This festival was un-bee-lievable!
Green thumbs at a Red Hook community farm invited locals to celebrate the growing patch’s bounty at a harvest fair on Saturday that allowed attendees to get up close and personal with non-human producers of local delicacies too, according to a dad.
“My younger one stuck her finger into the beehive,” Dan Wrzesinsk said of his 5-year-old daughter, Faye. “We’ve never been up close and personal with a beehive before, so that was exciting.”
Beekeepers from Brooklyn-based Borough Bees showcased the insects, as well as some of their honey for locals to sample, at the free festival hosted by leaders of Red Hook’s Added Value Farms, which recently kicked off a new partnership with community-service organization Red Hook Initiative that will offer lessons in urban farming to neighborhood kids.
The Columbia Street farm’s 14th-annual fall fair also featured pumpkin carving, bobbing for apples, tours of the facility, grub including hot dogs and hamburgers, and pony rides compliments of Brooklyn Equine, the firm that will operate the recently purchased Kensington Stables once its new owner, Red Hook industrialist John Quadrozzi, Jr., completes a massive renovation of the barn that he is renaming Prospect Park Stables.
And the farmers also educated attendees on their composting operation in partnership with bigwigs at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which annually processes some 225 tons of organic material on site, and is the country’s largest program of its kind, according to Added Value Farms’s website.
Another dad said his 8- and 4-year-old daughters also enjoyed watching the hive’s bees in action — and getting a glimpse of a goat who joined in on the day’s fun.
“It was a good time,” said Hector Nazario. “The kids loved it.”
