Spring flowers make an entrance

On this glorious spring-like day, my hyacinths couldn't resist poking their heads out of the dirt to greet the sun.

This green shoot will become a beautiful purple flower soon

Mystery of the missing Mockingbirds

I've written many posts since we started growing blueberries four years ago complaining about Mockingbirds that view our bushes as as nothing more than giant feeders. But this year, despite a bumper crop of blueray berries, the birds are strangely uninterested. We have seen them on nearby buildings and regularly hear them singing. We even sighted one on our terrace recently. But they have not been feeding on our juicy fruit. Sure, the berries are a little tart, but could that be it. The berries just aren't to their liking this season? Are these birds such connoisseurs that they are rejecting our fruit? Our neighbors Michele and Charles across the street grow blueberries as well. Are the birds stocking up there? I should be overjoyed. After all, when they come, they babble, chirping with verve outside our bedroom window at 5:30 a.m. And when they nosh, they take the berries just before they're perfectly ripe, which leaves us with little worth eating for ourselves. So, I'm thrilled that the birds have found blue-r pastures. I'm just trying to make sense of it all.

A bumper blueberry crop has not attracted Mockingbirds this year

Ants and aphids make for a gruesome garden

Sometimes, rather than bucolic idylls, gardens can be horror shows. Like when you discover squishy white aphids all over your beautiful Japanese eggplant, just as the flowers are beginning to bloom. Couple them with ants crawling all over the plant, not to eat the aphids, but to protect them, and its enough to turn a sunny day black indeed. Turns out that ants are sort of aphid farmers that sup on the tiny bugs' "honeydew"--a sweet secretion they produce. As soon as I discovered this unappetizing scene I went to work to salvage the plant. I pulled out my spray bottle of soapy water and washed away as many of the small bugs as I could (and there were hundreds, maybe even thousands!) Then I sprayed the Ichiban eggplant with Safer Insect Killer (I hate to use it but aphids are tenacious and will kill your plant.) Finally, I squirted tiny blobs of Combat ant killer (it comes in a syringe-like tube) on the pot rim where ants were swarming. Just minutes later, I witnessed a gruesome sight: ants feasting on the poison which is engineered to attract them. An orgy of delight for such a fortuitous meal ensued. The ants were of course unaware of the consequences: certain death. After two treatments, I am happy to report that the aphids and the ants were seriously depleted! But vigilance is a must. Aphids are hard to eradicate entirely. They often return on the young leaves. Still, the plant is back to healthy and plenty of eggplants are growing. What a relief!

This gorgeous eggplant was growing beautifully

But then I noticed aphids.  They are the tiny white dots

Combat attracts ants who eat it and then bring the poison into the nest

This feast will end badly

Healthy again. The lovely purple flower could become a Japanese eggplant in a few weeks

Ripe tomatoes at last

Tomatoes! We've finally got some tomatoes! If this were July, we'd be thrilled. But it has taken until September to finally see a ripe tomato. Well, better late than never. These black cherries will be sitting in a salad by later tonight.

Some of the beefsteaks are coming along too. Maybe by the time we're back from vacation next week, an heirloom Cherokee Purple (above) or Brandywine (below) will be ready to pluck. 

We're still waiting for Aunt Ruby's German Greens (below) to ripen. They get to be a deeper shade when they're ready to eat.

All told, we won't get much of a harvest, but for all the trouble of growing these puppies from seed to vine, at least we'll get a small taste of deliciousness for fall.

Recipes starring Serrano chilies

Sure I'd like to be cooking with tomatoes about now, but since our tomato harvest was a bust  (I'm still holding out hope for the green fruit that has finally sprouted on our vines) I've started preparing some fun dishes with our Serrano peppers. We have one very productive plant, and faced with an abundance of hot chilies, I began seeking out recipes calling for them. I found one for Chicken Enchiladas Verdes at Simply Recipes through Tastebook (my favorite food app). I'm new to cooking Mexican food (though not eating it) so it was a fun experience and it turned out to be a tasty--and spicy--meal.  Fresh corn salad with cucumber, cherry tomato (from a farm stand), red onion, cilantro and a mustard vinaigrette  made the perfect side dish.  Next, I will try my own hot sauce with a recipe from my friend Kim in Tejas. I can already feel the burn!

Oh, p.s., if you are cooking with hot peppers be sure to wear gloves! I got a case of hot hands last week that kept me up half the night. After trying soap and water, aloe, olive oil, and a few other Web remedies, I rubbed ripe banana all over my hands and the burning finally subsided. Maybe the enzymes in the fruit neutralized the capsaicin. I'm just glad it worked.

Yummy chicken enchiladas made with my Serrano chilies

Green tomatoes

Finally, we have tomatoes. Tiny green ones, that is. This will go down as the worst summer on record for our garden. Our tomato plants just never took off. We were a little late getting them in their pots this season, planting them all by mid-June. But I thought they'd catch up. They should be tall and full by now. Instead, the poor things are thin and spindly and they haven't produced at all.The rainy June didn't help.Nor did the steamy July. Our harvest should be rolling at this point, but instead our plants have just begun to fruit. If we're lucky, if we don't get blossom rot, a hurricane or some other mishap, we might have tomatoes by late Sept. Wow, what a disappointment!
Fortunately, the lettuce, eggplants, peppers and herbs are doing well. I got a few cukes too, though not the harvest I'd hoped for, and the heatwave knocked off the vines. I was able to save our blueberries from the mockingbirds by netting them.
Still, without tomatoes, I'd have to call the season a bust.

These plants are way behind schedule.

The eggplants are tasty, stir-fried with some green market onions.

The lettuce has been loving it this summer. I have had salad all season long.

Broccoli flowers

Oops, I forgot to harvest this purple peacock broccoli floret, and lo and behold, it blossomed! But no worries. I steamed it up and ate it anyway, along with some less mature shoots, and it was delicious.

More grief in the garden

Sometime in August, after the heatwaves broke and the weather got back down to the low 80s, our tomato plants perked up again. Flowers bloomed and tomatoes formed. None got more than the Green Zebra, which sprouted some 15 egg-shaped orbs.
I plucked the first ripe one on Monday. It was quite delicious and I was looking forward to enjoying the rest, a kind of booby prize to finish off a disappointing season.
Well, not so fast. A gusty wind storm knocked almost all of them off the vine.
Figures...Still, we have been getting a nice end of season harvest, including plenty of Angora sweet cherries and even some of the beefier Black from Tula and Azorean Reds, though the current cold snap could curtail that trend.

Kellogg's Breakfast tomato, perfect for dinner!

This beauty is known as Kellogg's Breakfast tomato. The orange heirloom is definitely our stand out this summer. It's sweet and juicy, with just the right amount of acidity and bite. We picked this 1.8 pounder two weeks ago. It was a tasty treat with mozzarella and basil, a sprinkle of olive oil and some pepper. Perfection! 



Kellogg's Breakfast for dinner



The berries are alright!

A healthy, homegrown breakfast featuring our very own blueberries and strawberries. Though the strawberry plant produces pretty sporadically, the blueberry bushes are prolific, especially now that we've protected them from our resident Mockingbirds with netting. Every morning I gather just enough berries to top my yogurt.

Urban farming gets boost

New York City has become farm country. According to an article in the New York Times the boroughs are bursting with locally grown produce. Of course, we've been farming here in Manhattan since '05. We are so ahead of trend!!

How to fertilize tomato plants

Ready for summer! By July this space will look like a jungle!

What a season 2012 is turning out to be! By Memorial Day we had all of our crops in their pots, ready to bask in the sun. The warm spring inspired us to get our seedlings started early. We're already reaping rewards. Our tomato and green pepper plants are sprouting fruit well ahead of their usual patterns, the cucumber vines are looking mighty healthy and the lettuce is going strong. We could be harvesting tomatoes come July. Speaking of tomatoes, we've added Jobe's Fertilizer Spikes to the pots. Buried in the soil, the sticks offer the proper mix of nutrients (a three to one ratio of phosphorous to nitrogen and potassium,) last for six weeks, and help the plants absorb calcium. The point is to avoid the dreaded blossom-end rot, a black, leathery scourge that often shows up on the blossom end of the fruit early in the season and renders it inedible. Another trick is keeping the plants consistently watered. We may try mulching so the soil doesn't dry out in the heat. We've added the spikes to our pepper plants as well. Next challenge: getting rid of the aphids on our eggplants!

Our first pepper

The fertilizer spikes

Tomato surprise



Seed packets from Tomatofest.com

 This is a season of experimenting for NYC Gardener. Every year for the past six seasons, we've planted Brandywine and Cherokee Purple tomatoes along with several other varieties like Aunt Ruby's German Green and Chocolate Stripes. Last year, we didn't even buy new seeds, opting to repeat 2010's choices. This year we're going rogue. We have skipped our standard bearers all together to try out six new varieties. We went to our favorite heirloom seed site TomatoFest and looked through dozens of descriptions for tomatoes that might be just as delicious but easier to grow. I do love the Brandywine and Cherokee beefsteaks, but they take a long time to mature, so the plants are not as productive as they could be. The fruit gets so heavy on the vines that they're at risk to the windy conditions we get on our terrace. Heavy rain often causes cracking. So, this year, we decided  to go for varieties that mature a bit earlier and grow a bit smaller. We love green heirlooms, so we chose Green Zebra, a tomato served at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse. We wanted a Roma tomato to make great sauces and the Pantano Romanesco sounded like a hearty and flavorful option. We also picked one of Tomato Fest's top 10 for 2012, the Black from Tula, a Russian import with a smokey flavor. We didn't entirely turn our backs on the beefsteak. We're trying out Neves Azorean Red, "the ultimate sandwich tomato," advertised as tasty, disease resistant and productive until a frost. The only repeat is the Angora Super Sweet cherry, which we planted a few seasons ago and very much enjoyed. Last on our list is Kellogg's Breakfast, an orange beefsteak that came as a bonus from Tomato Fest. It's said to be sweet, tangy and nearly seedless. If all goes well, we should have a bang up crop. Even more amazing, all our plants are out in their pots and basking in the fresh air, more than a week ahead of our usual schedule. So, here's to a season of change!

Tomato in the pot

Grow light sparks tomato seedlings

Tomato starters under our new grow light

Seeking stronger tomato plants we decided to invest in  a grow light this season. We got this simple Hydrofarm JSV2 2-Foot Jumpstart T5 model on Amazon for just $50. We put our little seedlings under the light and took off for a 10 day trip, giving our cat sitter instructions on how to adjust the system as the plants grew taller (and of course, to keep them watered.) When we came back the seedlings had sprung up like weeds. Though they're still not as fat as green house starters, they're not as spindly as they have been in the years when we depended on natural light.
The next step is "hardening off" the plants, or getting them ready for the outdoors. To do this, we put the seedlings outside for a couple of hours before and after work and on the weekends. This helps them adjust to strong sunlight, chilly temperatures and windy conditions. It will keep them from wilting or going into shock when we move them to the big pots on the terrace. I am really looking forward to a healthy crop this year!



Seedlings growing strong



The gardening work out

Years ago, I was in an all girl band with a fine bass player, Laura McDonald. These days she's a fitness guru and she has some pretty timely tips about how to make gardening good for you in more ways than just by eating your veggies. All that weeding and planting is really great exercise, she says. Any gardener can get a sense of that from the aches they get after moving pots, lugging soil and lifting watering cans all day. But Laura breaks it down to the muscles we stretch and tone with every bend and twist and the calories we burn. Adding a few squats and dips can make an even bigger impression on the figure. Read her blog post to find out how to make working in the garden a real work out.

Yogis run farm in Upstate New York

So, the great gardening trend of the 21st century continues unabated in the city and around it.

Each of the past three summers, I’ve taken a weekend trip to Ananda Ashram to enjoy yoga, meditation, vegetarian cuisine and the not-so-Zen swimming pool (hey, even Yogis have to cool off.)

The difference this year: Ananda has added organic farming to its list of amenities. The food has always been tasty, but now, some of it is home grown.

Ananda boasts two huge plots loaded with fresh garlic, greens, squash and peppers, and a cold-frame green house filled with tomato plants getting ready to yield a healthy harvest.

One of the biggest challenges for the volunteer farmers is deer. The 85-acre grounds just an hour or so from New York City, is a playground for the growing population of the lovable animals. They can be seen frolicking in the early mornings and evenings. Unfortunately, they are determined to share the harvest.

Currently, the plots are surrounded by heavy plastic deer fencing, which seems to work, and fresh produce is growing strong. Electronic deer fencing, which is cheaper, was considered and rejected as too cruel.

Over the weekend, I was lucky to enjoy several dishes filled with home grown zucchini as well as plenty of salad greens.

Farming at Ananda has a history. Dave, who’s been an Ashram resident for more than 30 years, tended the original organic garden at Ananda from 1972 to 1980. But when the board decided to install a swimming pool (yes that swimming pool) his garden was bulldozed.

Last December, his son, who was born at the Ashram, came up with the idea to create the current farm, thanks to all the publicity about local growers and food borne illnesses. He’s also helping Dad and the rest of the Ananda team build an Eco-village resort on the grounds.

Urban Gardener Weekend Update: Watering system beats the heat; where are the cukes?

We spent this fourth of July weekend enjoying a different kind of garden, the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)  cooperative in New Paltz, where we were visiting friends. What a great way to get fresh produce while letting someone else do the digging and weeding. The CSA was distributing Swiss chard, zucchini, beets, radishes, purple onions and a few other farm fresh veggies, Our hosts prepared truly gourmet meals every night creatively using all the green ingredients. I'll be posting more on that later in the week.

Meanwhile, with the temperatures nearing 100 degrees in Manhattan, our wondrous watering system allowed us the flexibility to garden in absentia. We purchased parts from The Drip Store  on the advice of our neighbor and fellow gardener Jan. My husband Mitch assembled the system two years ago. After our terrace renovation, we had to replace a few parts, and we added PVC tubing to cover the length of our terrace using elbow joints to go around the corners.

We've set the timer to go off twice a day, at 6:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. for five minutes each time.

We adjust the drip system to provide less water to the lettuce seedlings

Watering the basil requires a more robust flow

The Cherokee Purple and other tomato plants require the most water in our garden.

While we tried to keep cool in Lake Minewaska, the plants really thrived in the heat. The eggplants exploded with ripe fruit that is ready for harvest.  The tomato plants must've grown several inches taller and we have plenty of green tomatoes growing fast. One concern: our cucumbers are flowering, but so far, no fruit. As the cukes are a new vegetable for us, I don't know if they're slow to fruit or just not getting the right stuff. If anyone knows about growing cukes, please leave a post on the site with your advice!

Urban Gardener Weekend Update: Automation!

Sprinkler systems aren't just for the suburbs! This weekend we set up our own automated watering system, which gives us the ability to get away on weekends without having to hire a babysitter. We first automated in 2008. That's when we purchased everything from a timer to PVC tubing from The Drip Store . The system includes small stakes with adjustable heads that drip water into our pots. This way, we can set the timer to water in the early morning, for about five minutes, and adjust the flow individually for each plant. This year, we have more crops, so we expanded the system to encircle our entire terrace.
Our total investment over the two years has come to about $150, a small price to pay. With our sprinklers in place, there's no more early morning wake ups for watering before work. No rushing home in the evening on blistering hot days. The garden is on auto pilot.
Of course, we still have to weed and fertilize; we have to defend against bug infestations and plant diseases. But the day-to-day basics are taken care of.
We've already begun to enjoy the fruits of our labor. I harvested plenty of lettuce, cilantro, parsley and basil this weekend for a healthy salad. We also spotted our first bell pepper growing. The eggplants and tomatoes are beginning to flower and could be ripe for the picking in a few weeks or so. Can't wait!

Misadventures in the blueberry patch

There's been a death in the garden. Our green thumbs have been done in by the blueberry bushes. We don't know if its because we used too much fertilizer or too little. Or if it's because the weather was too hot and then too cool. The adventure started out well. As soon as we got the twiggy starter plants into their pots in early April, they began to thrive, adding shoots, growing green leaves and looking healthy.
The first sign of trouble came suddenly. On the first 90 degree day of the season, a few weeks ago, our Chippewa bush burned to a crisp without so much as a warning. That morning it was green. That evening, it had turned brown and crinkly.
We called Miller Nurseries where we had purchased the plants by mail order and they were quick to send another bush. We planted it a over week ago, but so far, it has yet to sprout even a leaf.
Meanwhile, the Polaris seemed to be doing well. Until last weekend, when it too began wilting in the heat. I'm afraid it has since gone the way of its Chippewa sibling. In an effort to save it, Mitch replaced the soil, which ws heavy with a fertilizer specific to blueberry plants (they like it acidic.) But it appears the move was to no avail. He also ordered a PH tester from Miller, which has yet to arrive. It may give us an indication of where we went wrong. Either way, this is a pretty disappointing development. We may have to wait until the fall to try again. If any experienced blueberry growers have suggestions, please post a comment!