I spent hours at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden last week. I went there specifically looking for the Wisteria, which is my spirit flower, and which I love so much that smelling it makes me feel high and looking at it makes my pupils dilate. Thank God for Wisteria!
While I was exploring the rest of the gardens, I came across something that made me laugh out loud: The garden of plants native to New York City. This garden was literally just rows and rows of all the weeds that keep popping up in my veggie beds! My first instinct was to scream and point and start pulling them all up by their roots (but don't worry, I didn't).
This got me thinking about the nature of weeds. Just like the word "Art", defining weeds is all about intention. If my entire garden is intended to be tomato plants, then anything else sprouting up in the soil is going to be considered a weed. Even Wisteria, when sprouting unintentionally in my tomatoes, would have to be weeded out. (Well, maybe I'd keep that plant as an exception... but you know what I mean!) And tomato plants, when sprouting in a flower bed, become weeds. No plant should be inherently defined as a weed.
So I'd like to publically apologize to the Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for being such a jerk and laughing in his face! Our local NYC plants are just as special and valued as anything else I may be planting in my garden. But I'm still going to weed them out.
Everyone wants to know about the rats. "You grow food in New York City? But what about the rats? Doesn't your garden attract rodents? Don't they eat your food?" When I first told my new neighbor that I planned on having a garden in the summer, this was his immediate reaction. Since his backyard is connected to mine, I absolutely understand his concern and appreciate that my garden can affect his yard, too.
A farm or garden anywhere--heck, a simple yard anywhere-- is going to have natural pests, whether it's deer out in the country or feral cats here in the city. So my short answer is, yes, there are rats sometimes, but no more than any other Brooklyn yard with or without a garden. The important thing is to garden responsibly so you don't attract more rats. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
Here's my yard right now, and well... I'm moving again. In July.
I've been doing this urban gardening project for about three years now, and this will be the third place I've lived in those 3 years. This is one of the main challenges that makes NYC gardening so difficult: We are a city of renters (about 70% of us rent instead of own our homes, according to the New York Times), so we have to figure out how to grow long-term plants in temporary spaces which we have no control over.
My solution to this problem has always been container gardening. I grow everything, even 6-foot tall corn, in buckets & bins so that when I move I just pack the binned plants into the back of a van and bring them to the new yard. The place I'm living now was an especially exciting move because it actually has soil in the yard instead of a fully paved space like I had before, so when I moved here I began transplanting my bucket plants into the ground.
Now that I'm moving again only 8 months later and in the middle of the growing season, I'll need to get a little creative (and I may even have to leave some of my babies behind). I still have the majority of my plants in buckets, but I did already move my lily bulbs to the ground (and OHMYGOSH did they thrive like never before) as well as my strawberries, mint, chives, and smaller spring flower bulbs. I had also been starting seedlings with the intention of transplanting them into the ground, but the time to transplant came about the same time I learned of the move, so I didn't do it and I sacrificed a few seedlings because they had nowhere to go.
But, dear readers, don't be sad, because this is actually good news and I've been sneakily hiding it from you for 4 paragraphs. The reason I'm moving is because I bought a home!!!!!!
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It's a condo in a building with 8 units, and I'm on the first floor with a private backyard. The yard is a total blank slate concrete slab, with not so much as a single flower pot or chair. I can build permanent planter boxes! I can set up a greenhouse! I can get chickens! My yard is protected on both sides, so no more kids jumping my fence from the street to smash my terra cotta pots!!! Life is good.
The first thing I'm going to do is build my planter boxes. I was totally inspired by Dave at Fancy Hands, who used found & recycled materials to build some really cool designy furniture at their office. I cornered Dave at a bar on Friday and coerced him into offering to help build my planters. I didn't ask! He offered! All I did was say I needed help... and a circular saw... and oh, would he like to come over my new place for dinner on July 1st? And maybe bring his saw?
So first I'll build the planters, and then I'll dig up the plants I currently have growing in the ground and move them to the new planters. Then I can worry about the rest of the move. As long as my transplanted plants are safe, I'll feel unstressed. Hopefully.
Gramulator (as I call her) was born in the 1930s and raised in New York City by a very young immigrant single mom, my Great-Grandmother BabiBabi. BabiBabi kept an urban garden on the roof of their tenement building to be able to feed the family, relying on found & recycled objects such as the wooden gun boxes she used as planters. She was "upcycling" not because it was the fun trendy hobby it is today, but because she had no other choice.
Gramulator has told me lots of stories about her childhood, and I know she's happy that I'm continuing the urban gardening tradition. She recently emailed me a story that I'd like to share-- that's right, Gramulator uses email, IM, and even Facebook. I told you she was cool!
Gardeners! Get out of the dirt, put on some shoes that are not garden clogs, and go out to these exhibits right now. Maybe even bring a date:
1. The Orchid Show, New York Botanical Garden in NYC through April 22, 2012
I walked through The Orchid Show with my mouth hanging open. This experience is a double whammy: First, it's the tenth year that the NYBG has exhibited a show of orchids from around the world, ranging from delicate pink loners in a single tiny pot to tangles of giant red flowers hanging together from the ceiling. But the second element to this year's show is the vertical gardens created by botanical artist Patrick Blanc. He built floor to ceiling structures of exotic orchids that literally climb the walls, using the colors, sizes and textures of the flowers to create really stunning pieces.
I attended one of the evening shows, which included cocktails and "orchid music" with my admission ticket. The Boyfriend noted that the DJ was perfect for the atmosphere, and wondered if he exclusively played flower shows. I believe that is very possible.
Watch this video of Patrick Blanc discussing something... What is he saying? Who knows! I'm one of those annoying Americans who has a really hard time understanding foreign accents!
2. The Glass Flowers, permanent exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Boston
The Glass Flowers have been on exhibit at Harvard for years, and I just finally made it to the gallery to see them. This is a room full of 800 hand-made glass models of flower species used for botanical study, so every one is perfectly accurate and detailed. Many of the species include englarged areas and cross sections, also made out of glass. The flowers were created from 1886 through 1936 by glassmakers in Germany.
Heehee! Heeheehee haha! That is me laughing out loud! I just found a mini siamese-twin pepper growing inside of a red bell pepper. Heehee!! The world is so cool!
(PS, I ate the red pepper and composted the baby twin for good luck!)
Hey dudes, sorry about my gloomy post yesterday! To get you excited for spring in my new Bushwick back yard, here's a peek at what's already sprouting.
1. My favorite of the flowers I grow, my hydrangeas, are growing nice and green in their plastic containers:
I've been pretty bummed out about the weather lately.
Here in New York City we've had a strangely warm winter, the second warmest winter ever on record here. This is wonderful when it comes to waiting at the bus stop on cold winter mornings and being able to wear dresses without double layers of tights. But when it comes to my garden, this is some tough stuff.
I started noticing a problem in December, when we had days over 60 degrees at a time we New Yorkers are used to seeing snow storms. My perennial plants, which have a growth cycle that includes a necessary cold winter dormancy period, just kept growing. They and I were both so confused.
This is something I can't stop thinking about so I need to share it (hey, what else is a blog for, right?)
I had no television and very limited access to pop culture as a kid-- my parents would only allow me to watch video tapes of The Prisoner, the British Sherlock Holmes series, and Star Trek until I left for college. I'm not kidding.
So for years I've been catching up on my old TV and movies with Netflix, and as you can imagine, I'm devouring terrible 90s sitcoms and John Hughes movies. Recently I decided to watch all 9 seasons of The X-Files.
The intro to The X-Files is hilarious: it's a montage of supposedly supernatural and spooky images, intermingled with scenes of Agents Mulder and Scully looking very serious. And just in case you don't totally get it, descriptive phrases splash across the screen: "Government denies knowledge" and "Paranormal activity". But when "Paranormal activity" appears on the screen, it's not paired with a paranormal image. It's paired with an image of a seed germinating.
A seed, germinating! Possibly the most natural un-paranormal activity that happens on this planet. The seed is sprouting its first shoot.
Not cool, X-Files. Not cool. If this "paranormal activity" is not actually paranormal, does that mean I can't believe the rest of your stories? No stretchy man living in the sewars? No cloned children named Adam & Eve? I know the truth is out there, but I guess it's not in The X-Files.
