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Seedballing Makes NPR!

We were just on NPR for our Guerilla Gardening project. We had a fun Sunday walking around with Margot Adler and dropping seedballs in some underloved spaces.

Neighborhood organizations across the U.S. that want to improve the environment are using a surprising weapon: seed balls. It's a technique for planting in abandoned places and often inhospitable land that was developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer in "natural farming."

The technique has worked its way to Brooklyn, N.Y. In the Greenpoint neighborhood on a recent Sunday afternoon, a small group of activists walked the streets carrying paper bags filed with little balls made from clay, compost and seeds. They are members of a local group called NAG, or Neighbors Allied for Good Growth. They drop the balls on dirt piles and throw them into abandoned lots...

Gallagher says that seed balls allow people to take control of their small piece of the planet. She says walking around on a Sunday morning throwing seed balls is fun and easy.

"I think it is really important to break down these larger tasks — of taking back our neighborhoods and cleaning up our open spaces — into tasks that are completely doable," she says.

Check out the story, audio available online at 7pm

RIP Greenpoint Courier

The Greenpoint Courier has its last edition on the newsstands this weekend. As the Courier-Life papers is owned by Murdoch's News Corp, when the Brooklyn Paper was bought by News Corp as well, it was a sad but unsurprising chapter in local media consolidation.

An unfortunate casualty of the acquisition was the Greenpoint Courier and the excellent coverage that reporter Aaron Short brought to important North Brooklyn issues, such as the Meeker Avenue Plume. Keep your eye out for Aaron's return to the local news scene, and keep tabs on his whereabouts and take on the issues at the burgeoning blog Aaron Short Story.

In the meantime, keep checking your other local papers: the Greenline, Greenpoint Gazette, Greenpoint Star and the Brooklyn Paper.

Briefly Noted

The NY Times identifies a trend of Western European immigrants settling in North Brooklyn.

A 40-story tower has been proposed for the Greenpoint waterfront between Huron and India (Brooklyn Paper). We are lacking details, but it sounds like the landowner is applying for a variance. The owner is represented by none other than our former Councilman Ken Fisher, who represented owners of this parcel during the rezoning, during which we do not recall the mischievous sewer pipe being mentioned.

Greenpointer notes that the holiday lights on Manhattan Avenue will not shine this year. This sad, but not completely surprising, since several of the longtime anchors of the retail strip closed this year. Most notably in our minds is George's (which truly did "have everything"), which was replaced by a Sleepy's after the family that ran the store sold the building.

From the Department of Controversy, we alert you to some thoughts about whether a lack of safe conditions on the road for bike riders inherently makes them behave like rebels on two wheels, a condition that the author, perhaps too cutely, calls "bikeism." (How We Drive)