scott wolpow | HarborLAB

Saturday night pool party? Well, close! 🙂

Community organizations, please contact us at edu@harborlab.org to arrange for your mature teens and adults to learn basic kayaking safety and paddle strokes so that by spring they can join us on longer and more adventurous tours! Our fun outings are based around exploration and service learning, to inspire environmental stewardship and further study. This is also a great way for parents to gain confidence through skills that allow them to help introduce their children to boating, even if (or perhaps especially if) they were deprived of such experiences when they themselves were younger.

Both the pool instruction and youth programs are FREE.

If you’re a kayaking instructor certified by the American Canoe Association, Red Cross, or British Canoe Union and interested in joining the teaching staff, or an experienced kayaker interested in assisting, please email us at volunteer@harborlab.org.

Great thanks to program leaders Steven “Chuubie” Chu, Dee Dee Maucher, and Scott Wolpow; sponsor TF Cornerstone; LIC YMCA for pool use; and Prime Paddlesports for making this program possible!

HarborLAB at LIC Springs! Seedball making station. This group of seedballers was perhaps the most fierce of the day. 🙂

HarborLAB volunteers had a wonderful time at the LIC Springs street festival, teaching kids and adults how to make seedballs. This means of planting native species helps restore habitat and stabilize shorelines. We focused on seaside goldenrod, which sustains migrating monarch butterflies and other beneficial insects in the autumn and shelters the eggs of black skimmer shorebirds. Our seeds were gathered by HarborLAB volunteers and students from Hunters Point Community Middle School in coordination with the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and Hunters Point Parks Conservancy.

HarborLAB at LIC Springs! Seedball making station. Some were super serious seedballers. 🙂

We’re very grateful to Long Island City Partnership, our local business improvement district, for organizing this annual event, which is much more than a block party. Our lead volunteers for the day were Dylan Geil, Patricia Menje Erickson, David Borgioli, Scott Wolpow, and Erik Baard, with Thomas Dieter helping us get shipped out from the site. Thanks to David Kistner of sponsor Green Apple Cleaners as well, who did the leg work of picking up and delivering the 50 lbs bag of red clay powder needed for our seedballs.

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We’re also grateful to our Seedball friends (http://http://seedball.us/) for teaching us this ancient propogation technique, which mimics the critical ecosystem process of endozoochaory (spreading seeds by animal droppings). We simply mix natural red clay powder, a pinch of sand, seeds, compost (cocoa husks), and a bit of water until the ingredients reach a cookie dough-like consistency. Then the “dough” is rolled into penny diameter balls. These are air dried for a few days and then bottled. Then HarborLAB distributes the seedballs along shorelines to stabilize them and provide habitat and sustenance for pollinators and birds. In cooperation with conservancies and governmental park agencies, we’ve seeded shorelines from Queens to Coney Island and Staten Island!