Joe Holzka Garden and the Humus Film Festival

Community Gardening in all of it’s manifestations is a proving ground for experiments in social and ecological sustainability. Read How. Last Fall I met Sara, a young woman from Madrid, Spain, who was visiting New York and asked me to show her a few of the Lower East side gardens. We met, walked around the neighborhood and visited gardens that were open and chatted about community gardening in New York and in Madrid. Sara is a leader of a community garden in Madrid, Esta es una Plaza .  We talked about another organization in Madrid, La Casa Encendida that was sponsoring The Humus Film Festival of short videos about community gardens along with the Humus Revolution, a 3 day fun event about community gardens.

Now I realized that she also had an ulterior motive, to ask me to submit a short video about a community garden to the festival. I agreed. I thought it would be a fun project. But the winter came and I wouldn’t be able to get any interesting footage in the winter. I did have some nice photos of the Joe Holzka Garden and when I looked through them I realized they could tell a story about the garden.

I’ve written about this garden before. It is close to my home and I’m an honorary member. I led a  project to build a shade structure/ rainwater harvester. I also worked on a expansion of the garden which added raised beds that would be used to grow produce for a local food pantry. Recently I helped the gardeners rebuild some of the raised beds that needed replacement.

We also organized a fun event to celebrate the release of a new book, Eat Less Water by Florencia Ramirez. Florencia visited the garden with me a few years ago and was so impressed by the garden that she mentioned the visit in the book. We read an excerpt from the book and shared food prepared by the gardeners, Kelly Morris and Aralis Munoz. It was easy for me to tell a story about the Joe Holzka Garden.

Thankfully there are computer programs that can take still photos and pan and zoom through the picture creating something called the Ken Burns Effect. My phone has a setting on the camera called Live Photos which captures several seconds of video when I take a still photo. So I made a movie using these photos with help from my son and my wife. It wasn’t action packed, did not have dialogue but hopefully will show the world this wonderful garden. Enjoy!