Pickles N. Jams: Gardening

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:43:22 GMT

Sunday's Harvest Yesterday's harvest was not bad at all. Lots of eggplants. I almost waited too long and one had some brown spots inside. I made Moussaka (without meat). So good! But a lot of work since it involves so many steps before you can finally put the pan in the oven: broiling peppers and peeling them, broiling eggplant, frying potatoes, making toamto sauce, assembling the whole thing. But it was worth it. And we will still have leftovers tonight. I am getting the roof ready for my first attempt at fall planting. It seems a bit too hot still for anything tender to grow. But a late harvest of some beans, cucumbers, radishes and greens would be nice. I am contemplating setting up a very simple passive hydroponic system. Nothing complicated or mechanical. That way I wouldn't have to schlepp so much soil up there, and since I would drain the system in the winter there would be less weight with the added snow-load. I am still a bit skeptical whether it will actually work. I will set up a few very simple containers as a trial. I got some new tart apples at the market. Tonight I will make some apple jelly. Maybe scented with some lemon balm or lavender. Or lemon verbena. I can't decide. Maybe some of each. Or maybe just plain.

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 03:53:44 GMT

Pictures From the Roof I took some pictures today. For now, I will just post them without much comment. I will write about some new ideas for the roof very soon. Everyone says you can't grow pumpkins in pots. Around here they just keep popping up. I didn't plan on these two ears of corn either. These tomatoes will be harvested soon. I ran out of pots. We had the first eggplant yesterday. There are many more.

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 01:41:24 GMT

Long Time, No See This blog will be on hiatus again (well, when is it not?); this time for three weeks as we will visit my family in Germany. I will not even attempt to sum up the goings-on of the past week. Instead I will post a few pictures from my "gardens," before they burst into bloom and hopefully fruit. Hey, if we had a webcam, we could watch things grow from afar. One thing I would like to say though is, that my fast was the best thing I did for myself since I had my children. I feel rejuvenated, both physically and mentally. I am back to eating normal now, although more thoughfully and in smaller portions. I will definitely go back and fast again. I had some major detoxification happening on day six and I am not sure I got rid of all the nasty stuff since I broke the fast on day seven. I hope to talk more about it when I get back. The windowboxes have filled in nicely. In my backyard the lilies are just about ready to start blooming. And here is my little rooftop farm:

Sun, 22 May 2005 03:05:17 GMT

One Week's Round-Up I am in between visits from in-laws. Visit was good, I think. It is good for grandparents to spend time with their grandchildren, especially in view of health problems. I focused the last week on my garden(s) (what am I talking about??? I have a postage stamp and three window boxes ...). In the back, I put the Japanese Maple in. It looks gorgeous. I still need to thin out the canopy a bit. I put in Sweet Autumn Clematis to keep the other Clematis company. They can mingle and we will have some nice bloom in the fall. General cleaning-up, put in some Impatients to brighten things up a bit. And I moved the Bleeding heart that had gotten so enormous it was crowding everything else.
I took the pansies and primrose out of the window boxes and planted them under the blueberry bushes. You never know, we might still get some mileage out of them. For me geraniums are the quintessential window box flower but since they don't get enough sun here, they actually never look really good. So this year I did something drastically different (and ironically, this was the first year I managed to overwinter my Geraniums). I assembled some houseplants that can't stop multiplying and added some colorful coleus. (I will post a picture once they have filled in a bit). Basically, there is Sweet Potatoe Vine and Wandering Jew trailing down the front, two different types of coleus and a polka-dot plant in the middle, along with a white Impatients (some flowers, I figured), and in the back there is a spider plant and a fern. It looks pretty good with unusual contrast of foilage.
I put my tomatoes and peppers on the roof and a few herbs and other things. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Well, I worked for five hours climbing up and down that ladder with my backpack loaded up with plants and compost. I thought my back would break. The potting soil I had used last year had not drained very well so I really needed to refresh the pots with lots of Perlite and compost. And speaking of compost, I had to move that around too, because my bins were full. Again. I wish I had room for a third bin. So much for was my gardening craziness. I also repotted most of the houseplants and put the geraniums in pots on the steps. I will post pictures eventually. The bizarre thing is that while I dig around in the little dirt I have, all around me neighbors are putting in paving and building walls and covering up that last bit of dirt as if it were the evil enemy. Oh well. I still have to do the tree-pit in the front. That's the toughest habitat. Dogs, people, cars, salt in the winter. Whenever I have an extra plant that looks tough I put it in there. Last fall I put in a hosta and it came up this spring. Then someone actually dug it up and took off with it. I hope it found a good home. Culinary Stuff I delegated most of the cooking this week to my spouse. Being cooked for is nice. I could get used to it. We went out once to Little Giant again. I had wild asparagus for the first time. It was amazing. Pencil-thin with relatively large tips. Very green and fresh tasting. Apparently some guy from Vermont drives around and sells it to people in the know. I don't think he will be coming by my house, though. The other noteworthy thing I had there was a Mojito with rum they had spiced themselves. I managed to coax the ingredients out of the waitress. Speaking of drinks we were at a BBQ today and I had excellent home-made beer. It was seriously good beer. Almost makes we want to start brewing. But my neighbor said he had been tinkering around for four years and pouring a lot down the drain. Hmm, maybe I can trade some canned goods? Or some spiced rum?

Wed, 04 May 2005 17:35:29 GMT

Go Away! Yesterday I saw a squirrel scampering along the fence with a large piece of perfectly golden toast in his claws. I managed to sneak a picture before it sat down out of range and proceeded to munch on it. I don't like squirrels. They dig up my flower pots. There weren't any on this block until last year. I think the toast-eater is actually second generation.

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 17:04:28 GMT

More From the Urban Habitat This stand of tulips comes back every year in all its glory among the ever- evolving junk. The yard immediately behind it used to be extremely well-groomed six years ago when we got here. Now it is a forest of saplings. The house that goes with the yard in the very back (where you see the broom) has just been beautifully restored and I am sure the yard will soon be very pretty as well. The chives are my windowbox. You can't see the yard right next to mine because the yards are terraced and the terrain drops down a retaining wall. It is totally bare anyway. Pesticides! It is incomprehensible to me how some people just don't appreciate at all having a backyard in Manhattan.

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 18:04:33 GMT

More News From the Urban Habitat Today I took a break and wanted to have lunch among the Magnolia petals. As I was carrying my tray outside a bird came flying towards me from the neighboring yard. I thought it was a mourning dove at first because of its size. But when it landed on the tree in my yard I saw that it it a speckled chest, a long beak and was a different bird altogether. It somehow resembled a woodpecker but was not the red-headed kind I had seen in the yard in years past. It did not sit still long at all but I did get a good look at it and it was quite distinctive. I went inside and got the children's bird guide. On the page after the woodpecker was the Northern Flicker. That's clearly what it was. I know this is not a rare bird at all but I had never seen one before, so I am very excited. I had heard its cry for a while (and also in a near-by park) had not been able to see it. There is a very dead tree two yards down and I had heard some hammering for a while but it was not as forceful as a woodpecker's and I couldn't see a woodpecker either. I hope the flicker will nest in the dead tree. Another species to add to my list of urban wildlife sightings. This year we have two very noisy blue jays who give the crow a run for its money. Sparrows, starlings, mourning doves and pigeons of course. Last year we saw woodpeckers, robins, and cardinals.

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:16:55 GMT

My Magnolia Garden Here is my little urban oasis, briefly sprinkled by fairy petals.

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 02:59:32 GMT

It has been very warm today. Hot. In the 80s. Suddenly the city was baking. One of these weird days. Tomorrow is supposed to be in the 60s. Everything just pushed out today. Tulips, magnolias, trees. They opened their blooms and immediately dropped their petals. The magnolia leaves from a neighboring yard have started to come down in our garden, and when it rains they will all come down. The long-awaited magnolia bloom is always so short-lived. I noticed a fragrance in the backyard and I wasn't sure what it was. We don't get a lot of sun and don't have an abundance of things blooming there. Finally I figured out it was the Eglanteria rose. I knew it was supposed to have fragrant leaves, but in years past-we have had it for 3 years-you really had to rub the leaves to detect any hint of fragrance. Not this year! It has a distinct green apple fragrance and i can even detect it in the house. I wonder if it will get weaker over the summer. It is a good thing it has at least some fragrance now, because I don't think we will get much bloom from it. Although it is one of the few roses supposed to do ok with less sun, we had maybe twelve little blooms last year. Oh well, we kind of knew we were taken a chance.

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 01:47:51 GMT

Finally Spring Today it was finally spring. Real Spring. T-Shirt weather. I put the tomatoes and peppers outside, just for the afternoon, they are back in now. I don't know if these tomatoes will make it. They came up as volunteers in pots I had taken inside last fall and I over-wintered them. One of them is quite large and has many blooms. They also have downy mildew and probably not a very long lifespan. I put them in larger pots a couple of weeks ago and more volunteers have come up. My compost is obviously full of seeds.
The peppers did not do well at all last year, in part because the potting soil (Pro-Mix) I had used did not drain well. At the end of the summer I cut them back and repotted them. Three survived. They are small but seem healthy. One is blooming like crazy.
I should probably just toss everything out but I like to coddle things along. The tiny backyard is basically cleaned up. Except for the strawberry runners that are everywhere. I have to do something about those. It was so much fun being out there. I could literally watch things grow. We also had our first dinner in the backyard. Pasta with Pesto (by popular request), salad and ice-cream for dessert. But the best thing was that today finally my right ear stopped feeling as if a huge wad of cotton had been stuffed in it. It was about time, it has been driving me nuts for almost two weeks. Now my throat hurts badly but I would rather endure pain than what felt like aliens that had nested in my ear. It turns out that the Pope's heart is not going to Poland after all. The concept was probably too medieval.

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 04:02:36 GMT

Spiraling Upwards My neighbor finally helped me find a way out of a conundrum that plagued me for several years. Ever since we moved into this house I had the intention of installing a roof garden, but I could not figure out how to access the roof comfortably and safely. Currently the access is through a very small hatch, to which leads a fire ladder, straight against the wall, with no angle at all. Nevertheless, last summer I managed to get up there, by means of a mountaineering backpack, about a dozen of 5-gallon buckets, tomato plants and soil and miscellaneous other stuff. This was done out of sheer impatience and clearly not intended as a permanent arrangement. I kept looking at the space in the hallway, the ladder and the hatch, and I just could not figure out how to make it work. I have been through everything. There is not enough room for a spiral staircase, not enough room to install stairs or even a ladder at a decent angle. I was at my wits' end and had asked several people to look at it with me. We tossed about putting in another flight of stairs and going through a sky-light, building a bulkhead on the roof and other utopian stuff. I knew there had to be a solution but I just couldn't find it. The other day my neighbor called and asked if I could help him with a computer-related problem. This neighbor is a Fine Artist who is painstakingly renovating his 19th century townhouse, pretty much doing everything by himself except for plumbing and electrical work. I went over there and I helped him. I was totally awestruck by the rooms he had finished. Then I asked him if he wouldn't mind to look at my roof access problem at some point "Because I just can't wrap my mind around it and I am sure someone is going to look it and think of something that just hadn't occurred to me." He said, how about right now. Fine. We looked at the space for a while and measured and tossed around various things and he poked his head into the hole in the crawl-space and told me about how the joist were "sistered up" and why you couldn't enlarge the opening this way or that way. Then we looked into various untidy closets and contemplated stairs going right through the untidiness, but in the end, we decided that wasn't feasible either. Finally my neighbor said it might be easier to cut a new opening someplace and we to wandered through the rooms gazing around and my neighbor peeked out the windows. The back room is narrower than the rest of the house, and there is sort of a light-well between our building and the adjoining building. A window in the middle room looks out into the light-well (which is not fully-enclosed but open to one side). Here is what my ingenious neighbor came up with: We could use that window as door (it is low and tall) and then put a spiral staircase in the light-well going up to the roof. That would put the staircase outside and solve many problems. I knew it! There was a way and I could not see it. Now I feel I can finally go ahead with this project. Next week I will start making phone calls and asks for quotes. I am nervous of course. I am not very comfortable "hiring" people. I hate to have anybody do work for me. But I can't install an outside staircase by myself. I still have not totally resolved what exactly is going to happen on the roof. I have my ideas, but I need to have the access worked out first. I want to get it done, but I am in no rush. I need to have a very clear idea of what I want before I can do anything.

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:56:58 GMT

Carne Vale
(Fare-Well Meat!) It has been so blah around here, and I want this winter gone! No wonder people all over the world are trying to get rid of it! (from de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastnacht)
Maybe I will dress up like this and make a big racket! I don't know if there are any pagan roots for going on a fast and stopping to eat meat but my suspicion (totally unresearched) is that around this time of the year folks probably had consumed the meat they had put up and thus it was 'Fare-Well Meat' and let's look for some juicy fresh sprouts. I too was out in my backyard, and glad to see that the trusty chives are sprouting and my Arp Rosemary seems to have survived the winter. But best of all, inside, I discovered yesterday that my orchid is up to somthing: it looks like it is sending out a scape! Might it even bloom again?