Loyal Green Line Garden readers Kristin and Carl were in town this past week, offering unsolicited admiration for our gardening exploits. Yes, we're fortunate to have more space than the average Brooklynite -- but our stuff is also growing like gangbusters. I spent Monday wrangling tomato plants that have now completely taken over the raised bed, trellising them a third time this season already. And these are cherry tomato plants.
Things are going well here. The four basil plants I planted could provide pesto for an entire Italian village, the tomatoes are the size of small trees, and even the lame-ass cilantro finally is making a strong showing above ground. There's a dahlia the size of my (very large) head over in the flower bed. We could bring three bags of lettuce and herbs to our friends Will and Lucy's house over the weekend and still have a bag, plus three uncultivated heads, waiting at home. Just walk by our house and we'll force something on you.
Still, we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. We joked at lunch with Kristin and Carl that the swarm of locusts, or stink bugs, would descend imminently and put an end to our beginners' luck. I've seen exactly one Japanese beetle and one stink bug in the yard and instantly, think, ok, now it starts -- even after I've killed the bastards. The sight of finches adorably searching for nesting material on Monday morning, stubbornly tugging on the metal mesh around the higher raised bed, made me think, "next time, they come for the tomatoes."
I am legitimately worried that we are facing a systemic problem in the lack of bees I've seen around the now plentiful tomato and pepper flowers. The zinnias and cosmos in the flower bed and the marigolds directly in front of the vegetables are not drawing them in, if they are floating around the city at all. It just seems like we should have more fruit at this point.
6/28/11
New Community Garden at Bruce Monroe Park
If you live in the greater Columbia Heights area, you may have heard from other blogs and sources about a new community garden that is being built at Bruce Monroe Park. Work to construct raised beds started this past weekend. I feel guilty blogging about this development because I signed up to work but skipped out for a last-minute out-of-town invite. The good news for slackers like me is they seem to be not even remotely done with the project. Huge dirt mounds and stacks of lumber remain.
I've seen some of the community gardens around town, more or less stumbling upon them by accident, and must say that I understand why it took more than a weekend at Bruce Monroe. The boxes being assembled are gargantuan! The seven boxes finished so far are from 57 to 24 feet long and 6 feet wide.
Residents looking to volunteer or sign up for a plot in the garden can find out more information on the Bruce Monroe site on Wiggio or by emailing Steve Seuser at steve [dot] seuser [at] gmail.com.
The community garden movement remains fairly weak in DC. The Neighborhood Farm Initiative counted 36 such gardens for its 2010 garden census. The Bruce Monroe garden would be only the third in Ward One and the only one in Columbia Heights proper that they list -- although there is a community garden behind 11th St. opposite Wonderland Ballroom that's not on their report. Overall, the city gained only one new community garden came on line between 2009 and 2010. The Field to Fork Initiative has a great map of these 36 gardens here.
Ecolocity DC, a broader-focused community organization that has helped promote the Bruce Monroe project, has created a more comprehensive map of the region's foodshed. It's mapping of city community gardens is less complete, though.
I've seen some of the community gardens around town, more or less stumbling upon them by accident, and must say that I understand why it took more than a weekend at Bruce Monroe. The boxes being assembled are gargantuan! The seven boxes finished so far are from 57 to 24 feet long and 6 feet wide.
Residents looking to volunteer or sign up for a plot in the garden can find out more information on the Bruce Monroe site on Wiggio or by emailing Steve Seuser at steve [dot] seuser [at] gmail.com.
The community garden movement remains fairly weak in DC. The Neighborhood Farm Initiative counted 36 such gardens for its 2010 garden census. The Bruce Monroe garden would be only the third in Ward One and the only one in Columbia Heights proper that they list -- although there is a community garden behind 11th St. opposite Wonderland Ballroom that's not on their report. Overall, the city gained only one new community garden came on line between 2009 and 2010. The Field to Fork Initiative has a great map of these 36 gardens here.
Ecolocity DC, a broader-focused community organization that has helped promote the Bruce Monroe project, has created a more comprehensive map of the region's foodshed. It's mapping of city community gardens is less complete, though.
6/21/11
Briefly, Ladybugs
Hunting for Thai basil plants last week, I came across a cool organic pest control solution at Ginkgo Gardens (as well as the basil). They sell cottage cheese-sized containers of ladybugs to release into your yard to eat any soft-bodied pests like spider mites and aphids. Watching the horde of bugs scuttle about on the wire mesh lid was pretty disturbing, I'll be honest, but I guess it's no different than purchasing live bait. If you're the kind of person who needs to do that.
I took home my little teeming impulse buy and released the ladybugs that night. They instantly seemed content to crawl around the passiflora vines and the tomato plants. Two mornings later, I realized that I essentially had wheeled out dim sum carts for the neighborhood finches. Those ladybugs who survived the great bird massacre I drowned in their cup with the garden hose accidentally.
Clearly, I should have released the ladybugs a few at a time as to not attract the avian onslaught, or force some to fly away. The container would have supported them for awhile. The good news is that there has already been a reduction in spider mites, perhaps thanks to my previous regimen of aggressive spraying.
I took home my little teeming impulse buy and released the ladybugs that night. They instantly seemed content to crawl around the passiflora vines and the tomato plants. Two mornings later, I realized that I essentially had wheeled out dim sum carts for the neighborhood finches. Those ladybugs who survived the great bird massacre I drowned in their cup with the garden hose accidentally.
Clearly, I should have released the ladybugs a few at a time as to not attract the avian onslaught, or force some to fly away. The container would have supported them for awhile. The good news is that there has already been a reduction in spider mites, perhaps thanks to my previous regimen of aggressive spraying.
6/10/11
A Passionflower
Two of the three passiflora I've planted have taken off and grown over much of the corners of the back fence line. The middle one is still being hacked, this time by ants. Today, I noticed that one of the enormous flower buds on the plants has opened.
It looks like something from a Star Trek set. So cool.
When full sun really is full sun
It was abundantly clear that our backyard got lots of sun before this week's mini-heat wave. When I first put the containers of juvenile plants out for hardening this spring they ended up looking like I'd put them into the solar wind. Fortunately, they all bounced back and what we have is mature enough now to take the 100-degree heat just fine with enough water.
Keep in mind we've had salad four nights in a row so we've cut several plants to the nub.
Finding shrubs that will tolerate this environment has been a bit tricky, though. If you have a similar situation in your yard, I can recommend the stuff we selected. As vertical-growing plants, the Japanese pencil sky holly and the euonymus have done quite well.
The first six inches of the holly is new growth (the lighter green).
We also planted, as I mentioned before, a ninebark. It's native to the East Coast, but I've never seen one before. It will wilt in weather like this but perks up with a nice soaking.
This picture does not do the complexity of the colors in this plant's leaves justice. In the evening it's very nice.
Short of being on the roof, or in the Arizona desert, our garden could not get more sun. For the vegetables we've planted, that's generally been fine. Look at this lettuce patch
Keep in mind we've had salad four nights in a row so we've cut several plants to the nub.
Finding shrubs that will tolerate this environment has been a bit tricky, though. If you have a similar situation in your yard, I can recommend the stuff we selected. As vertical-growing plants, the Japanese pencil sky holly and the euonymus have done quite well.
The first six inches of the holly is new growth (the lighter green).
We also planted, as I mentioned before, a ninebark. It's native to the East Coast, but I've never seen one before. It will wilt in weather like this but perks up with a nice soaking.
This picture does not do the complexity of the colors in this plant's leaves justice. In the evening it's very nice.
6/9/11
Final Analysis: Arugula
Arugula is one of those ur-foodie items of produce. The writer David Camp harmoniously replaced the word "America" with it in the title of his book on the rise of the nation's recent discovery of culinary taste. It is the antithesis of the green leafy champion of American culinary mediocrity: iceberg lettuce.
I feel a certain pretentiousness in saying to people, "we're growing arugula" as a result. But my wife loves the stuff, and it started early enough for our succession planting plan. We sowed it directly into the bed and it sprouted right around the beginning of spring. It was ready to eat when it was still too chilly to eat outside yet. It didn't live to see the end of May, though. After it started to bolt in the warmer weather, I had to spit out a taste-test leaf because it was so revoltingly bitter. Guess I solved that mystery of its mildness earlier in the season. Fennel seeds have now taken its place.
We definitely planted too many seeds and should have culled some small plants. Mac did his part by digging up the bed a bit and offing a few early on. The arugula turned out to be small and didn't yield as much as I expected. What we did harvest was tasty through the mid-spring. But it was constantly competing for my attention with the lettuce variety pack planted directly behind, which went completely bonkers and is still producing all kinds of tasty greens. The yield for the arugula seems so skimpy compared to this lettuce, which, for all of my inexperienced worry about the small plants, really is ten times more than we can keep up with.
I'd do arugula again, but I would not allot it much more space than it got this season, and certainly not at the expense of the lettuce.
I feel a certain pretentiousness in saying to people, "we're growing arugula" as a result. But my wife loves the stuff, and it started early enough for our succession planting plan. We sowed it directly into the bed and it sprouted right around the beginning of spring. It was ready to eat when it was still too chilly to eat outside yet. It didn't live to see the end of May, though. After it started to bolt in the warmer weather, I had to spit out a taste-test leaf because it was so revoltingly bitter. Guess I solved that mystery of its mildness earlier in the season. Fennel seeds have now taken its place.
We definitely planted too many seeds and should have culled some small plants. Mac did his part by digging up the bed a bit and offing a few early on. The arugula turned out to be small and didn't yield as much as I expected. What we did harvest was tasty through the mid-spring. But it was constantly competing for my attention with the lettuce variety pack planted directly behind, which went completely bonkers and is still producing all kinds of tasty greens. The yield for the arugula seems so skimpy compared to this lettuce, which, for all of my inexperienced worry about the small plants, really is ten times more than we can keep up with.
I'd do arugula again, but I would not allot it much more space than it got this season, and certainly not at the expense of the lettuce.
6/1/11
Final Analysis: Snap Peas
Given that I'm very familiar with eating everything in the garden but not so much with growing it, I'll produce a summary of each crop we produce once its harvesting is over. It's a chance to evaluate how things went with the plants, how everything tasted, and whether or not the crop was worth the effort. Call it ... Final Analysis.
The first thing into the ground this spring were the snap peas, which we sowed all the way back in late February. Once the weather gets hot they really start to struggle and the pea pods become tough and unappetizing, so Christine actually ripped them out last week and planted fennel seeds in their place. I was sad to see them go because they were the first thing we had to give us produce consistently. I was thinking we might squeeze one last harvest out of them before their extirpation, but it was so hot here this week that would have been for naught anyway.
We had two rows and probably about 24-30 plants total. I cooked them three different times as features parts of meals. Add walk-by snacking to that total. I'm guessing we got 6 cups of peas out of this crop. Considering the limitations of snap peas as an ingredient, that's plenty -- but given that these plants were with us since March, it's not particularly inspiring.
The pods themselves were good in stir-fried Asian dishes (I do not make "stir-fries") but I have to say they were best simply raw. They were tasty and refreshing, but not remarkably better than store-bought alternatives. I mean they were, but not anywhere near as comparably more delicious as fresh English peas are from their grocery store counterparts (or, gag me, frozen peas). If you see fresh peas at the farmer's market, pounce -- even if you're iffy on peas in general like me.
So were the snap peas worth it? Yes, in that nothing else would have been ready when they were. I may bang the drum for larger shelled peas next year, though, simply for their greater utility in cooking.
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We had two rows and probably about 24-30 plants total. I cooked them three different times as features parts of meals. Add walk-by snacking to that total. I'm guessing we got 6 cups of peas out of this crop. Considering the limitations of snap peas as an ingredient, that's plenty -- but given that these plants were with us since March, it's not particularly inspiring.
The pods themselves were good in stir-fried Asian dishes (I do not make "stir-fries") but I have to say they were best simply raw. They were tasty and refreshing, but not remarkably better than store-bought alternatives. I mean they were, but not anywhere near as comparably more delicious as fresh English peas are from their grocery store counterparts (or, gag me, frozen peas). If you see fresh peas at the farmer's market, pounce -- even if you're iffy on peas in general like me.
So were the snap peas worth it? Yes, in that nothing else would have been ready when they were. I may bang the drum for larger shelled peas next year, though, simply for their greater utility in cooking.
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