Walking around the NYBG on this misty Wednesday afternoon, you can already make out hints of Halloween creeping into the Garden. The jack o’ lanterns peeking out from atop the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden archway are a dead giveaway. And this weekend, Annie Novak and the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden do them one better by welcoming an age-old tradition back to our vegetable plots. Leave the chicken wire at home, skip the raised beds, and grab a burlap sack: the scarecrows are slinking in!

As of Saturday and Sunday, the Family Garden’s vegetables see the silhouettes of autumn’s most iconic bird-shooing bodyguards, and we need your kids to help put them together. We’ll supply the poles, twine, floppy hats and straw, just so long as they bring their creativity. And that imagination easily carries over to our other activities for the weekend, like making corn husk dolls and exploring the nine restaurant kitchen gardens of Mario Batali’s Edible Garden.
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What’s as big as a school bus, full of hammers, and can chew up a log the size of a Mini Cooper in just a few seconds? That would be The New York Botanical Garden‘s new Diamond Z tub grinder, the latest addition to our collection of groundskeeping machinery and easily the most impressive.

Tub grinders in this class are essentially glorified mulchers, using rapidly swinging “hammers” to break down organic material into an easy-to-manage pulp. Think of the trailer-sized woodchipper the average home landscaping company uses, then scale that up to industrial proportions, and you have the Diamond Z. It’ll handily take down a bundle of twigs and weeds, but its real talent is in gobbling up enormous segments of tree trunk–up to 30 tons of them per hour–and spitting out useable mulch or compost. After the past year’s fluke storms left us facing damaged trees across the Garden, this was exactly what we needed to tidy up our wood piles.
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“In Spain, we say that when a person has a vivid imagination or is particularly jolly, he has a head full of butterflies.”

– Manolo Valdés

Photo by Mark Pfeffer