Dirty rice: Just add daylilies

Have you ever made dirty rice? It's a delicious mess of rice made exciting with all sorts of bits and pieces. The Southern Creole dish looks a bit different in our house, but I hope I capture its spirit. One of the staple ingredients  in my various versions is dried daylilies. Hemerocallis fulva is still in bloom here in Brooklyn, and the spent flowers are a delicacy (I think), once dried, with an unexpected flavor of carob. Daylilies are dead easy to dry, and last pretty much indefinitely.

My recipe for dirty daylily rice is now up on Gardenista, along with the how-to of drying. Bon appétit!

(Oh: the salad above? Just watermelon pieces with various basils from our terrace, a little salt, and little olive oil, and a drizzle of good balsamic vinegar.)

Ten years and two books

The picture above was taken one Memorial Day weekend when the two moves that followed (to Harlem and then back to Brooklyn) were not even a whisper.

This first terrace, in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, a dozen blocks north of where we live now, was a sweet, quiet and private place. There are many things we miss about it, like the top floor sense of isolation, being able to see the sun and moon rise in the east, and the quick access to the roof and its wide, big sky horizons. Measuring those exact 66 square feet, this (lack of) space transformed my life. And the cat you see there, Don Estorbo, had a lot to do with it, too. He started his irascible blog a few months before I did. That gave me the idea to write this one: it will be ten years old, this June. The blog led to many good things. New and lasting friendships, writing for a living, the discovery of the Frenchman, all the way on Canada's British Columbian coast, and my first book.

So over on Instagram (@66squarefeet), for this little anniversary, I am giving away two copies of the book that this terrace inspired: 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life. Please follow that link if you'd like to enter the random draw. The deadline is Wednesday the 31st, 11PM, EST.

We now live in Carroll Gardens with about 1,000 square feet of garden - a fantastic luxury in a city like New York. We can move without bumping into things. I can grow more than token crops, at last. Eight rows of potatoes, rather than one pot. I can experiment with the wild plants that I like to forage. And our crazily weathered salvaged oak table, built just for this space, never runs out of surface area, like that little stone table above, which I now use as a potting bench.

We have learned things with each move. We have lost. We have gained. I miss aspects of each place we have lived. Just as I was happy to leave elements of each. I will write more about it, one day.

__________________

Book a late Spring Forage Walk

What light on yonder duck breasts breaks...?

Duck prosciutto hanging from the high kitchen ceiling. The light is reflected from the windows across the road.

One breast is flavoured with Northeast-indigenous spicebush (bright yellow when crushed, and orange-piney in fragrance), the other with Turkish sumac. They were cured for four weeks in the fridge in a mixture of salt, sugar, pepper and the two spices.

They should be ready in about three weeks.

Which will be exactly a year after we last tasted them, on that Brooklyn terrace...

Which reminds me. Seed trays (far right): must buy.

The Other Roses

The edges of the terrace still look like a garden. Lady Emma Hamilton, Windermere, Abraham Darby (and another of those, on the roof). And all the sun-lovin' herbs.

And, as I shuttle between this photogenic gem of a terrace, and the bigger wider one in Harlem (ironically not as easy to photograph, and you know it's all about the pictures!), I am consolidating ideas about the new space, which is so different. There is the uniform line of wraparound weathered wood planters. It is both a boon and challenge. Boon because it's all there, already - lots of linear feet of planting space. Challenge because in long, quite narrow boxes roots become intertwined and plant bullies can crowd out more tentative perennials. In pots they are segregated, and their differing water needs can be meted out easily. Shared planter - everybody gets the same. So there will have to be more discipline in plant choices.

The Harlem terrace, south view. 

The terrace floor here on Henry Street is exposed, now. The gravel has been removed, the filter fabric lifted, and the planks of the pressure treated deck revealed. Pots have been coralled, some emptied, in preparation for the second phase of our move to Harlem, with the new terrace, and new light, next week.

Yesterday we moved boxes up there, traveling Manhattan's length on 1st Avenue in a bouncing truck. The Frenchman calculated that he climbed 140 flights of stairs, total. Four flights down to truck, four flights up, and the parlour level stairs over there.

66 Square Feet,  May 2012

I have decided that the Iceberg is coming with us.

It was the first rose on this terrace. Arrived as a stick from Texas, and gave us these, last spring:

May 2012

I cut it back to about three feet, and have no idea, really, how it will respond. I doubt we'll see flowers next spring, even if it recovers, as I think it will want to bloom on canes formed this year. And now there ain't none.

At night it leaks clear fluid from the cut ends. Capillary action undiminished as it pumps water and nutrients to phantom branches, higher up, and over the roof.

Goodbye to all that*

June 2006

In some ways, leaving the terrace is about making decisions I have put off for years.

Like the New Dawn.

This rose is - as anyone knows who has grown it - a long distance endurance climber. It does not hold back. And after almost seven years it had wrapped its thorny, once-blooming arms all around one side of the terrace and over the door. Its lovely and delicate flowers appeared for two weeks, less in heat, and were gone.

                                                              May 2007, the rose party

But for some years it had not been well. Hanging in there, but desperate for more room.  It made a good support for the clematis that I grew up through its canes, and for the Gloriosa lily that wound its little leaf hooks around the bare lower parts of the rose, and for the very, very tall lilies in the neighbouring pot, which I tethered to the New Dawn to keep them out of my way as I moved back and forth.

                                                                                May 2008

But some relationships have to end. A tipping point is reached and over you go (thank you, Malcolm Gladwell - imagine if he got royalties every time someone said that. He must hear it and wince and think - ka-ching!).

Today I cut the New Dawn back, and then down, and then tipped its massive rootball out of the large pot, and bagged it. The Frenchman had to carry it downstairs. It was too heavy for me to lift. I was not as sad as I thought I would be. But looking at these pictures does make me sad.

May 2009

The terrace is a-kilter. Almost two thirds of the gravel have been removed, the filter fabric lifted to expose the deck beneath, the shady corner is no more. It will be left blank.

May 2010

I am doing this as much for myself as for the notoriously litigious landlord. I want to leave nothing. Not out of spite, but out of neatness, because I like to end things cleanly.

May 2011

The terrace in its glory was a story. It is a story. 

May 2012

                                                                     It will always exist. 

* Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves, 1929

Alpine strawberries

...in a very, very small bottle.

The staging area

We'll eat on the terrace this evening (and it's chilly!). There is no space inside.

Ungovernable

The rowdy Etoile Violette.

A climber with chutzpah.

Cocktail menu for a new book

Today, 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life is officially released. If you pre-ordered it, it should be on its way to you, or in your possession.

Here's a peek at the cocktail menu I am planning for its launch party on Saturday at Book Court. Yes, you should come!

The pork belly (transformed into rillettes in this case, not served whole, as a roast) and the avocado cream are from the menus in the book. The black currant chutney is the result of my headscratching regarding what to do with all my gin-soaked currants, after straining the gin off, recently. The crunchy phyllo triangles are a celebration of things wild and green. And because I have to be nice to vegetarians!

The Rhus Hour (...get it?) is a sumac-based cocktail from the book.

(And for a chance to win a copy of 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life, visit Gardenista and tell them about your favourite garden-to-table recipe)

Alpine strawberries

In the spring I potted up a baby Alpine strawberry. It was growing apart in the main Alpine pot, after a fruit had dropped and self-seeded.

It has grown. And now there are lots of long, sweet strawberries. They taste like the artificial strawberry flavour of Marukawa gum

Someone - here - once suggested that artificial flavours are really memories of the original and now forgotten flavours of real fruit.

Their pot is also host to a small ant colony. Every day the ants send up a midden of fine soil in the middle of the strawberry plant.

Every day I water it down again. They don't seem to mind. Sometimes, rarely, they eat a strawberry.

Green things

The season shifts. Figs are appearing all over Brooklyn.

The self-sown hardy begonia is beginning to bloom. Are they invasive, anywhere? 

The Heuchera has sent out new spires of flowers.

Clematis - going up

I have four Clematis on the terrace. Three are in bloom now. 

Bee's Jubilee last week, and yesterday, below. It still has a few flowers high up in the New Dawn's thorny canes. This Clematis shares a pot with a hardy begonia, a Gloriosa lily and a primrose. The pot is in complete shade but the climbers make their way up into the sun via the bare lower canes of the climbing rose.

On the opposite side of the terrace the Etoile Violette is in its second flush after being cut right back down six weeks ago. It shares a pot with two Gloriosa lilies, two Turkscap lilies and some Thai basil. And that grass you can see. Oops.

The flowers are much smaller than they are during the first, spring round - though I missed those, this year - and are opening in a funny way, with clasped and pale petal tips. It must mean something.

High up, Ramona watches over the cat, who watches over the basil, which watches over the wild strawberries, which keep an eye on the fig.

Nice plants. Little trouble. 

Unexpected flowers in difficult places.

Gloriosa superba - climbers for strange places

Although all five Gloriosa tubers were planted at the same time on the terrace, this one, in the shadier corner, has only just begun to bloom, weeks after the rest, which - just eleven feet north - lay down and expired.

Add them to your list of easy climbers. They seem fine in pots, and I plant them with perennials and other vertical growers, like clematis, near something that will support their long, searching stems. In this case the leaf hooks clasp the stems and leaves of tall lilies that bloomed in July.

I find them fuss-free, and love the evolution of their flowers from creepy, pale green beaked monsters to full-flared and racy red flowers, with no touch of menace remaining in their arch petals

I had never noticed this, before: the pistil, I think - shooting off at a right angle.Very strange.

The scented terrace

The Abyssinian gladiolus (Acidanthera murielae) do not survive winter reliably in this climate. They did one year. The next, they did not. So now I plant new corms every late spring. 

They have a faintly detectable scent during the day, but at night it becomes powerful.

Plant for pleasure in your own particular darkness.

The English roses like Brooklyn

The temperatures over the last two weeks, more reminiscent of September than of August, have been kind to the English roses.

The two new roses, gifts from Michael Marriott, the rosarian at David Austin, have begun to show off. Lady Emma Hamilton - above -  in her second flush since we returned from South Africa in early July, is no longer flat orange and pinched, but nuanced and supple. The colour of the younger flower is rich, tending paler pink as the bloom ages. They are beautiful, and have lasted well. The stems are long.

Windermere has long stems and perfect ivory cabbage-shaped flowers. The blooms are small, but exquisite, and as you see each stem has multiple buds. They hate the heat and wilt fast. The scent is delicious, but not as strong as Abraham Darby's. I've been feeding them Espoma's Rose Tone and they seem to like it.

More will open today.

Clematis Ramona

The name Ramona makes me think of an actress in a 50's movie, in a poofy skirt and serious lipstick, setting down a plate of spaghetti in front of a man with slicked back hair, his tie loosened at the neck, and a fan blowing in the window of a walk up. 

In fact, just like home, minus the slicked back hair and poofy skirt.

Thanks to reader Kathy Lilleskov for steering me to the forgotten name of this clematis, which I bought this spring. It was grown by Jim Glover out on the North Fork.

It is one of the Group 2 clematis - the three groups refer to their blooming and pruning schedules. Group 2's are cut back hard in late winter, and then again after their first flush of flower in spring.

Bee's Jubilee has also opened, on the other side of the terrace. Pictures to follow. She's the really gaudy one. Louder than Ramona.

More like Lucy.

Gardening for cats

...my next book.

Not really. I think it should be a novel about the last days of the United States post office.

But I do garden for the cat. He has his little green carpet, with the creeping Jenny, where he likes to hang out during the day, under the shade of the Heuchera leaves, and he has his space between the pots on the side of the terrace, so that he can jump from the stone table to prowl on the roof. Or sit and stare down at us while we eat dinner.

The other night we heard the familiar and rare click of a katydid. Green cicadas, the cat calls them, and he says they taste like cat candy. His ears pricked up and he shot to the roof and began swiping at the climbing rose. We liked the katydid and did not want it to be eaten. The Frenchman shot off after him,  and performed a dramatic aerial rescue of the katydid, to the disgusted amazement of the cat. It was his birthday and we had just removed his present from the universe.

The katydid was equally unimpressed, rejecting its new housing in the middle tiers of the rose, and flying into an oak tree across the road, where we hear its chirruping clicks every night, while we eat dinner.

Summer roses

My August roses, picked yesterday evening. They make me very happy.

Munstead Wood (red), Abraham Darby (pink), and Lady Emma Hamilton (seen in the reflection, only).

I wish you could smell them.

I was going to work today, but I may play hooky. I have a mushroom feeling. We have had showers.

Pots of flowers

When Estorbo is tired of wandering the roof, but can't get back inside because the sliding door is closed, he will sometimes park himself here, in his well-used ford in the tide of plants.

The seed-grown purple basil is making me proud. It is so perfectly purple. Just looking at it makes me want tender mozzarella. And figs. And tomatoes.

There it is again. But I think the chives, back left, need renewing.

Surprise. After being cut back the newest of my four clematis made it to the top of the climbing Iceberg. But what's its name? I have forgotten - I know it's from Glover Perennials, on the North Fork of Long Island.

The Iceberg itself continues to recover. Leaf cutter bee action on the right.

The fall anemones continue to bloom in summer. (Gloriosa tendrils in the foreground.)

And the unveiling...

It lives. The fig. After The Pruning, I admit I was worried. Root pruning plus severe branch pruning. I think we'll have ripe figs by late September.

And I can't wait.

Actually, I can.

Sometimes waiting for the good things is the best part.