Happy Participatory Budget Voting TIme, UESiders!!
Yes, pretty heavily weighted towards pressing area school needs and it’d beeen great to see some street tree planting included – even last year’s pretty paltry number – but absolutely DO VOTE!!
Alrighty, let’s talk Farmstand/Greenmarket:
Every Friday: The Lenox Hill Farmstand
70th Street & First Avenue, 11:30am-5:30pm
The lower Upper Green Side’s primo produce/bread/egg and more source!! And so convenient for UESiders south of 79th… And so easy to hit on the way home!! (For more…)
Every Saturday: 82nd Street/St. Stephen’s Greenmarket
82 Street between First & York Avenues, 9am-2pm
At their tables will be American Pride Seafood, Bread Alone, Ballard’s Honey, Sikking Flowers, Hudson Valley Duck, Haywood’s Fresh, Valley Shepherd, Samascott Orchard/Nine Pin Ciderworks, Hawthorne Valley. Nolasco, Walnut Ridge and Gajeski Farms
(How delicious were those American Pride scallops we devoured last week!!)
Then there’s Marketta Manageria Manager Margaret’s weekly wisdom:
“Dear Greenmarketeers,
As you’ve likely observed, it’s a pretty tough time of year for our great market farmers…
Early April means they’re super-busy on their farms planting and preparing for the upcoming growing season, but meantime there’s just not the usual bounty to be laying out on market tables…
That said, what there is is not only nutritious but delicious!!
Prime example: Our green-of-the-week… Spinach!! Great in salads, smoothies or cooked!! With both over-wintered and baby varieties on offer at 82nd!!
Oh, and don’t forget to add a bouquet of beautiful Sikking Flowers to that shopping list and take spring beauty home!!
See you at the market,
Margaret“
Moving on UES compost collection and – finally – the 2023 totals:
Every Friday: East 96th Scrap Drop-Off
96th Street & Lexington, 7:30-11:30am
Bring on those lemon rinds!!
2022 Total: 66,962 lbs.
2023 Total: 42,888 lbs.
Every Sunday: Asphalt Green Food Scrap Drop-Off
1st Street & York, 7:30am-12:30pm
Don’t forget that freezer-burned bread pizza crust!!
2022 Total (from 3/22): 46,675 lbs.
2023 Total: 65,699 lbs.
Every Day, Any Time: GPG Compost Drop-Off at 64th Street
East River Esplanade (under the pedestrian overpass from York Avenue), round the clock
Open 24/7 and with bins awaiting…
2023 Total: 2,275 lbs.
And the Grand 2023 UESide Total: 110,854 lbs.
Get ready for some really great NYC/UES events coming up:
Saturday, April 20th: Hell’s Kitchen Farm Opening Day
Metro Baptist Church Rooftop, 410 West 40th Street, 12-2:30pm
Celebrate the arrival of SPRING at the amazing Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project’s rooftop garden for the kick-off of its 14th growing season with music, food, drinks, and activities!! Everyone welcome at this true NYC wonder that feeds hundreds every year!!
Saturday, April 20th: Earth Day at Carl Schurz Park
Commencing at 1pm, throughout the park
Saturday, April 20th: Sutton Place Parks Conservancy Earth Day!!
Sutton Place Park, Sutton Place & 57th Street, 1-3pm
Sunday, April 21st:: We Are Limiting Plastic Earth Day Celebration
116th Street at Morningside Park, 1-3pm
FREE & WITH ARTISTS:
Elizabeth McAlpin – Play Chess.
Nancy Lemberger – Compost Kids Game.
Capucine Bourcart – Knitting Forever Fashion.
Dominique de Cock – How to Reduce Personal Plastic.
Jessica Reisch – Meet Mycelium exhibit project for Children.
Trashion – Children Workshop make clothes from recycled materials
to wear at the upcoming Morningside Park Show May 2024.
Saturday, April 27th: Esplanade Friends First Spring Concert
Aycock Pavilion, East River Esplanade at 60th Street, 1-4pm
Friday, May 3rd to Sunday May 5th: Jane’s Walks
All Around NYC, All Day Long All 3 Days, Free
The great, in-person, guided group tours (plus virtual and self-guided offerings) return with over 200 walks across all five boroughs!! To check out the many wonderful possibilities:
And add:
Sunday, April 28th: 9/11 Memorial & Museum 5K RunWalk
Brookfield Place to the Museum on Greenwich Street, 8am
Run/Walk and raise dollars to sustain the museum!!
Prepare yourself for lots and lots of upcoming shredding:
And add another conveniently local visit by the Mammogram Bus:
How about this so NYC-centric virtual event:
Tuesday, April 30th, 6pm via Zoom: The Freaks Came Out – The Definitive History of The Village Voice
Organized by the Greenwich Villiage Historical Society… To sign up…
International activism this time around:
If you believe Mexico’s within its rights to ban import of genetically engineered corn from the U.S…
Followed by a few diverting diversions:
How to watch the upcoming Lyrid meteor shower… U.S. grid update need… Why spring smells so good… The MSK demolition… NYC H2O spring walking tours… Carbon storage mapping… The world’s first self-sufficient, zero-emission sailing laboratory makes a NYC stop… How come there’re so many beetles… Separate pedestrian and bike paths coming to the 59th Street Bridge… Central Park’s threatened elm trees…
And the Hudson River Almanac:
3/20 – Manhattan, HRM 1-2: While the normal retinue of invertebrates was present (mud crabs, mud dog whelks, grass shrimp), a less common organism for our traps was encountered: a sea gooseberry
(Pleurobrachia pileus), a species of comb jelly (Ctenophora). – Avalon Daly, Zoe Kim, Renee Mariner, Brandon Campos
A Sea Gooseberry!!The sea gooseberry (25 mm) is found in open water in the northern Atlantic Ocean from Maine to North Carolina. As a predator, they feed on active swimming prey such as Gammarus sp. Largely a marine species, they are seldom found in estuaries. Tom Lake]
3/23 – Town of Poughkeepsie: The new, for 2024, bald eagle nest NY62 is high in a white pine 100-feet off the ground. In recent years, the NY62 nest was in a deciduous tulip tree. When the leaves came out in spring, our observation view became compromised. With a conifer this season, that will not be an issue.
For the first half-hour of today’s visit, well within spotting scope range but far enough away to provide a privacy buffer, there was no sighting of an adult, no activity whatsoever. The nest looked empty, and I was beginning to wonder if the nest had failed.
Then, a huge tell-tale shadow moved past me along the road. It was an adult heading to the nest where it landed. Up popped another white head inside the nest. The two adults poked around for 30 seconds before the second adult took off and flew up the road directly close over my head. It was an 11:00 a.m. changeover of their shared nest duty. – Tom Lake
3/23 – Croton Point, HRM 35: It has been a few years but once again, red-headed woodpeckers are wintering here. At least two, both males, were easily spotted in an oak grove on the north side of the point. In a true sign of spring, Dutchman’s Breeches was blooming along the road to the oak grove. – Christopher Letts
A Red-Headed Woodpecker!!
3/23 – Hudson River Watershed: Spring comes very slowly to our watershed. The ancestral Algonkian peoples of the Hudson River watershed used bio-indicators in spring to alert them that it was time to ready the soil, sow their fields, and set their fish weirs. In historic times, up [to] 2010 when commercial shad fishing was halted, fishermen still relied more on the uplands than technology to let them know when the river was ready.
When most of the trees in the forest are yet to leaf out, the soft, hazy white glow of our native shadbush (Amelanchier sp.) blooms. There is an ecological timing between these events: Shadbush blooms when the soil warms in early April at the same time the river reaches a temperature that triggers the beginning of fish migration in from the sea to spawn. This procession proceeds from south to north in an orderly manner from magnolia to forsythia to shadbush to flowering dogwood, with lilac being the final signal that spring is ready for summer. This process is called phenology, the study of nature through the appearance of seasonal phenomena. The word comes from the Greek word phaino, meaning “to appear,” or the Latin phenomenon meaning “appearance, happening, or display.” – Tom Lake
That Native Shadbush!!
3/24 – Hudson River Watershed: If you look up this time of the spring season, you will see trees such as poplar, willow, and some maples) that have opened their flower buds and are in the process of being pollinated. However, if you look down, the reproduction of forest floor plants has yet to begin, except for the early-blossoming skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus).
A Skunk Cabbage!!
Their flowers appear before the leaves and this early maturation benefits pollinators such as flies, springtails and beetles that are active, providing them with both food (pollen) as well as a mini-warming hut for temperatures that can be below freezing at times. Fueled by energy stored in the plant’s modified underground stem (rhizome), skunk cabbage can maintain temperatures of up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit (F) within their spathe (mottled maroon hood-like leaf) even as external air temperatures drop below freezing. Skunk cabbage, as noted in its common name, is best known for its strong skunk-like floral odor. – Mary Holland
[One April, a decade ago, we had to traverse an acre of marshy skunk-cabbage woodlands to reach Moodna Creek (river mile 58) to net river herring for our ongoing research. As our boots crushed the leaves, the pungent fragrance was overwhelming and not to be confused with the field of poppies in The Wizard of Oz. (The trivial name foetidus comes from the same Latin word meaning “foul, as in “foul smelling.” – Tom Lake, T.R. Jackson
]3/24 – Furnace Woods, HRM 38.5: A tiny movement in the leaves at the base of an old stone wall revealed the presence of a winter wren (Troglodytes hiemalis). Roger Tory Peterson offered “mouse-like” as a very apt description. It seemed that the bird was just passing through. I see them briefly in both spring and fall migration. – Christopher Letts
A Winter Wren!!
3/27 – Yonkers, HRM 18: Our research and education team at the Sarah Lawrence Center for the Urban River at Beczak returned to our tidemarsh at high tide today to check our fyke net. Our glass eel numbers maintained their recent high bar with 250.
The surprise in the fyke’s bag was a single larval (Leptocephalus) speckled worm-eel (Myrophis punctatus). This was our third this season, Two previous speckled worm-eels were caught, one each, on February 9 and 12 (all were 80 mm). This week’s speckled worm-eel brings our total number of this rare fish encountered in the estuary to five.
That Worm Eel!!
The water temperature was 46 degrees, salinity was 5.0 ppt, and the dissolved oxygen (DO) was 9.9 ppm. – Jason Muller, Rachel Lynch, Ronan Selbi
[For more information on the speckled worm-eel, see Schmidt and Wright (2018): Documentation of Myrophis punctatus (Speckled Worm-Eel) from Marine Water of New York) Northeastern Naturalist, Issue 25-1. Bob Schmidt]
With the actual Fish of the Week being:
3/26 – Hudson River Watershed: Fish-of-the-Week for Week 262 is the bluespotted cornetfish (Fistularia tabacaria), number 131 (of 237) on our watershed list of fishes.
A Bluespotted Cornetfish!!
The bluespotted cornetfish, a marine-brackish water species, is from the same taxonomic order as the pipefishes and seahorses (Syngnathiformes) and quite closely resembles them in body type. Their genus name Fistularia comes from Latin fistulaae, as pipe or flute. They can also be mistaken for needlefish (Belonidae). Bluespotted cornetfish can reach four-feet in length and feed on small fishes, crustaceans, and squid.The bluespotted cornetfish occurs over grass flats, reefs, and on hard and rocky bottoms. They are widespread in the Western Atlantic from the Georges Bank to Nova Scotia, to Bermuda, the Gulf of Mexico, to Brazil.
They are an extremely rare visitor to our watershed. The most recent record (432 mm) was caught in 2015 in the East River under the Manhattan Bridge by Cynthia Fowx – Tom Lake
Never forgetting The Week’s Actual Wonderful Bird:
If you haven’t yet signed Big Reuse’s petition to save its compost collection site…
Yours with the greenest of greenness,
UGS
Eco Fact of the Week: New Yorkers discard more than 742 million single-use plastic bottles annually–nearly 21 million pounds. It takes 450 to 1,000 years for a single plastic water bottle to decompose!!.
Eco Tip of the Week: Recycle unwanted thermometers – carefully packed in bubble wrap – by mailing them to to Coastal Plumbing Supply, 38-16 Stillman Avenue, Long Island City, New York 11101.
This Week at The Markets 