From commentor Carbon Dated:
My place in the East Village, far east, near Avenue D. Some of the attached pics were taken early in the summer. We live in an old house (pre-1850); two cats, who lord it over the backyard garden. Taken from the roof (4 story bldg) in late spring. That is C-Word, front and center.
A garlic bloom. We don’t eat anything out of the ground here, as we are assuming that, though the soil is very rich, it’s probably larded with mercury, lead, and all manner of contaminants. This part of Manhattan is all land-fill.
We do have basil, tomatoes, mint, hot peppers, and parsely growing in pots (in supposedly clean potting soil).
Nasturtium. The leaves are quite tasty in a salad (this too, in a pot).
Tiger lilies and daisies. Both are “wild,” as in not planted by human hands.
Many thanks to Carbon Dated, who was not only first past the email post, but sent so many pics I’m saving the rest for another post. Thanks also to RossinDetroit, Jeanne, Feebog, Munira, Marvel — I’m drooling over your gardens & harvest! — and Shell, who sent a shot of her own little tomato thief.
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Anybody have any advice about blueberry plants? Our yard should be the perfect environment for them, but the little wild plants that had been providing rabbit food along the western chainlink fence didn’t survive its replacement, and I haven’t had much luck with the dozen or so commercial bushes I’ve put in over the last three years. I’m wondering if transplanting them now instead of spring might make a difference…
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How are everyone’s harvests coming along? Who’s putting in a fall/winter garden?
Mino
Lovely yard there.
My first go at a winter garden is going in this weekend. Not as a formal garden, but kinda spotted in here and there. Gives me twice the good for my time spent watering.
SiubhanDuinne
Since it’s an open thread, just want to note that Jimmy Carter is going the be on TRMS in a few minutes. I’m going to watch, y’all might want to too.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Great garden!
Dave Trowbridge
Yes, blueberries are best planted in the fall. They need well-prepared soil (acid), and should not be harvested for the first year or two–in fact, take off the flowers before they bloom to give them time to create a strong root system. Also be sure to get the right type (temperature needs) for your area.
Joe
Planted a bunch of stuff, then we got a foot of rain in two days. No problem. A week later, the turnips and kale look great, the beets are up, the lettuce is making a start. This is my first fall garden, and I’m delighted by how fast things sprout. Oh, and then there are the peas. They look great, four inches tall, but they all seem to be sprouting about six inches downhill from the trellis i wanted them to climb….
cathyx
If I leave my string beans in after they are finished, they will bloom again and I can get a second crop. Same for my lettuce. Except I don’t let them bloom of course. I just break the leaves off at a 1 inch level and they they releaf and I keep getting more lettuce.
Linda Featheringill
Mino, tell them that you have winter tomatoes planted.
That just blows my little Ohio brain.
Linda Featheringill
Fall garden:
Brussels sprouts, broccoli raab, rutabagas, leeks, beets, and spinach. And kale for the daughter.
Not much of anything, just a variety. This was the list of cold-hardy plants that I found online. Hope they get up and grow between now and about the first of November.
Litlebritdifrnt
Really ot but how the hell do you get by the Koch brothers in the Tea Party Zombie game, I am stumped.
As for gardening stuff my maters have recovered from their hornworm infestation and are pushing out new leaves, my green peppers are putting out fruit (one almost ready to pick) and I will be planting lettuce and cabbage in the next few weeks if I can stand the damn skeeters for three and a half seconds.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Linda Featheringill:
I planted carrots from seed one year and they overwintered and survived a foot of snow, and were ready to harvest in the Spring, it was glorious going out and pulling fresh carrots in March.
OzoneR
uh huh
hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_WALL_STREET_BOOK?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DE…
The Pale Scot
Alphabet City, heh? Do any of the community gardens still remain?
different church-lady
A couple of weeks ago my nasturtiums were out of control, so I grabbed some of the long ends, yanked them off and threw them onto the yard waste pile behind the shed with the lawn clippings, leaves, and broken branches from Irene.
I swear to god the yanked off ends look like they’re still growing — the flowers are just as fresh as when I threw them there.
PS: I am as we speak making my first batch of fresh tomato sauce of the year.
Libby
What a great garden pix. It’s so cool to have a yard in NYC. And I adore the mixed media patio. I want to believe it was made of salvaged finds from the streets.
PeakVT
Does anyone have an experience with garden soil testing to share?
fuckwit
My 10-year-old daughter explained the Repug objection to the AJA, in her own unique watches-too-much-Disney-teen-TV-programming way:
I found her comparison of Rethugs to bitchy, cliquey, mean-spirited, spiteful teenage alpha-girls to be a work of brilliance.
gnomedad
GOP says ban on invasive snakes is ‘job killer’
4jkb4ia
9-1 Rays. Total walking disaster.
PeakVT
@fuckwit: She’s being unfair to bitchy, cliquey, mean-spirited, spiteful teenage alpha-girls.
Lyrebird
ditto on acidic soil for blueberry bushes… we used to rake up pine needles for ours when I was little.
I’m excited that my Montauk Daisies have what look like buds all over them, I think I’ll get Sept flowers, yay!
And for others who don’t wanna eat from the dirt they have, both Gardens Alive and Farmer D have really good dirt (for a price). I figure I’m contributing to a good cause…
PS: yummy nasturtiums! Can eat the flowers, too, but if you’d rather enjoy every flower as long as possible, note that when the flowers go & turn into little green pod thingies, those are tasty, kinda like capers.
Little Boots
those plants are pretty.
they are.
but there is a lot going on here.
Little Boots
i don’t know if vicki is sweet or awesome right now.
let’s say awesome.
Little Boots
ignore that last message.
I’m a goob.
OzoneR
@Little Boots: oh that vicki
Little Boots
@OzoneR:
she must be stopped, on that other site.
Suffern ACE
@OzoneR: Interesting. Larry Summers is a bit of a pill.
SiubhanDuinne
@Little Boots: Who’s Vicki?
Little Boots
@SiubhanDuinne:
other site. other thread. other me.
Reality-based
a little sympathy and commiseration, please, for those of us gardening in North Dakota, 25 miles south of the Canadian border –
After a nasty blight attack on my tomatoes last year, I focused on blight-resistant cultivars this year. Ordered the seeds, grew the plants – not a speck of blight.
(I highly recommend both Defiant and JTO short-vine, if you live in a blight-prone area.) Also had good luck with my Slava, Japanese Black Trifele, and Amy’s Super Sweet – don’t grow Old German, though – it looks pretty but has no taste)
And it was perfect weather all last week – dry, about 79-80 degrees, no wind, no mosquitoes. I picked crabapples with the family Sunday morning, from Dolga Crab trees planted by my grandmother 60 years ago – the bright-red small ones that make amazing jelly. It was a halcyon day – a little too warm, but perfect otherwise –
– and then a cold front blew in Monday morning. I picked all tomatoes with even a hint of orange on Tuesday, and covered all 15 plants on Tuesday night – all to no avail.
It went to 28 degrees on Tuesday night, 27 on Wednesday – and I have 15 blackened, dead tomato plants, with dozens of soon-to-rot green tomatoes still on them.
The REALLY irritating thing is that it will now go back up to normal temperature and it will be a couple of weeks till another killing frost.
Next year, I swear, I’m building a high-tunnel – it’s just too heartbreaking up here!
Oh how I wish my Great-Grandfather had gotten his butt out of Norway 15 years before he did, and established a beloved family farm in a REASONABLE CLIMATE!
Dennis SGMM
Nasturtiums are just the best. Both the leaves and the flowers are edible. The little green pod thingies that Lyrebird mentioned tend to be a bit hot to the tongue on my plants but they add a great spicy note to green salads.
Mino
@Linda Featheringill: Mario Batali says Italians uproot the plant with its green fruit, hang it up inside, and just pick tomatoes as they ripen.
Little Boots
flowers. okay. flowers.
Linda Featheringill
@Reality-based:
I think Mino’s comment to me at #31 was meant for you. Pull your tomatoes and hang them upside down somewhere.
Mino
@Reality-based: A jelly-hobbyist came and picked my native crab apples. Made a pretty jelly but w/ a little puckery aftertaste.
Mino
@Linda Featheringill: Don’t know if they would ripen if the foliage is frost blackened.
Little Boots
oh, come on, people, wake up.
mzrad
Blueberries need acidic soil–50% peat moss and 50% potting soil as well as azalea food and pine needle mulch on top. They don’t do well in the ground because you can’t keep the soil acidic enough. Need to be in a container, not the ground. Our two plants are in a galvanized tub with holes drilled in the bottom of it. Also, they grow in swampy regions in nature and, thus, can take all the water you give them. Keep them wet always. Our blueberries look fantastic and are fun to eat, but protect from marauding birds with netting. : )
Little Boots
oy.
Reality-based
@Mino:
I don’t know what a “native “crab apple looks like – If they are about the size of a small plum, and round, and more yellow that red, we have some of those, too – they make good pickled crab apples, but NOT good jelly.
Our Dolgas are about the size of a cherry (only oval) and a uniform, bright maroon-red – and they make AMAZING jelly.
Also, the deer love them – when they start falling, we often have 5-9 deer at the end of our lawn every morning, noshing on crabapples – I’ll have to send the pix to Annie sometime.
Shit, I wish I’d thought of – or someone had reminded me! of the “pull up the whole plant” trick before the frost. I’ve seen it in central italy, plants hanging in a barn to ripen – I was just so pissed at the weatherman I wasn’t thinking! (I don’t think it would work now, the green tomatoes had frost on them this morning! )
Next year, I’ll give it a try! Hope everybody else’s tomatoes are still going strong.
Mino
Off topic, but I just read about the discovery of dinosaur feathers in amber at a Canadian site. Amazing!
Speilberg made dinosaurs sexy and look how much we’ve discovered about them since Jurassic Park came out.
Mino
@Reality-based: Our natives are more green with slight pink blush and maybe quarter-sized. The skwerls bite them, but I think they find them too sour unless they’re desperate.
Roger Moore
@gnomedad:
Wow. Just wow. If barring importation of dangerous invasive species is one of the worst examples you can find of regulations run amuck, you really have nothing. What’s next, complaining that forbidding people from using their neighbors’ houses for target practice is an unconstitutional restriction on gun rights?
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Fortunately, all the fertilizer is on the other thread.
.
.
Anne Laurie
@Reality-based:
Owwwww! I shudder in sympathy!
Agree with your Trifele recommendation, too. My supertaster Spousal Unit gave them the hairy eyeball, first time he saw one (they look like, well, burgundy-brown nutsacks) but the taste won him over. And my Trifs are holding on, after the other black tomatoes (Black Prince, Black Krim, Carbon Black) have succumbed.
Yutsano
@Roger Moore: Let’s just throw every single business regulation out the window. Give them their free market and give it to them good and hard. They’ll start screaming as soon as they find they can’t enforce contracts.
Roger Moore
@Yutsano:
I’m just thinking this is proof that the Republicans are a cheaper date than I thought. I didn’t think the exotic animal industry had enough money to get the Republicans to care. I guess they got a reduced price because it could be used to criticize the Kenyan in Chief.
Little Boots
@Roger Moore:
don’t encourage these people.
or do.
either way is fine.
Yutsano
@Roger Moore:
Hell they’d do that for free. They have two goals: make the rich richer and get the damn nigra out of the White House.
They aren’t bothering to hide it at all.
Little Boots
@Yutsano:
they are such dicks. and we have to defeat them. but we do not know how. it seems.
Little Boots
we have to figure out what we are doing. they cannot win. they cannot.
Little Boots
I blame John Cole. I do. just cause it’s past midnight. but I do.
Yutsano
Some amazing photography and Celtic music. And yes every picture is a photograph. The illusion is remarkable at times.
The Tim Channel
We do a bit of ‘gardening’, but not at the house. We keep a few strawberry, tomato and bell pepper plants at our horse stable. Here’s a pic I took of a strawberry bush the other day.
one and two
I know a lot of you guys/gals here at BJ are flower and garden aficionados. I’ll make a pointed effort to get some photos/video posted of the neighborhood here in Germany where I reside. Every day reminds me of a trip I took to the Japanese Sunken Garden in San Antonio early in my military career, only on a scale that dwarfs that of such a specialized location.
The attention to detail and the level of public acceptance/compliance in keeping everything perfectly nipped and tucked truly boggles the mind. For the most part, the front yards on homes in Germany are nothing more than miniature flower gardens, but they are tended with care, devotion and a commitment unlike that I’d ever been culturally exposed to in the US. This attention to detail doesn’t stop at the curb. It’s not only the yards that are free of debris and leaf clutter. It’s also the sidewalks and streets. The general population appears to engage in a weekly sidewalk/driveway scrubbing as well.
We’re about to enter that time of year where I expect the average German is pushed to the brink of nervous exhaustion. The leaves are going to start falling en masse. The disruptive chaos of all those fallen/falling leaves will be matched by an even more determined and totally committed public. They will round up and corral all the unwanted debris with a zeal only matched by their mid-nineteenth century desire to purge the Jews.
Enjoy.
Lost in America
Carbon Dated,
Regarding your garlic bloom and contaminated soil, if it makes you feel better, I worked on a project removing some small trees from a brownfield-type area that was contaminated with PBCs so the soil could be dug up and incinerated. Samples from those trees were sent for testing to see if they had taken up any of the toxins and they all came up clean. I’m not sure that would apply to every possible contaminant or to your vegetables, but it might be worth further research.
Lost in America
I spent a couple of nights camping this week in northern Minnesota where I live. While I was out, we got frost and sleet, so I returned to squash plants lying flat on the ground and tomatoes incapable of supporting themselves anymore. The tomatoes were half-ripe and now have weird bruise-like areas on them from the frost–anyone know if they’re OK to use? I guess my garden is done.
My serrano peppers were fortunately in a pot inside during that nasty weather, but the leaves are looking really light-colored. I don’t know if the cooling weather or the lack of some nutrient–though the peppers are growing in compost, so that seems unlikely.
A Mom Anon
OK Gardeners,a question. Everything in my garden this year(what little there is/was)tastes just awful. Bland or almost sour. What the hell? What soil ammendments should I use? Lime? The garden soil is compost,composted manure and some topsoil we had trucked in a few years back. Would the horrfic heat do this or is it a soil issue?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@A Mom Anon: First you need a soil test
arguingwithsignposts
about half this thread reads like performance art.
harlana
kitteh! on a patio!
he/she definitely looks like the “owner”
Linda Featheringill
@A Mom Anon:
Bland garden.
My first reaction would be too much water but I don’t know how much rain you got. Or poor drainage, leading to the same problem.
But that’s just a guess.
MKSinSA
@A Mom Anon: It’s the heat. Your plants are so stressed out just trying to grow/survive that there’s little left for production. I finally gave up trying to cool the blossoms to get the fruit to set (Central TX). It meant spraying them down twice a day in addition to regular feeding and watering. For the amount produced and its lack of quality/taste, it just wasn’t worth using that amount of our precious water resource.
Sigh. We’ll get ’em next year, Mom!
A Mom Anon
@Linda Featheringill: Can’t be too much water. We had a total of maybe 4-5 inches in about 3 months. I have soaker hoses,but I only turned them on a few times. Even the stuff in pots had no taste and that was in organic potting soil with compost and cow poop. I’m leaning toward blaming the heat,but I’ll do a soil pH test too and see what that tells me.
stagemom
soil can be contaminated, but what about leaves and fruit?
i’d worry about how to get the toxins off the leaves, fruit since the NYC air is very dirty and dust carries the lead.
here’s a helpful link about lead:
extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/DG2543.html
Precautions for Garden Soils
To minimize absorption of lead by plants a number of control measures may be taken:
Maintain soil pH levels above 6.5. Lead is relatively unavailable to plants when the soil pH is above this level. If needed, add lime according to soil test recommendation. Lead is also less available when soil phosphorus tests are high. For information about obtaining a routine soil test, contact your local Extension office.
Add organic matter to your soil. In soils with high lead levels, adding one-third by volume organic matter will significantly reduce lead availability. Organic compounds bind lead and make it less available to the plant. When adding organic matter, the pH should also be maintained above 6.5. Good sources of organic matter include composted leaves, neutral (non-acid) peat, and well-rotted manure. Avoid leaf mulch obtained along highways or city streets as it may contain higher than normal lead levels.
Locate your garden as far away from busy streets or highways and older buildings as possible.
Because of the possibility of bare soil exposure to children through hand to mouth activity, soils with lead levels exceeding 100 ppm should not be used for gardening. If soil exposure to children is not a concern, then plants can be safely eaten from soils with soil lead levels up to 300 ppm.
Carbon Dated
Thanks for the spread, Anne Laurie. Looks very nice.
@Lost in America — nice tip there. I just learned about phytoremediation recently. I hear NYDEC might be able do something for us along these lines, gratis.
Thanks to the commenters who mentioned eating the nasturtium blooms. I had no idea!
CD
Drew @ Willpower Is For Fat People
For the blueberry plants, they won’t produce fruit unless they are pollinated by a different bush. So you need to have two bushes, preferably of different varieties.
Orchards generally plant alternating rows of different varieties. In a backyard, you’ll need two of them planted next to each other.