Thanks to all our Volunteers in 2020
Happy New Year and thank you for your continued support of Rewild Long Island.
We welcome ideas and volunteer effort towards sustainable landscaping. In this new year, we have a renewed opportunity to help ourselves and our planet. Let’s seize it with both hands!
Rewild Long Island had a busy and productive 2020 in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our thanks to all our wonderful volunteers for what you helped us accomplish!
REWILD GARDEN @ DODGE
The ReWild Garden @ Dodge is a new collaboration with The Cow Neck Peninsula Historical Society initiated in 2020 where we began working the garden space at the Thomas Dodge Homestead. We have been busy planting natives and growing food at the ReWild Garden @ Dodge. Our special thanks to Pat Spencer, Veronica Lurvey, Elisa Delaney, Eric Linder, Jenne Biunno, Meg DeSiervo and Phyllis Sickerman who watered, weeded and maintained the space through the year.
Our ace garden designer and volunteer Dianna Facci has been instrumental in creating the vision for what this space could look like as a community site where education, garden work and fun come together with native plants. Watch as our new pollinator garden springs to life this year!
We are happy that this space is evolving as a hub of rewilding activity ranging across composting, bokashi bran making, monarch butterfly release and pollinator garden planting.
SPRING AND FALL PLANT SALES
In 2020, as most of us endured the social isolation of Covid, gardening and rewilding became an important psychic outlet helping us reconnect with the earth and one another.
Our Spring and Fall covid-safe plant sales resulting in thousands of native plants being picked up safely from the ReWild Garden @ Dodge Farm. Thanks to the leadership of Marivic Restivo, Margaret DeSiervo, Joanne Strongin and others who helped us make these sales a great success!!
Procuring locally grown, hard to find native plants and distributing them across Long Island is critical. We thank our members, volunteers and gardeners who make these sales a success.
Your membership and support of our activities is critical to the success of all-volunteer efforts like Rewild.
Please BECOME A MEMBER AND SUPPORT US! Remember that members get deep discounts for plant sales
COMPOSTING & RECYCLING
We composted, made Bokashi bran, recycled garden pots, held webinars on turning kitchen and yard waste into “garden gold”, and spread the message of sustainable landscaping to an ever-growing audience! Kudos to all our composting volunteers and new composters – Bea Helft, Bill Fleming and others … you are as dear to us as mellowed earthworm castings!! Thanks to Claire Brezel for leading the innovative program to collect and recirculate plastic pots!
SUMMER PROGRAM 2020
A coalition of four local groups including ReWild Long Island spearheaded the Summer Program to Fight Hunger and Climate Change. Starting in the summer of 2020, 18 local youths interested in fighting hunger and climate change contributed 1,000 volunteer hours from July through November. Six adult volunteers mentored and worked alongside the youth. The student internships resulted in 3,000 pounds of food donated to the Food Pantry at Our Lady of Fatima Church. Food was planted and harvested at organic farms at the Science Museum of Long Island, Growing Love Community Garden, Helen Keller Center and the Thomas Dodge Homestead and included zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, okra and a wide variety of other produce. Students learned about gardening and growing food, planting natives, composting and recycling, as well as the importance of fighting climate change through activism. The emphasis was always on learning by doing, and not learning by lecturing. One significant component of the education was youth presentations to the group on topics of deep interest to them – from cleaning our waterways, to native plant protection, to recycling.
PLAN OVER WINTER, PLANT IN SPRING
And finally our thanks to Anthony Marinello for working with 30 new Rewilders to provide guidance on their sustainable landscaping journey as well as designs for the our rewilder garden.
