Here’s a great video of Patti Moreno, the Garden Girl, showing how easy it is to build a raised bed garden and hoop house. She doesn’t get into it in depth, but she keeps chickens and rabbits in cages over the gardens to help fertilize the soil.
Category Archives: urban farming
Harvesting Herbs
It’s finally starting to get cold here and I wanted to save some edibles from my garden. On the left is lemon verbena and on the right is flat-leaf or Italian parsley. I washed all the leaves and they are on this wire rack to dry. I put the parsley in the freezer to use it in sauces. I dried the lemon verbena to use as tea. It makes a wonderful tea mixed with mint leaves. You can also chop up the leaves and put them into baked goods.
Happy Thanksgiving
Here’s hoping you have a wonderful holiday with time to reflect on all the things you are thankful for.
How to Build a chicken coop
Here’s a nice video showing a man and his son building a coop out of a lot of re-purposed materials. I can’t tell from the video, but my only suggestion would be to make sure the whole thing is sealed. It looks as though the back wall has an opening under the roof, which could allow raccoons in.
Neil is in our yard right now trying to figure out how to secure our coop to keep marauding raccoon claws out.
Trade Off
My chickens are in the final stages of their molt. At least all signs point to that. Chickens begin the molt on their heads and kind of work their way down to their tail and wing feathers. Edie looks gorgeous and fluffy instead of mangey like she did after her bout with mites. I’m not walking into their coop to find loads of feathers these days. I think they should be well insulated for winter with all their new feathers.
However, when I check their nest box all I find are little fluffy feathers. No eggs. It’s been about 2 months with NO EGGS. I have to buy eggs from the store, which doesn’t suit me at all anymore. So instead of staring at an empty egg holder, I have decided to fill it with the gorgeous grape tomatoes that are still coming out of my garden. They are getting smaller and smaller as the days get shorter and cooler, but they are still coming. Winter is a mourning time for me when I don’t have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, so I’m enjoying each and every one of these little treasures.
This Friday
This past friday was my birthday. I woke up to flowers and a card that Lindsay made me. Our friends picked Lindsay up from school and she slept over at their house.
Neil and I had a leisurely day having brunch and wandering around Central Park. The day was perfect and the park was lovely. Reminded me why I live in this crazy city! Definitely walk along the mall by the Bethesda terrace to see the American Elm trees. They are so pretty in how they curve and bend toward the sky. Read here about the park fighting another round of Dutch elm disease.
Friends joined us for dinner at Frankies and we sat around a little fire outside while we waited for a table. Definitely not a typical New York experience, but a good one. And then we had drinks and dessert at our house afterwards without worrying about what time we were going to have to get up in the morning. A perfect day!
Molting Hens Don't Lay Eggs
It’s been about 2 weeks since I’ve gotten an egg from my girls. No, they aren’t all eggbound either! They are molting. Instead of eggs in the nest box there are loads of feathers. There are feathers in their run, there are feathers in the yard, there are feathers in their poop tray. Amazingly enough, there are even feathers on the girls. Sort of. Well they look a little scruffy.
But I’m happy to see feathers growing back on Edie’s neck. She lost most of her beard from scratching at mites. She started to get little porcupine-like quills sticking out of her face. Kind of a 5 o’clock stubble. But now they are fluffing out and she has gotten her hilarious mustache and beard back.
Take a peek at the old, bare neck with the feather quills just starting to peek out and the new fuzzy neck. Doesn’t she look hilariously in her attempt at dignity?
Backyard Harvest
I keep taking photos of the beautiful tomatoes I’ve been getting from my garden. I said taking photos, not posting photos. Argh. I’m so behind on sorting through my photos!! I was lucky not to have the tomato blight that wiped out so many people’s crops. I bought a 6-pack of heirloom tomato seedlings this spring, but the names weren’t identified, so I don’t know what they are. I know the ones on the right are green zebra tomatoes, but the beautiful persimmon-colored ones are a mystery. I want to find out because they were absolutely sweet and delicious. The little cherry ones were so sweet, it was like candy from nature.
We’ve been getting shorter days (sob) and cooler nights, so the days of tomatoes are coming to an end. I have basil that needs to be cut and turned into pesto and lemon verbena that I have some ideas for. I planted some salad greens (a mesclun mix, mache and spinach), which are already coming up, so I don’t feel as though my garden has come to an end. I love the weather at this time of year, but it always brings a bit of melancholy with the shortening days and the approach of the winter cold.
Sunday Spinning
This past Sunday I had some spinning and knitting friends over at the house. Neil very sweetly took Lindsay to Central Park so I could have uninterrupted time with my friends. It was a perfect day, so we were able to sit outside in the garden. This wheel belongs to Shannon. She just got a drum carder, so she’s been dying and carding her own fiber.
Here’s Shannon knitting after taking a little break from spinning.
Here’s Sara on the left wearing her February Lady sweater and knitting a pretty cashmere lace scarf. Laura is on the right knitting a purple Coraline sweater designed by Ysolda Teague.
Here’s Eve spinning some gorgeous autumnal-colored wool. Please note her cute silver toes that match her silver Birks. What’s so nice about these meet ups is that besides catching up with friends we don’t see every day and dusting off our (my) wheel and remembering why we love to spin, we also get to eat the most delicious goodies that we all bring. We had bruschetta w/ chopped tomatoes and white bean toppings, chips with guacamole and piquant salsa, pistachio tea cakes and scones. Yum!
I pulled out a merino/tencel blend that I bought from Misty Mountain Farm at a wool festival several years ago. I thought it would make a pretty lace shawl, so I spun it very fine. It’s a little over-spun in places (the parts that look like a telephone cord), but I think that will work itself out when I ply it in the other direction.
Spinning is very relaxing and it’s rewarding to be able to turn fleece into yarn. Some of my friends buy their fleece unprocessed directly from the farm and even get to meet the sheep. I think there’s something really sweet about that.
I’ve been spinning every night since then and have filled my bobbin. Last night while I was spinning I watched 2 more episodes of The Good Life and they were both about spinning!
Chicken Meet up at the Waterpod
Last Saturday after going to the Greenpoint Food Market, we drove to the Bronx to go to a chicken meet up group being held on the Waterpod. KayCee Wimbush of Awesome Farm in Tivoli, NY came to talk about basic chicken keeping. Her farm pasture-raises chickens and lambs and are committed to taking care of both their animals and the land. While I knew most of the basic information, she did talk about alternatives to chicken feed.
In an attempt to reduce their feed costs and do some recycling, they gathered food scraps from local restaurants. Chickens are omnivores, or miniature goats as I like to call them, so they eat practically everything. Her solution was a win-win in that her chickens were getting high-quality food, she was saving money and the food wasn’t going to a landfill. I guess that’s a win-win-win. Anyway, these things always turn out too good to be true and they found out that what they were doing was illegal. Turns out there’s a law against feeding post-consumer food to agricultural animals. I’m sure I’m not quoting the law correctly, but it’s a way to prevent farmers from feeding ground up animals to their livestock, which can lead to many nasty diseases such as mad cow. Anyway, while it was a great idea, they had to stop.
If you are in NYC in the next 2 weeks, you should try and visit the Waterpod project. They are a self-sufficient floating farm. They incorporate many interesting ideas for farming, such as vertical farming, mobile farming, recycling graywater, etc. They are showcasing a new type of farming in a time of global warming and overpopulation. If land is too scarce, you can farm on a big barge. They are open to the public for tours and host performances and discussions. They were a great venue for our meeting and even have a few hens onboard.
We had our meet up under one of their domes. All of the materials have been gathered from salvaged parts. The dome was covered with billboard material (is it fabric, paper??). You can see a watch ad behind Owen, who’s the organizer of our meet up group. If you can’t visit the waterpod, check out their website at the link above. It’s a very interesting project and definitely applies to urban gardening.
