Early Surprises, New Experiments

This is going to be a little out of order, but I couldn't really contain my excitement over the surprises I found on the roof today! The late afternoon light, was also delightful for pictures =) Blueberries laden with flowers:
Window boxes abloom with ground covers I stole from my mom last year!
Despite neglect and a fence falling on them, the Loch Ness Blackberries monster on.
Strawberries already getting bigger! I can't believe they're so early!
Lettuce I never planted! This garden just doesn't let me kill it =)
Back indoors, my tomato seedlings are growing on. Imagining sun-ripened juicy goodness, now...
My experiment of splitting the herbs and growing some in pots to be transplanted to the roof appears to be a success as far as everything surviving the split. Things are looking good!
The thyme is growing in wild little bushes, a little basil seed I thought had failed decided to sprout up after all! The afternoon sun makes everything in my apartment a little golden =)
A new experiment this year is the use of rooting hormone. I've always been curious about the stuff, and never really knew what form it would take. My friend at work and I were trading plant cuttings and she mentioned having some extra, so she gave me some in a little pharmacy bottle. Now it looks like I have illicit drugs...
Anyway, I think you just dip the ends of a cutting in the stuff and plant it. Above is a sprig of oregano and below, some rosemary.
I started some snow peas the other day and these might actually be a little rotten because I left them in water too long before planting them. I brought them up on the roof and used the soil inoculant (mycorrhizal fungi for proper nitrogen fixation in the pea roots. Peas are legumes!) again. We'll see if they grow!

Finally Sowing

Leaving my plants for 3 months means relying on nature to take care of them as best she can, and when indoors, relying on family. Guess who did a better job? Before I left, my thyme and rosemary were thriving indoors and I had a bumper crop of window basil. I came home to find them all crispy. Somehow, it seems to happen every year, whether my fault or my parents'. So, Friday, I headed to Union Square Green Market and picked up some herbs from the same seller I trust every year. 3 pots for $5, but I guess earlier in the season some types sell for a premium so this thyme was 2 pots for $5. I have lemon thyme to the left and silver thyme to the right. I split a small piece off of both plants in order to keep some inside. I kept the larger portions buried in small containers to make it easier to remove them when it's warm enough to plant out on the roof.
Here from left to right, I have italian oregano, rosemary, and spearmint (3 for $5). I did the same splitting thing to the mint. The oregano and rosemary will have to be propagated by cutting later. Usually, I'm growing basil as well, but I'm all out of seeds. I tried to save seed last year, but it appears that all of those seeds are duds. Maybe indoor basil doesn't pollinate itself very well, even though it loves to send up flowers.
And, finally, I sowed my tomatoes to the left, lettuce bottom right, and spinach top right. When I'm not growing my own salads, I get 1lb containers of baby spinach from whole foods and I realized they might be perfect for starting small seedlings. They seal completely, so I can leave them on the fire escape when they sprout, without fearing that the street exhaust will get all over them, though I'll have to remember to open them every day for some air exchange. I got the container for tomatoes from a package of kiwis my family bought from Costco. Perfectly, it has 6 separate pits for the different plants and plenty of headroom for early growth. I've grown 3 varieties, Black Krim (my favorite from last time), Bloody Butcher (because again I have no Stupice seeds) and Pearly Pink (an intriguing new variety from my tomato seed archive).
When I accumulate more containers, I'll start some arugula. Normally around this time of year, I also start my sugar ann snap peas, but I'm all out of seeds and if I were to wait any longer, they'd be too late. Instead, I do have several new varieties of beets I'll grow this year. More to come on those in a future post =)

Indoor Salad Greens

It may have snowed yesterday, but inside, it's toasty warm and things are still growing. Back in early November or late October (I'm not sure, because I was bad and too lazy to write it down here), I let everything in my window boxes die and replanted. I really only lost my rosemary, which I'll have to replace, and my orange mint, which I never really liked or used. I resowed Arugula (top) and the Rocky Top Lettuce mix (bottom) in these window boxes. I think they could due with a bit of fertilizer, but I'm so lazy about that. I'll probably eat the lettuce in a salad with a sprinkling of tiny arugula leaves, soon.And, I also resowed my basil, which seems to be growing healthily, if slowly. I am day dreaming of some winter pesto... =)

Demented Watermelons, Fish Fertilizer, Window Herbs

So, early on in the watermelon growing process my 2nd largest melon was touching the surface of the roof on a hot day and got a little dry/burnt. I figured I would let it keep growing to see if it would fix itself or somehow or other survive. No such luck! It and any other melons that were scalded by the roof have become demented or aborted themselves. The big one even split open a crack at the scald point. The melons that grew early off the vine so that they were hanging in the air during early growth are the ones that survived (2 looking nicely these days). I decided to take off any messed up ones remaining on the vine, so I got a chance to see what pre-ripe watermelons look like inside. They still smelled pretty watermelony, but I bet they wouldn't have tasted very good:

Also, last week I decided that maybe I should start fertilizing some of my vegetables. I hadn't fertilized anything yet, and things seem to do pretty well without it. But, I didn't want them to run out of nutrients all of a sudden and die. I have some Miracle Grow but have decided maybe I'll leave that for my non-edibles. So, the best organic fertilizers I've read about are Fish Emulsion and Kelp Meals. There were several recommendations for the Neptune's Harvest products but they're not cheap and I wanted to see the product, maybe shake a bottle, before buying. So, I went to Saifee Hardware in the East Village where they have a truly amazing array of gardening products for such a non-descript store. They might not have as many live plants as they do at Plantworks, but they have a GIANT variety of fertilizers, soils, containers, hoses, etc. Neptune's Harvest is not an easy product to find in stores, but they had it. So, I brought some home and put it on my tomatoes and watermelons. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to tell... perhaps that's an experiment to run next year.

On the herbal front, my rosemary and orange mint from my previous purchase are doing well, but the English thyme died from being burnt to a crisp in it's little pot.... Doh. So, I bought some more English Thyme along with some baby and 1yr chives at the Union Square Greenmarket on Friday. I planted the Thyme and 1yr chives on the roof with my lilies and went on to make an indoor herb window box. Here is baby chives, basil I grew from seed, and orange mint from left to right.

I found early on that orange mint prefers being indoors to being in full sun. It burns easily but also comes back quickly. I have basil growing on the roof too, in a tomato bucket. It grows a bit better on the roof, but I figure I should keep some inside if I can. Here, I cut 1 tall basil plant into 3 pieces and stuck the extra 2 into the dirt. I hope they root and grow. I've read that chives are hardy and will come back next year on the roof, but they can also be kept indoors at a sunny window. My window has a south-east exposure. I hope it's sunny enough!

Busy Before the Downpour

Busy..... SHOPPING!!!! Ok, no Versace here, but Vermicompost, more containers for my plants, and a few herbs. I got my containers at kmart.

Then, I headed to the Union Square Green Market. There were lots of stands set up in Union Square, as there are every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Many had potted plants, flowers, herbs, and vegetables.

The herbs caught my eye... 3 for $5. How could I resist? Such difficulties I've had starting my own rosemary! And these smelled so good. So I grabbed myself an English Thyme, Orange Mint, and Rosemary (left to right in pic). Lovely! When I got home, I repotted the thyme and rosemary in 6" pots and transplanted 2 small basil seedlings I've grown into the leftover pots.

Then, I headed over to the Lower East Side Ecology Center's stand. I indulged myself and bought 3 20lb bags of vermicompost for $10 each. $$$! What can I say, it's all for my baby plants! I plan on getting new worms for my wormbin from them in a couple of weeks. They have a really great program for encouraging environmental conciousness in Manhattan.

When I got up on the roof today, I saw great improvement from just the last couple days! Very exciting! My watermelon seedlings, which had just come out of their shells yesterday had completely unfolded, and grown. They must really love that heat and moisture provided by the repot and the cloches. Here's a pic from the top of the Coke bottle cloche:

And, perhaps most exciting was that my tomatoes have BABY TOMATOES!!! They are so young! But these tiny little globes are definitely tomatoes. Both of my plants have flowers, but this particular plant is the potato leaf heirloom variety, Stupice, known for being "early".

Besides repotting the herbs, I dragged 2 of the bags of vermicompost up to the roof and my cat litter pans, which I'll be using for low growing items. I mixed up a slurry of Water-Keep super-absorbent crystals and mixed a good deal of them into vermicompost to fill 2 of the litter pans. Then, I got through transplanting 9 baby cosmos when the sky turned dark and opened on me! I didn't get anymore pictures before I had to run downstairs and hide from the rain. Here's a shot of the downpour: