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Raised Bed Planters

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As I’ve probably mentioned before, I have a tiny backyard surrounded by tall buildings. What this means is that for several hours a day (more in winter) the sun is blocked by these buildings. So while my yard looks sunny, the sun travels and doesn’t hit one spot all day long.

The spot that gets the most sun is (of course) the area that is paved. I have had an assortment of pots and planters there, and this year I put in some raised bed planters. Instead of building them, I scavenged wooden wine boxes from our local wine shops. They are the same width (wine bottle length), so even though they are different lengths, they make a nice, even row.

I have to be somewhat smart about what I can plant with my limited sunshine. I have bush beans, lots of greens including mâche, deer tongue, new zealand spinach and lacinata kale. I can grow tomato plants that don’t produce a lot. Cherries do best. This year I planted white currant tomatoes. I have way too many, since I started them from seed, so if anyone wants some, let me know.

I am trying yukon gold potatoes and ground cherries for the first time.

And if you are wondering why I have wire over my beds, it’s because I have very tenacious squirrels. They dig like lunatics in my beds, which rips up anything that isn’t well established.

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Baby Apples

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You may recall a couple of weeks ago I put some blossoming apple branches into my backyard to try and pollinate my little apple tree. I didn’t have high hopes that it would work, but if looks don’t deceive me, I have baby apples. They are about 1.5 inches in diameter and there are about 8 of them.

I ordered a tiny twig of an apple tree, which arrived a week or two ago. What’s completely amazing is that this puny little runt of a tree is blossoming! I thought I would have to wait a couple years like I did with my first tree.

I’m going up to my in-laws house this weekend and might get greedy and bring back some of their apple tree branches which are blooming right now. Maybe I can pollinate my little tiny tree and get an apple or two it’s first year.

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Dusting Your Chicken for Mites

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I knew that there had to be videos on YouTube for how to dust your chickens for mites, but I never could seem to find one. Here are a few videos that are very helpful.

Dusting or Powdering a hen


Doing the “Shake and Bake” method


Shows a serious mite infestation


red mites

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How to Dry Morels

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If you are lucky enough to have more morels than you want to eat at one time, drying them is the perfect solution. Even though my measly 2 morels weren’t an overabundance, I decided I wanted to try to dry mine. I think the flavor is more intense when they are dried.

Drying morels is a very simple process. First you cut the morels in half lengthwise. Put them into cold water to rinse out any dirt, grit or critters. Then you can do one of several different things to dry them. You can hang them in a place that gets good air circulation, but no direct sunlight. You can put them in a dehydrator set to 110, or you can put them into an oven set to about 110F. You don’t want to go with a higher temperature, because that will cook them and ruin the flavor. You will need to run the dehydrator or oven for about 10 hours to remove all the moisture.

I decided to string mine on thread and hang them in my kitchen. After one day, they were noticeably smaller and already getting brittle. Once you have all the moisture out of them, you can store them in an airtight container for 6 months, or freeze them for up to a year. Keep them out of sunlight if you aren’t freezing them.

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More Morel Hunting

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I admit it. I have morel fever. This past Saturday I went by myself to go morel hunting with the New York Mycological Society. We went to the same place as last week. It was another gorgeous day, and very peaceful not having a bored, hungry kid to appease.

I found 2 morels and many things that had nothing to do with morels. I saw an oriole, which was gorgeous and a deer bounding across the path in front of me. The deer bones I found, I jokingly (sort of) refer to as the bones of the last mushroom hunter who told others about this prime morel picking spot. When I showed the bones to my daughter, she asked me if I was going to put them into the soup I was making. She was not joking.

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Pollinating my apple tree

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If you’ve read my earlier post, you will know that I was in need of a second apple tree to help me cross-pollinate my dwarf apple tree. I mentioned this to my sister, and she said all I might need are a few flowering branches from someone else’s tree. If I put the branches out in my garden near my tree, the bees could do their work and I might get apples this year.

So where does a city girl get flowering apple branches? I posted on Brooklyn Freecycle, but didn’t get a response.
I went to a synagogue a few blocks away that has a neglected apple tree on its property, but I think they thought I was nuts. (I’m getting used to this response in people) The woman who had to make the decision never called me back. My next, best option was to prune some branches from the apple trees where we went morel hunting. And this I did. I did notice that quite a few of the trees were actually crab apple trees, which wouldn’t help me out. In fact, I already have a crab apple tree in my yard.

The branches made it home without wilting too much. I put them in water and hung one from the support of my tiny, new tree. I also brushed the stamens/pistils from the pruned flowers onto my flowers just in case I didn’t have bees visiting my yard. Now, let’s cross our fingers for some fruit.

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Garlic Mustard

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During my morel hunting last Saturday, I noticed other wild edibles in the woods. There was winter cress, garlic chives (as a kid, we called this onion grass), watercress, and two highly invasive plants – garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed.

Being the somewhat nature-deprived city gal that I am, I took the opportunity of gathering some wild edibles while I was in the woods. I gathered all of the above except the Japanese knotweed. Lindsay took ownership of the garlic chives, and delighted in pulling them up to get the bulbs. We made scrambled eggs with chives that were delicious. The eggs, of course, were from our backyard chickens.

The garlic mustard looked hopelessly wilted by the time I got home, so I put it in a big bowl of cold water hoping to revive it. It seems as though nothing can kill garlic mustard, and it perked up in no time. I made a delicious pesto sauce, using 50% basil leaves and 50% garlic mustard leaves and buds. Now is the time to pick garlic mustard to eat, because after the flowers bloom, the plant becomes too bitter.


In searching online for garlic mustard recipes, I learned more about the plant itself. It is a highly invasive plant that European settlers brought to plant in their kitchen gardens. It is a prolific producer of seeds and will blanket an area in a very short time, choking out all other native plants, including jack-in-the-pulpit, solomon-seal MOREL MUSHROOMS, and others. Wild animals don’t like to eat it, so it grows completely unchecked. And if that weren’t bad enough, the roots send out a chemical compound that makes the soil inhospitable to other plants. A very primitive form of chemical warfare.

There are many groups that host garlic mustard pulls. The amount of bags filled with the weed is astonishing. Unlike other weeds, you can’t pull this one up and just leave it on the ground. The flowers will have enough energy to produce seeds even after the plant has been uprooted. You have to pull it up by it’s roots and bag it.

Here’s a video that talks about the problems with garlic mustard. It helps you identify it and learn how to get rid of it. There’s even an annual Garlic Mustard Challenge, in which you help them log how many bags of garlic mustard have been pulled. Take a peek here.

Garlic Mustard Identification and Control from Barbara Lucas on Vimeo.

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Farming Concrete

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In 2010, Farming Concrete asked 100 community gardeners (in 67 community gardens) in NYC to weigh their harvests. They averaged the yields and determined that on just 1.7 acres of land, 87,700 lbs of produce was grown. The value was estimated to be $200,000.

Take a look at their interactive map. You can search by borough, or even crop. It’s pretty interesting

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How to plant a dwarf apple tree

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As you may have read from a previous post, I ordered a second apple tree to serve as pollinator to my current tree. My first tree is a Sundance apple. The new tree is a Pixie Crunch.

If you get a bare-root tree, as I did, you will need to immediately soak the roots in water (in the shade) for a couple of hours.

Then fill your container with good soil. I added compost from my garden, which is rich in nitrogen from my chicken’s manure. Make sure to keep the graft (the bumpy join in the trunk) a couple of inches above the level of the soil. My tree has a white line painted on to show the join.

I put a support post in as well and added a protective guard for the trunk. Hungry squirrels will chew on the bark of a young tree. I had this happen to my first apple tree. Fortunately it didn’t harm the tree. I added a guard around that tree as well. This set-up looks like overkill, but the tree will quickly grow into it.

When you have your tree in place, pat the soil down and water it well. Keep watering the newly planted tree if you have less than an inch of rainfall per week.

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