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Scenes from Family Day: Pollinators and Food on June 26
Volunteer extraordinaire Tom Eccardt serves up handmade mulberry ice cream, made with mulberries grown in Stuy Cove Park, to an enthusiastic crowd at Family Day on June 26. All photos are by Solar One photo intern Maya Cramer.
Tomorrow we’ll be having our second annual creature-themed Family Day, but in June we had a Family Day that revolved around pollinators and food. We learned about pollinating creatures like bees, moths, flies and butterflies, colored pictures of pollinators and made puppets out of them (this activity is always a hit, and is affectionately known as Bugs-On-A-Stick), sampled sprouts grown from native plants seeds, and best of all, made ice cream without an ice cream maker! Check out the pictures after the jump to find out how we did it! And also a big, heartfelt “Thank You” to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer for supporting Family Day!
Tom shows examples of pollinators to a rapt audience.
Preparing butterflies to become Bugs-On-A-Stick.
So how did we make the ice cream? The basic idea came from the fabulous ReadyMade magazine; here’s the link to the original recipe. Instead of Lemongrass-Vanilla, we made 2 flavors using park-grown plants: mulberry and mountain mint chip. We used coffee cans to hold the ingredients, but we couldn’t find any 5-lb coffee cans for the ice, so we used clean plaster buckets instead:
Kicking the cream around under the FDR drive.
Everyone gets in on the action.
The wider top of the plaster bucket made it really easy to kick in a circle, from one person to another. Even in the 90-degree-plus weather that day, it only took about 30 minutes of kicking to form the ice cream. Because the plaster buckets were so big, we could put 2 coffee cans inside, and make our 2 flavors at once!
The results were absolutely delicious! There were many satisfied customers, and you can be sure this is a Family Day activity we’ll be repeating…
