The tiniest garden of all

There is a block of earth in front of our building. I must measure it. I'm guessing about two feet by three feet? So that's six square feet. Neat. Its southern border is the concrete sidewalk. Some dog owners tend to let their pets linger here as they pass, where their stream of pee hits the plants on the frontline. Their leaves burn. Salt residue in winter, especially the icy one just behind us.

I began planting it years ago. It's the first thing that greets us when we come home,  between the townhouse steps and the omnipresent trash, recycling, and compost bins. You need to feel good, arriving at your doorstep.

A tiny agastache from the Gowanus Lowlands Nursery now towers by late summer and is a constant theatre of bees, mostly native. A self-sown white snakeroot (native Ageratina altissima) resembles a shrub, and does its species name proud. I have to cut it back hard to keep the steps to the basement accessible to delivery people who leave parcels there if no one answers the intercoms. It blooms in autumn, for white weeks. The agastache blooms continuously from mid summer to frost.

Sometimes there is fennel, sometimes balloon plant, that southern African milkweed. Tall and skinny, both. There should be native Asclepias verticillata, too, but it hates the dog pee the most.

But this year - last year - I planted bulbs, too. Alliums, liatris, and, in existential panic, tulips. I only plant tulips during Trump presidencies, apparently. The alliums and tulips are up, and I have now removed their sheltering fir branches, remnants of our Christmas tree. 

And I plan to squeeze in more. There is about six inches of soil depth nearest the sidewalk (the pee zone). Less towards the rear. Maybe an African basil, because it blooms constantly and bees adore it. 

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Find my Books

Begone Winter, Welcome Spring!

 It is spring. And here is a gift of quiet hellebores.

And pickled eggs, with a wintercress (Cardamine hirsuta) nest. They are destined for a picnic tomorrow in Prospect Park, and my first plant walk of the year, in the pale sunshine, with the singing of the hundreds of congregating American robins.

Here is our Begone, Winter Menu:

To Eat:

Beet-pickled deviled eggs with field garlic and garlic mustard root

Le grand field garlic aioli - baby carrots, pink chard stems, watermelon radish, Chinese broccoli stems, snap peas and field garlic mayonnaise for dipping

Endive and avocado bites with field garlic

Carrot-spicebush puff pastry vol-au-vents

Cattail pollen garlic biscuits with field garlic butter, juniper ham, and apple-spicebush compôte (from the fizz, below)

Spicebush chocolate truffles

To Drink:

Spicebush apple wild-fermented fizz (no ABV) with forsythia and spicebush ice

Fortified with an optional Calvados shot

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Forage Walks and Picnics

It has begun

Just yesterday I said that our native spring is weeks away. What was I thinking? Today I saw this beautiful silver maple (Acer saccharinum) in bloom. And red maples have just begun, and I'd forgotten about an American elm tree I passed late in the afternoon, it's tenderly thready tassels shimmying in a cold breeze.

So, you see, it is here.

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Spring Walks and Picnics

Inside

On the Monday after the late February blizzard (which was Sunday the 22nd into Monday the 23rd), we walked in the woods of Prospect Park, where all the shrubs, and many trees, were bent into taught bows by the heavy, beautiful, relentless snow. Big trees were down. 

I beat slender spicebush branches free, watching them snap upright. And I noted broken branches, all around. The next day I went back, armed with sharp Felco pruners, and wading through more snow to clip the broken arms of forsythia while life was still in them. That was over two weeks ago. Now the budded branches are in bloom.

Also, weeks ahead of planted daffodils (some now in bud), corner-store flowers - at $5/bunch - add bright courage to our lives.

 Supper for a friend last night meant spring flowers on every surface.

Real, native spring, is weeks away. 

The embroidered napkins - made by a friend - seemed appropriate.

Some of supper was also yellow: a lamb shoulder, slow-cooked with saffron and cardamom and bay leaves form our tree, with turmeric rice and raisins, and an avgolemono sauce. A vegetable adobo on the side. An arugula salad singing with ginger. And baked apples for dessert.

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Spring Walks are Here

Sniff this

 The acquisition of windowsill happiness. 

Daffodils were being sold in bucketsful on 7th Avenue at Carroll Street, a 30-minute neighborhood walk north from where we live. So I bought a fat sheaf, all in tight bud, as Sunday's arriving blizzard picked up strength. They were really meant for a friends birthday, but we we couldn't get there. Non-emergency traffic was banned, and the subway was scrambled. 

So they have been opening, slowly, and are now in peak yellowness. They smell like childhood. 

Winter beach

On a winter whim we drove out to Breezy Point. A summer evening haunt. Quiet water, lots of shorebirds, a wide sky. Stars, as we walk back in the dark. Manhattan to the north, rising above the blocky mass of Sheepshead Bay.

The tide was coming in.

The sun sets much south of west, at this time of year. 

We wore down coats and I packed a hot toddy.

There were big-nosed surf scoters on the calm water. And my favorite loons, hunting in a pack of four.  A pair of nervous grebes. And many, many dead birds at the high water mark. We have never seen this. Probably avian flu. I could only identify a Canada goose and a brant, and a diving duck, maybe a scaup.

Snow on the dunes, where we sat and sipped and watched the watery world go by.

Bluebirds

As we were leaving the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey yesterday after a snowy picnic, and a distant owl sighting, and the company of a crowd of very noisy bird photographers (interested only in dramatic owl pictures but not in the other birds around them, apparently), we noticed a small flock of bluebirds beside the road. 

No one else was about, and they were hunting. So we waited, and watched.