Your trash can be treasure for Wyandanch school garden project

Laurie Farber wants your garbage.

She’s not looking for just any old trash, but for compost, the kind of waste that can imbue soil with the rich nutrients needed to help nourish the garden at Milton L. Olive Middle School in Wyandanch.

The Wyandanch resident recently began soliciting donations of compost, which is organic waste such as leaves and food scraps that can be recycled to feed soil.

Farber, who heads the nonprofit environmental group Starflower Experiences, said she helped start a vegetable garden at the middle school in 2014 but it was dismantled this summer due to its proximity to a refurbished baseball field.

The garden is being relocated and its beds will have to be rebuilt. School district officials didn't respond to requests for comment on the project.

Farber, 68, began evaluating the needs for the rebuilding and came to the conclusion that more compost was needed. She had a lidded box built, with two large buckets inside to allow for compost drop-offs, with help from high school students who work for her through Suffolk County’s Labor Department.

She and the teenagers then walked around the neighborhood distributing flyers in English and Spanish that asked for compost.

“We’ve been trying to get people from around the neighborhood to give but we need a lot more,” said 15-year-old Abrianna Amador, one of the students.

Farber said she wants to increase outreach to the community and can give residents individual kitchen bins to collect their scraps. She also is aiming to work with the school’s kitchen to get more contributions and possibly to have local businesses give their food waste.

Collecting the materials means they won’t have to be purchased, reducing the need for water and artificial feed for the garden.

“Making our own is not only a good learning process but it’s good for us,” Farber said. “In addition to eliminating food out of the waste stream, compost is the best stuff for your plants. It adds organic matter, it adds nutrients, it adds moisture.”

Someone who already has contributed to the composting effort is Karyn Kirschbaum, a coordinator for Western Suffolk BOCES under a state healthy schools initiative.

She donated leaves and kitchen waste and said she will keep it up because she feels the garden and composting effort are valuable tools for teaching students.

“Whether it’s collecting compost or understanding the science behind compost, there are so many wonderful lessons that can come out of it," Kirschbaum added.

Christopher Turnier, 15, who also works with Farber, said he has learned the importance of gardens for sustainability so people have a “better, more direct source of food so you don’t have to go to the store in case you don’t have the money or the transportation.”

School board member Latesha Walker said Farber has brought fruits and vegetables from the garden — which she called "a tremendous asset" — to previous board meetings.

"Teaching our young people agricultural skills is profound because you don’t generally see it in areas like ours, full of Black and brown people, unless you live on a farm," she added.