Hurricane Harvest Irene!

Well, I harvested all of my watermelons, yellow squash, Chimayo peppers and scallions ahead of the hurricane on Saturday morning. I was worried I might lose everything to the wind. This morning, I woke up to an almost sunny day and thought, gee all that fuss was about nothing!
First I tasted a pepper. I took a tiny nibble of the tip and thought, Hmm, that wasn't hot at all. I took a bigger bite and it tasted like a sweet pepper. Then, I took a bigger bite towards the top and was like, Hmm, actually... this is hot. Ha! Still, it was a nice slow burn and I liked it! I'll have to think of something to cook them in.

I knew that the small watermelons weren't quite ripe when I harvested them, but what can you do when a hurricane is bearing down on you. I ate the red parts of this mini guy and it was tasty!
The yellow squash are just a little old, but I skinned one, sliced it very thinly and fried them up to put on a home-made pizza. Mmmmm!! I also stuffed the squash blossom with goat cheese and fried it up in an egg. Mmmm!

I don't know what to do with all those scallions!

Chili Peppers! 2011 Watermelon!

As always, I've been a bit lax with the garden and the blogging by this point in the summer. But, there are successes despite me! I have a nicely sized watermelon for the first time since 2008! This is really an accomplishment. I sure hope it tastes good! You can see that the leaves are yellowing and spotted, so the plant is definitely on its way out. My other watermelon plant looked about the same and has 2 smaller watermelons growing. =) They'll be nice little softball sized treats, I hope.And for the first time ever, I have peppers! These are Chimayo chili peppers, a variety from New Mexico. I'm excited to try making something spicy with them! They are extremely prolific, despite all of my neglect.
My yellow squash is putting out fruit, even without hand pollination. I'm going to eat this baby. You better believe it.
Zucchini, too! Though, it's not doing quite as well as the yellow squash, I think. I really have to watch the curcubits better. I should probably fertilize them more than I do. That's probably part of why the watermelon vines are dying sooner than I'd like.
Tasty fun times await!!

Big June Update: Early Red Tomatoes!

Well, May came and went without taking any pictures in the garden, but I did get up there enough to plant these gorgeous nasturtiums (got them at the Union Sq. green market) and do enough watering to keep things alive. Last Sunday I even got around to weeding, pulling up my spent pea plants and planting some new things in their place.

And here are the earliest red tomatoes I've ever had!! They're not quite ripe, as I like them really dark red, soft and fragrant. But they're almost there! Now if only the weekend would be hot and sunny...
You can see how much the tomato plants have grown. The other 2 are just as big as this one. I set up the automatic watering system on Sunday (June 5th, I know... too late like last year! but at least I had been watering a little). This plant had looked like it was going to die. I was worried that these red tomatoes would be the only ones I'd get because I'd underwatered. But, it looks like the watering system did it's job and I can't even tell it was ever in mortal danger! On the left is one of the white potatoes I planted in April. Seems to be doing well, though I honestly don't know much about growing potatoes so we'll just have to see when it's time to harvest.
Here are the blue potatoes. They suffered a bit down below because I didn't add soil when I should have, but I did add soil on Sunday. So, hopefully I'll have more potatoes than I planted =)
I got around to planting this watermelon seedling on Sunday, which had been growing on my windowsill for a while. I had some trouble with my watermelon seeds getting killed by fungus. On Sunday, I direct sowed a few more seeds in the hope that I can get a couple more plants growing. This one seems to be doing decently, though. I'm sure it's happy to be planted properly in the sunshine and heat we've been having.
I think these are the black beauty zucchini seeds I planted on Sunday.
I think these are the yellow prolific straightneck squash I planted on Sunday. I always mix them up with the zucchini because they look so similar.
This year, I tried something new and sowed some pepper seeds. I had some trouble getting them to start, but eventually got 2 plants, which I planted out on Sunday. One is a chimayo hot pepper plant from seed someone friendly sent me back in 2008. One is a King of the North red bell pepper I bought from seed savers exchange. I also mixed them up and don't know which one this is, but it has one tiny pepper forming! I hope it grows fast, as it was a bit stunted indoors.
Here is a beet plant next to my other pepper plant. We'll see which one is sweet and which is spicy when they grow up =)
This might look like weeds to you, but it's actually asparagus! When I received the asparagus plants in the mail, they looked like a bag of dried roots. The directions say to plant, water and wait. I waited for quite a while and they finally came up out of the soil. They actually looked just the way asparagus looks when you get it at the store, but they were much smaller and thinner. When first planting asparagus, I have read that you should let the plants grow without cutting them to eat for the first 2 seasons. This allows them to "fern out" the way they have here and gather energy to grow more next year. When you buy asparagus at the store, the "spear" is what has grown here and turned into feathery leaves. Who knew?!
On Memorial Day weekend, I went home to Long Island to help my parents in their garden. For my efforts, I got a pot of well established and delicious chinese chives (gao choi). They came out of a garden bed that we reclaimed from an awful amount of ivy. You see how the bottoms of the plants look whitish-purple? Where the plants start growing green is where I had cut them on May 29th!! They've grown a ton in just 13 days. Very strong plants. Chinese people have a saying that goes "strong like gao choi." I can see why.
Those scallions I planted at the end of April also grew like gangbusters. I should chop them and cook something.
Now an update on a few well established plants. These are my Northsky and Chippewa blueberry plants. As large and lush as they have grown, they remain a disappointment and I realize now that it's because there are no bees to pollinate them and they are not self-pollinating. Every year, they get covered in flowers and I have so much hope!! But then my hope is dashed when the flowers are gone and no blueberries form. What to do? Hand pollinate? Or just pull them up and start over with something else? Start a bee hive? Wah.
This Briteblue blueberry plant is much smaller but at least it produces something for me to eat!
These Loch Ness blackberries suffered last week from my lack of watering, but there are still some on the plant. They should ripen up nicely.
This Arapaho blackberry plant did not suffer as badly and is covered in these pretty little fruits. It'll be a while yet before they are large and black and yummy! My summit and anne raspberry plants are growing nice and lush as well, but I probably won't have fruit from them this year. Next year should be plenty!
This lilac I planted in April is doing very nicely =)
Here's a shot of the garden as a whole. Doesn't look as nice from far away! But, things are growing. In the near corner, you can also see a cold frame my father made me this spring. =)
That's a wrap for now!

Little update, Tomato Attacked!

I'll start with the bad news first. It seems like every year, I lose one of the tomato plants early, or at least it gets severely damaged, and thus stunted. Also, it's always in the same pot. I'll call this the bad luck pot from now on.... This year, it seems like a hungry pigeon decided it wanted to chomp the tips of each branch off. =( This will mean even later tomatoes from this plant.
Luckily, I still have 2 healthy tomato plants. I have no clue which variety each is any more. Good job documenting, Laura...
Strange things grow in the garden when you let them. This looks like some kind of squash or nightshade plant. It already has flowers growing from the center. There is another one of these growing in another pot and I don't know where they came from. I figure I'll let them grow and see if they make any tasty fruits.
The squash seeds I planted last week have sprouted.
Watermelon seed is juuuust starting to sprout.
And, the lilies are blooming =)

Note to self: June 5 is TOO LATE for setting up the water system

I had a visitor with me today, the first time on the roof since April 24th, and because there was a witness to the devastation in the garden, I feel it would be dishonest not to blog about it, too. My laziness caused this!! A pot of very dead raspberries.
There were a lot more casualties than that and some more that are on the fence and may still pull through. But as always, there are surprising survivors. A few of those peas I planted back in April grew all by themselves and had some peas the perfect size for picking =)
One of my blueberry bushes could be a goner... One suffered some damage, but is still alive. This one is still healthy with a few berries growing, but they're not blue yet =)
More small pea plants. Maybe with water and some more time they'll grow, but I'm not sure. We'll see. I also planted some swiss chard seeds in here, which should be grown and ready to pick by the time the pea plants are definitely expired.
This pot of had some pea plants and another plant, which could be a weed or perhaps a volunteer squash plant? I'm not sure, so I left it. We'll see what it grows into.
My visitor helped me clean up the dead and get new things planted. The empty buckets near the front are planted with zucchini, yellow squash, and watermelons. I planted some yellow and hot pink swiss chard. I'll be excited to eat those =)
I snipped the lower leaves and branches from my tomato seedlings and planted them low in the buckets with some egg shells and good compost that's been collecting in a bucket on my fire escape =) All 3 seedlings look pretty happy now, even if planted late. I'm optimistic I'll have some tasty tomatoes in August. I planted some basil seeds along with the tomatoes, too.
It seems like I let my garden fall into a disastrous state every year, but it's always ok to plant more and keep going! Starting over on some things isn't the end of the world =)

November 24th: Compost Update and Fall Cleanup

Over the last 2 years, I've experimented with different ways of composting my food scraps. At first, I chopped my scraps coarsely and threw them in a bucket on the roof, with no drainage. That resulted in a pretty soggy and smelly mess. Then, during the growing season, I began chopping my scraps and liquefying them in my blender to use as top dressing for my watermelons and tomatoes. (I know, gross. But, sometimes a gardener will do crazy things in the name of good compost. The blending and addition of water allows for double quick decomposition. In this blenderful, you can see my banana peels, beet greens, and orange rinds.)
Out of growing season, I continued to blend and dump my liquid scraps into a compost bucket with drainage. This all worked pretty well, except that it is kind of a pain to bring my scraps on the roof, and this made me lazy so the scraps would be stinky and messy. But, I think I've finally come up with the perfect compost system. I have placed a bucket on my fire escape, so now I only have to open my window to deposit my blended scraps. I leave the bucket covered loosely, to keep flys out, and that's that. This makes things easier and I do it more often now, so the scraps don't get stinky. When planting time comes, I'll just take the whole bucket to the roof and use the finished compost in the garden.

This process doesn't work quite as well for large garden scraps, but I have developed a separate annual cleanup system for these. Right now, the outdoor garden is definitely dead until Spring. Back on November 24th, I took advantage of a warmer day to do my final garden clean up. It probably took less than an hour, and involved cutting off all of the strawberry runners that I'd let run wild, hacking apart what was left of my tomato plants, and pulling up the shriveled squash and watermelon vines. I put all of these remnants in my compost buckets and covered them with soil from other buckets. It is now an annual ritual to rotate some of the soil between buckets in order to cover all compostable plant matter. This worked fantastically last year. By the time Spring planting time came around, almost everything was decomposed completely and my buckets were in good shape for planting. I'm hoping I'll see the same results by Spring 2009!

Winter Garden Update: Back to July 18th

Yep, it's December 6th. Yep, it's been a while since I've posted. In fact I missed the whole second half of summer, prime growing and posting season! And yep, I should really be studying for finals instead of procrastinating by updating my out of season garden blog. But, here we are.
Here's a look back on the garden as it was on July 18th. This oriental lily was in full bloom. =)

My Yellow Squash plant was doing fantastically.
This Arapaho Blackberry was developing fruit, though I'm guessing next year I'll have to fertilize and water more (I know, I'm always saying that about everything).

This watermelon was looking small and yummy, and the Rainbow Chard was doing well.

The Bloody Butcher tomatoes were doing decently, though smaller than I expected. Again, need more fertilizer and water.

The Black Krim tomatoes were really getting some color, and clearly a different color from normal red tomatoes.

The Hillbilly tomatoes were sad though. The plant must have been suffering from nutrient deficiency and the fruit were suffering from blossom end rot. I thought the plant had gotten over it's blossom drop last week, but looks like things just changed in a not-much-better direction.

Lots of Fruits to Come!

Check out this watermelon! I dunno if it will survive to adulthood as the other side of it is slightly irregular as if from scalding. I can't think how that happened, as the plants were well watered all week. But, it really has exploded from the tiny fruitling I saw last week.
This Arapaho flower is fast turning into a blackberry! I'm so excited!
This Black Krim Tomato is starting to darken up a tiny bit...
I ate this Bloody Butcher. Yum... Though, I will say, not as good as I remember the Stupice being last year. God those Stupice were wonderful!! The Bloody Butcher isn't as juicy, more meaty and I feel, less flavorful. I suppose it's a matter of preference.
And really, the biggest accomplishment of the week is that I have Hillbilly tomatoes!!! I thought it would never happen. For some reason, that Blossom Drop was hitting the Hillbilly hard. I also noticed that the stamens of the Hillbilly flowers sit lower in the flower than the pistil, so maybe it is hard to get this variety fertilized. But, I noticed 3 tomatoes forming today, so I'm hoping to get something worthy of eating.

Finally, here's the Yellow Squash from last week, grown quite a bit from the tiny seedling. I'm envisioning good stir fry....