Category Archives: gardening

What difference a week makes

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Things are popping up and growing like mad in my little garden. You can almost hear the green shoots popping out of the soil.

I took these photos on May 3rd.

I wish I could share how delicious the crabapple blossoms smell! The lily of the valley are just poking up and the currant bushes look very promising.

This is a week later.

And now the cherry and crabapple tree blossoms are gone. The clematis is getting ready to burst, which means the hydrangea and elderberry bushes aren’t far behind. I love looking out of my kitchen window and seeing green

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Spring Cleaning In the Garden

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We’ve been out enjoying the warmer weather these days. Last weekend we went to buy some new pine chips for the chicken run. Their run was mostly dirt, which might not bother the hens at all, but definitely was ugly and also caused dirty eggs.brooklynfeed-8

What is usually a no-brainer errand turned into a bit more of a challenge. Both Lowe’s and Home Depot seemed well-stocked with wood chips. But on closer inspection, they had dyes embedded in them. All of them! And not only were they colored, but the dyes were guaranteed to last something like a year. This was definitely something that I thought would be an environmental and chicken health nightmare. I finally found undyed chips at Home Depot by a company called Great Gardens that is a part of the Long Island Compost project. I had never heard of them, but if you take a peek at their link, you can see some of the great work they are doing. I was much happier buying organic chips for my chickens to run around in, so it was a win-win.brooklynfeed-6 brooklynfeed-9

The girls were happy because they got to run around the garden wreaking havoc.

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And there were a few plants starting to poke out of the ground..

It was a good day in the garden. I emptied out my compost bin and enriched the soil in my pots and various beds.brooklynfeed-13

 

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Natural Pest Control

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Is it just me, or does everyone love venus fly traps? I just got one at a farm stand/general store on the way home from a hike. I put it in my kitchen near my compost bucket and the next day it had caught a fruit fly!

I noticed a dead fly on my back steps the next day, so decided to try and feed it to my plant. I think my eyes were bigger than it’s stomach so to speak, because it couldn’t quite wrap it’s jaws around the fly. I’m giving the plant a break from force feeding it. Turns out if you play with the traps too much, you can kill the plant. I think I’ll just stick to watering it and let it catch whatever size fly it likes.

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Fruit Drop

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At the beginning of the spring, I noticed that my two tiny apple trees had a bumper crop of apples. There were easily 3 fruits per cluster, which was way more than the tiny trees could support. I was going to have to thin the fruit, which helps the remaining fruit grow larger, and also protects the young tree from broken branches.

Before I thinned the fruit, the tree did it for me. There are lots of tiny apples under both trees, and now there are no more than 2 fruits per cluster. Nature is amazing.

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Garden Kale

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I think that this post should be called The Lazy Gardener Gets the Kale.

So for some unknown reason, I didn’t harvest my kale last fall. Don’t ask me why because I don’t have a valid reason. Or any reason for that matter. So I guess the glaring answer is laziness…

Anyhow, we had such a mild winter that the kale survived. I didn’t even have to cover it. Again with the laziness. Sheesh!

I’ve been planting away this spring and decided to finally pull up the spindly looking kale and actually eat it. It’s Tuscan kale, or lacinato kale, which is very tender. And just to keep the whole lazy streak going, I did the simplest (and very delicious) preparation, which is to sauté it in olive oil with garlic. It was worth the wait!

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Raised Bed Herb Garden

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If you’ve spent time reading this blog, you will know that the soil in my garden isn’t great. The term to describe it is “rubble.” I don’t really trust growing food items directly in it. Besides the sunniest area of my garden is paved, so that limits my options. This has lead me to trying raised beds. I have a mish-mosh of containers that I hope are creative and fun and not reminiscent of the set of Sanford and Son.

These are the wine crates I salvaged last year. They are holding up well.

This year I’m not going to grow beans or try and coax tomatoes to grow in a partly sunny garden. I’m going to stick to herbs, which do very well in my yard. I love mixing flowers, herbs and vegetables together.

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Spring in my back garden

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Spring is finally in my garden. It lifts my spirits to look out of our window and see a color other than brown. I have been slowly planting more edible and native plants in my yard. I haven’t ripped out any of the other plants, so there are still some non-native species.

The white crabapple blossoms make your feet lift off the ground when you smell their scent. I know my neighbors are used to seeing me do strange things in the garden, so they probably don’t batt an eyelash seeing me standing under the tree sniffing for minutes on end.

You are looking at the crabapple blossoms, the double cherry tree (ornamental), my little apple tree, which is loaded with blossoms, a blueberry, the bleeding hearts, a Solomon’s Seal and a couple of ramps I planted last year.

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My Apple Harvest

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If a reader hadn’t asked, I might have forgotten to post about my little apple tree. In the early spring I posted about trying to pollinate my Sundance apple tree. I pruned branches from another tree and put the branches near my flowering tree in the hopes that the bees would do the cross-pollinating. You can read about the process here. The good news is that it worked and I had 5 apples growing on my tree. I don’t have any experience with dwarf apple trees, so I don’t know if this is a decent number for the first year of fruit. I also wasn’t familiar with this variety of apple, so wasn’t sure how it would look when the fruit was ripe. This apple is one of the 5 from my tree. The fruit is sweet and crisp and delicious. I’ve always dreamed of having a small home orchard, and although 5 apples is a laughably small amount, it is a beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

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Ground Cherries

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Our ground cherries are ripening now. I was taken with this unusual fruit a few years ago when visiting a garden in Berkeley, CA. The little papery balloons turn a creamy yellow and fall to the ground when they are ripe. Inside is a small round fruit that’s smaller than a regular cherry. Actually, other than the roundness of the fruit, it’s really nothing like a cherry.

If you’ve never had one, try and track them down. A bowl of them for guests to peel and eat is quite special.

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