On the first Saturday of October, the corner of Marcy Avenue and Lafayette Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant will fill with the smell of cooking and the sound of a crowd. The 46th Annual GreenThumb Harvest Fair runs from noon to 4 p.m. on October 3, 2026, split between Herbert Von King Park and the Hattie Carthan Community Garden, and it remains free and open to anyone who shows up.
The fair is the signature public event of NYC Parks GreenThumb, now the largest urban gardening program in the nation. GreenThumb supports more than 550 community gardens and thousands of volunteer gardeners across the five boroughs, and its gardens account for more than 100 acres of public open space in a city not known for giving land away. The Harvest Fair is where all of that gets celebrated in one afternoon: workshops, live entertainment, healthy cooking demonstrations, garden tours, arts and crafts, lawn games, storytelling, and tables staffed by botanical gardens, city agencies, and community organizations.
But the event has a competitive streak that sets it apart from a typical fall festival. The GreenThumb Fresh Chef Contest, staged at the Almira Kennedy Coursey Amphitheatre in Herbert Von King Park, invites guest chefs to demonstrate a surprise dish and then turns contestants loose to prepare their own interpretation of it under a ticking clock. This year's guest chef is Hisham "Ham" El-Waylly, a chef, recipe developer, and video creator based in New York City. He is a partner and head chef at Strange Delight, a New Orleans-style seafood restaurant in Brooklyn, and his first cookbook, Hello, Home Cooking: Do-Able Dishes for Every Day, is a national bestseller. He is also one half of a culinary power couple with his wife, Sohla El-Waylly, who lent her own cookbook, Start Here, as a prize for the contest's first-place winner in an earlier year.
Marlon Rice of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation will MC the cook-off, and a panel of judges -- including El-Waylly and Chef Shorne of the restaurant Fat Fowl -- will crown the top three 2026 Fresh Chefs. The sign-up form for contestants closed early this year because of overwhelming response, but the amphitheater seats are open to anyone who wants to cheer.
The choice of venue is not incidental. Herbert Von King Park is one of the oldest parks in Brooklyn, carved from land acquired by condemnation in 1857 and originally named Tompkins Park for Daniel D. Tompkins, the abolitionist who served four terms as New York's governor and two as vice president under James Monroe. The plan for the grounds was submitted in 1871 by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the designers of Central and Prospect Parks, who laid it out as a public square for ceremonies and military reviews and provided for little more than border plantings -- arguing, in a line that has aged poorly, that trees and winding walks would cause the park to be used "for clandestine purposes by people of bad character."
The park's later additions tell a different story. Space was cleared in 1915 for the crowds that turned out for regimental band concerts; a playground arrived in 1927; and in 1973, after a fire destroyed a shelter building that had housed a public library, the Tompkins Park Recreation and Cultural Association pushed through a new recreation center containing the amphitheater, senior and teen centers, and an auditorium named for the ragtime composer Eubie Blake. In 1985 the park was renamed for Herbert Von King, a community organizer active for more than half a century and known as the "Mayor of Bedford-Stuyvesant."
The garden half of the fair carries an even deeper local history. The Hattie Carthan Community Garden at 719 Marcy Avenue is named for the woman the New York Times called "the tree lady" of Brooklyn. Hattie Carthan was born in Virginia in 1900, moved to New York in 1928, and settled in Bed-Stuy in 1953. She later recalled that within a decade of arriving on her tree-lined block, only three of the original trees remained. In a redlined neighborhood where the city had little interest in replacing street trees, Carthan organized. Her campaign led to the landmarking, on May 12, 1970, of a Southern magnolia at 679 Lafayette Avenue -- planted as a seedling from North Carolina in 1885 and still the only individual tree in New York City to hold landmark status. Brooklyn Botanic Garden has since named a hybrid magnolia in her honor. When she died in 1984, the Times remembered her as a one-woman force for urban conservation.
The garden that bears her name describes itself as an intergenerational agrarian project, and it anchors a stretch of Bedford-Stuyvesant that holds the largest concentration of community gardens in the city -- 37 of Brooklyn's more than 200 gardens sit in this neighborhood alone. Many of them began as acts of guerrilla gardening, when residents took over abandoned lots and turned them green. That tradition reaches back to 1973, when the Green Guerillas began lobbing "seed bombs" packed with fertilizer, seed, and water over the fences of vacant Lower East Side lots, a tactic that grew into a grassroots movement and, eventually, into the city program that now runs this fair.
That is the through-line of the Harvest Fair: a city program born from residents who did not wait for permission, celebrating a season in a park designed by Olmsted and Vaux, beside a garden named for a woman who saved a magnolia. The afternoon's activities reflect it. Visitors can tour the Hattie Carthan garden on the half hour, take home free daffodil bulbs from New Yorkers for Parks' Daffodil Project and seedlings from Gotham Greens, try flora printing, sit in on a microgreens workshop about growing salad greens on a windowsill, or hear storyteller Tammy Hall perform tales including "The Giant Turnip and Talking Pumpkins" and "Tante's Big Callaloo Fete and other tales from the Caribbean."
There are scarecrows to build, pumpkins to pick from the harvest patch and carve, face painting, and lawn games -- cornhole, sack races, tic tac toe, corn toss, jumbo games. Fitness classes run alongside the gardening programming. The Harvest Fair Passport also returns: complete a few assignments during the event and you earn a GreenThumb gardener tote bag printed with last year's winning T-shirt design by Rina Root.
Volunteers are still being sought for the day, though the requirements are firm -- 18 or older, able to commit from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and available for a one-hour virtual orientation, with sign-up closing Friday, September 18. Lunch and volunteer swag are provided. Everyone else can simply arrive at Herbert Von King Park or the Hattie Carthan Community Garden between noon and 4 p.m. on October 3. The event is free, and the address for the garden is 719 Marcy Avenue, between Lafayette and Clifton.