherd, Hawthorne Valley and Gajeski Farms!!
Every Sunday: Asphalt Green Compost Drop-Off
91st & York, 7:30-12:30
Patiently waiting June/July totals…
Year-to-Date Totals (3/13-5/29/2022): 845 Drop-Offs; 24 Bins; 5.738 lbs.
Sunday, July 24th: 92nd Street Greenmarket
92nd Street just east of First Avenue, 9am-3pm
Doesn’t get any better than the delicious goodness on the American Pride Seafood, Ole Mother Hubbert, Grandpa’s Farm, Halal Pastures, Meredith’s Country Bakery, Norwich Meadows and Phillips Farms tables!!
To which Uberinatta Maestra Manager Margaret’s adds:
“Dear Greenmarketeers:
We’re just about at the peak of Summer 2022!!
With one great way to stay all-important cool and hydrated being… Salads and fresh fruits!!
And are there ever plenty to choose from… From greens… To vegs… To fruit… To cheeses… To eggs, poultry and beef…!!
Reminder: The Sunday Market will be in its new location… Running east from First Avenue on the north side of 92nd!!
All our farmers will be there. You may have to look for them, but you will find them!!
Happy hydrated shopping,
Margaret“
Then:
July and August Fridays: Roosevelt Island Summer Movie Series
Southpoint Park, South of the Tram and Cornell Tech, pre-movie fun at 7, films at sunset
And on this side of the river:
Wednesdays, August 3rd and August 10th: Sunset Film Series
Carl Schurz Park, on the basketball and hockey courts, 8:30pm
The music’s over… Let the family-friendly films begin!!
Always virtual gatherings of interest and fun:
Tuesday, July 26th, 6pm: “Before Central Park” Book Talk online
Historian Sara Cedar Miller fills us in on the Park’s two and half centuries of history from Indigenous hunters to the Black landowners of Seneca Village to Irish pig farmers to Jewish protesters and all points in between and after… Organized by Friends of the UES Historical District. Free. To sign up…
Tuesday, July 26th, 7pm: #Skip the Stuff – Building a Plastic Free Future in NYC Webinar
Sponsors of historic NYC bill Intro 0559-2022 (otherwise known as “Skip the Stuff,” requiring restaurants, food delivery apps and online delivery platforms to give out single use plastic utensils, napkins and condiments only when it is requested by the customer) discuss the proposed, ultra green legislation… Free. To register... (You might also want to encourage CMs Menin and Powers to sign on to the bill…)
Wednesday, July 27th, 12-1pm: Soil Health Basic with NYC Parks Green Thumb Webinar
Want to learn how to keep your plants growing strong this season? Partnerships for Parks, sister program NYC Parks GreenThumb and Parks Workshops and Education Coordinator Mara Gittleman share their deep knowledge of soil vitality and its impact on plants!! Free. To register…
Thursday, July 28th, 2-4pm: AM Seawright’s Weekly Virtual Knitting Social via Zoom
Stay cool while you get in the loop with things UESide… And knit, of course… Just RSVP…
Tuesday, August 2nd, 6:30-7:30pm: Living Breakwaters Talk via online
Resilience expert Pippa Brashear fills us in on Living Breakwaters, the innovative coastal green infrastructure project designed not only to reduce and eventually reverse erosion and damage from storm waves, but also improve the ecosystem health of the Raritan Bay, encourage stewardship of our nearshore waters and enhance people’s experience of the shoreline of Southern Staten Island. Organized by NYC H2O. Free. To sign up…
This week’s activism:
If you think the Great Lakes’ Boundary Waters should be protected from sulfide-ore copper mining…
In case you haven’t checked out the new, proposed redistricting plan... (Yes, we could soon bean annex of Queens…)
Moving on to the realm of diverting diversions:
Can’t have enough beating the heat tips… How to deadhead our flowering plants… Rescued teen turkeys returned to the wild… Consumer Reports on induction… Baby oysters – millions of ’em – and their new Hudson River home… Hummingbird trivia quiz… The truth about woodpeckers… Not exactly environmental, but so good Jim Thorpe’s medals have been restored… For those unfamiliar with the Appalachian Wildlife Center…
Moving on to the Hudson River Almanac:
7/7 – Manhattan: On the green lawn overlooking the inlet of Spuyten Duyvil Creek at Inwood Hill Park, a cheerful patch of chicory flowers (“blue sailors”) was the only other color. On a small island exposed by the low tide, four mallard ducklings dozed close to their mother; farther along, another led her three older chicks out for a paddle. A few brave flowers of bouncing bet (Saponaria officinalis) stood among a field of mugwort.
In this hot, dry summer, the little strip of salt marsh was completely overgrown with mugwort, dock, and porcelain berry. Forty minutes later, the rising tide had shrunk the island; the ducks had been joined by half a dozen Canada geese, and a great egret landed before wading off to fish.
A few flowers remained on the false indigo (Amorpha fruticosa) bush, but the fruit was ripening. The chairmaker’s rush sedge (Schoenoplectus americanus) was flowering, and a little patch of white sweet-clover (Melilotus alba), though crowded against a fence by invasives, was fragrant. The salt-meadow cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) had lost some ground but looked healthy, and yam-leaved clematis was holding its ground on a fence.
In the woods, the tall oaks, tulip trees and others were fully leaved and there were far fewer invasives. In the lower, damp area of the Clove, the path was now bordered by a dense stand of jewelweed, more than in recent years, backed by thickets of brambly five-fingered aralia (Eleutherococcus sieboldianus).
The understory was an open wood of spicebush over a carpet of common enchanter’s nightshade (Circaea lutetiana). Up on the ridge, this was a good year for circaea, where Virginia knotweed or jumpseed (Persicaria virginiana) had covered much of the ground in recent years. Patches of stinging nettle and white vervain had reappeared. In a sheltered spot, deertongue, a native grass that does well in shade, was flowering near tall lettuce, another native. Burdock was blooming there as well. A black-raspberry bush had ripe fruit, but a patch of joe-pye weed and pokeberry seemed to have been lost to a path re-paving. – Thomas Shoesmith
7/12 – Ulster County, HRM 85: I found four monarch butterfly eggs on milkweed plants in Stone Ridge. Yes! They are back. I will relax and breathe through this season of migrating monarchs. – Betty Boomer
Those Wonderful Monarch Butterfly Eggs!!
7/12 – Ulster County, HRM 76: I check the three milkweed plants growing outside my back door in Kerhonkson every day. Today I found eight monarch butterfly eggs. By contrast, in my garden, three milkweed plants a mere 150 feet away had no eggs at all.7/12 – Putnam County: I went outside to see if any of my tomatoes were starting to ripen, but as I went past my grouping of coneflowers, I spotted a monarch butterfly flitting from flower to flower. It briefly flew away, but then returned to resume feeding. Coneflowers provide good nectar for butterflies and pollinators, but monarch butterflies also need milkweed host plants for their caterpillar to feed on. Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) with its beautiful orange flowers is a milkweed that is native to North America. To help the monarch butterflies, we should plant a lot of butterfly weed. It is more than a beautiful flower.
That Monarch Butterfly!!
7/13 – Manhattan: Our Hudson River Park’s River Project staff checked our sampling and collection gear that we deploy off Piers 26 and 40 in Hudson River Park. At Pier 26, two of our crab pots caught adult oyster toadfish (200 mm) and one blue crab (80 mm). In our crab pots at Pier 40, staff found adult oyster toadfish (210, 250 mm) and an adult tautog (220 mm). A minnow trap caught young-of-year oyster toadfish (50 mm) and black sea bass (80 mm); the latter have been especially plentiful this season.
The surprise of our day was a small spider crab found inside a minnow trap. We usually find them hanging on the outside of our collection gear. – Zoe Kim
That Spider Crab!!
Not forgetting the Fish of the Week:
7/15 – Hudson River Watershed: Fish-of-the-Week for Week 179 is the cobia (Rachycentron canadum), number 172 (of 236) on our watershed list of fishes.
A Cobia
Cobia is monotypic, in that it is the only extant (existing) species in the cobia family (Rachycentridae). They are found worldwide in tropical and subtropical waters; in the western Atlantic, they range from Canada to Argentina including the Gulf of Mexico and the entire Caribbean. Cobia is a legendary sportfish throughout their range and considered to be excellent table fare.
Cobia can get to six-feet-long and weigh 150 lb. The International Gamefish Association all-tackle world record is 135 lb., 9 oz, from Shark Bay, Australia (1985). The largest known cobia, 172 lb., was a speared-caught fish from Brazil where they are called, in Portuguese, bijupira, or “tasty fish.”
C. Lavett Smith describes the cobia as a rugged, heavy-bodied elongate fish with a projecting lower jaw and a broad flat head. Perhaps it is the physically impressive nature of cobia, or their immense popularity, that has elicited a compendium of colloquial names such as black kingfish, black salmon, ling, lemonfish, prodigal son, and black bonito. While they relish eating fish, they heavily favor crustaceans such as crabs and shrimp. Their predilection for blue crabs has earned them the colloquial name “crabeater.” Cobia’s color, primarily dark brown, lends to another colloquial name of “chocolate fish.”
Briggs and Waldman (2002) note that cobia is “uncommon but regular” in the New York Bight. In our watershed, where they are designated as a temperate marine stray, C. Lavett Smith describes the cobia as an occasional visitor.
Recent records from the Tappan Zee include a 2017 young-of-year cobia captured and released (size unknown), and a 2018 young-of-year (103 mm) caught by the DEC Hudson River Fisheries Unit at Kingsland Point, river mile 28. Early cobia records from the estuary include a 31-inch cobia from New York Harbor in 1815, another from New York Harbor in 1872, and a 95-mm cobia collected in a minnow seine in Croton Bay, river mile 34, in 1890. The latter three are in the collection of fishes at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. – Tom Lake, Bob Schmidt
And This Week’s Wonderfully Resilient Bird:
Yes, great monarch butterfly news from our NYS… Still and all, the gorgeous insect was formally listed as endangered last week…
Fingers crossed for an Autumnal Shred-A-Thon,
UGS
Eco Fact of the Week: A major gas leak happens in the U.S. every 40 hours!! Between 2010 and 2021, nearly 2,600 incidents were reported to the federal government!! Eight hundred and fifty resulted in fires and 328 in an explosion!! Those incidents killed 122 people and injured more than 600!! The total costs to communities in terms of property damage, emergency services, and the value of intentionally and unintentionally released gas, totaled nearly $4 billion!!
Eco Tip of the Week: Best Buy’s still accepting the full range of electronics for recycling,,, But no more leaving in the lobby… Take ’em downstairs!!
This Week at The Markets 