Summer in the jungle

And it's August. July slid by, filled with walks and picnics, and wild scents and red fruits. 

The terrace has filled out to its summer jungle voluptuousness. Fennel has shot up and is flowering and the South African milkweed is about to begin, too. Cardamom and galangal and black pepper and sand ginger throw tropical parties at night, after we have gone to bed.

What is missing is last year's lush screen of moonflowers on the birch poles, and also the raspberry along the railing (removed because of its incurable virus, and replaced with another, after scrubbing and sterilizing the pot). I regret the moonflowers, but an extremely late sowing of an unusual white lablab bean from Abbie Zabar's stash may still have time to climb. It's a baby. I also cut the Clematis 'Etoile Violette' right back to provoke more flowers in...guessing...mid September. (You can see the first one I grew here, in the original 66 Square Feet in Cobble Hill - funny, that post has an almost identical title.)

After a lavender hiccup (mistake, their roots needed more room) the windowboxes are fluffy with a yellow Agastache cultivar from the Gowanus Nursery, Nemesias that have not stopped flowering since spring (they are a wildflower from South Africa's Western Cape, in bloom there after wet winters, so it's fascinating that these can withstand intense New York humidity), and more South Africans: the daises are an Osteospermum, also planted in April. 

I made this warm salad that warm night by grilling tomatoes over coals, splashing them liberally with very good soy sauce (Ohsawa nama shoyu), adding crushed purple basil from the pot on the terrace, and a shredded sesame leaf (Perilla, but not the frilly shiso, which tastes a little different). 

Stuff? The pink sparkling wine is Graham Beck Brut rosé, a cold treat on a warm night. The kikoi is one of the endless collection that I stockpile after a South African trip (it's been 17 months, and counting) and the pillow covers I ordered online from A Love Supreme, also Cape Town-based. The ibis plates are from Anthropologie's discontinued Nature Table series designed by the whimsically wonderful artist Lou Rota (you can still find this series squirreled away on eBay).

So, there it is. Our oasis within Delta variant life.  Everything changes while it stays the same. We garden. we walk, we cook, we order in. Forage-picnics (for now) still happen, but proof of vaccination is required. We adapt, we wash our hands. We wait.

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Next Walks? - 5th and 7th of August

Catch it while you can

 

Spring. It's all happening so fast. Very soon, these Virginia bluebells will vanish from the late April woodlands and shady gardens (plant them where you have spring sunshine under tall deciduous trees that create summer shade). Kanzan cherries are about to shed their petals, crabapples have opened, dogwoods are starting. New York is in full bloom.

All that young garlic behind the bluebells on the counter has already been pickled, and the green apricots hiding to the right are now part syrup, part suppertime ingredient (last night they were cooked slowly with lamb, mugwort, pickled magnolia flowers and wedges of potato). The green apricot syrup is just sugar with an equal weight of apricots - their juices are drawn out slowly by the sugar and then ferment. A spoonful is wonderful stirred into a tall glass of cold sparkling water. Or added to the gin and tonic I sit and sip at six with the Frenchman. 

Or into this yuzu and lemon juice delight, beside my mayoral pick.

It's a year and two months and we have lived on top of one another for the length of a pandemic. And we're still okay. And still look forward to that evening ritual where we sit together and talk about what went on inside our heads all day, and watch birds, and plan outings. As of today we are both double-shot by Moderna. I was very sick after my second dose, he's fine. But being vaccinated against this beast that I never saw coming, and that I vastly underestimated a year ago, seems like a miracle. 

Inbetween, there have been walks, with and without forage picnics (Japanese knotweed and fava bean tartlets, above, on mugwort pastry).

And small but intensely precious escapes to a special spot in the Catskills. 

And there have been dandelions, I don't think I've ever seen as many dandelions. Leave them in your lawn - they are gorgeous. And course you can eat them, nose to tail. I've been including the petals in quiche fillings. Quiche is back. I've decided.

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My NYBG Class, 27 May 2021

The door opens...

Things change. The sliding door to the terrace sometimes stays open for hours, during the day. Some evenings are warm enough for drinks outside. The new pillow covers from Skinny La Minx have been slipped over the down pillows (the most forgiving pillows, ever - occasionally they have been forgotten outside in the rain, and then they dry right out again). 

The pots under the table are from Gowanus Nursery - owner Michele overwintered alliums in them and came to my rescue when I realized I had left it way too late to order those bulbs - sold out, everywhere. I will plant them next week so their first, premature leaves are not burned by a possible freeze. I really wanted the big purple balls for bees - they adore them. And, as usual, I have ordered too many lily bulbs for the space (when in doubt, squeeze). Those are from The Lily Garden, also as usual.

It's a garish drink, the Aperol Spritz: prosecco, Aperol, sparkling water and (blood) orange slices. But March deserves it.

The windowboxes have been sown with arugula and cilantro, and the violas are to keep our spirits up, in the meantime.

Some time in late April all the citrus trees will migrate back out to the terrace, along with the bay tree and the myoga ginger (I divided the myoga in fall, left one out and brought one in - to see if the outdoor one might make it). In May the sleeping sand ginger will follow. And two tea plants (Camellia sinensis) will arrive, too. 

I know, not much space will be left for humans. But we are good at sidling...

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The Books

Not-quite-spring snacks

For a recent forage walk on a colder-than-forecast afternoon I made some canapés to accompany small glasses of chilled PandemicVermouth, infused and blended in April 2020. 

On the right are buttery salmon and field garlic (Allium vineale) tarts, with a savory custard filling. To serve them I added more slivers of salmon and extra, snipped field garlic. In the rear? Fir sugar shortbread cookies. Bottom left are toasted rounds of field garlic cheese bread. 

I topped those toasted rounds with garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) pesto and pickled chanterelles, from an epic mushroom hunt in the woods upstate two summers ago. The chanterelles - incredibly - still have that magical apricot aroma that traveled back with us that day.

And there were eggs, not quite deviled. Cooked in boiling water for eight minutes before being peeled and covered in miso, overnight (chilled). The miso flavors them but also draws out some moisture, so the texture becomes firmer. Onto their yolks I dripped some powerful, bright green ramp leaf oil, Aleppo pepper, and the peppery leaves of bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), a maligned but exquisitely pretty edible green in the Brassica family - like tiny watercress. 

Socially distanced walks and picnics are a challenge but everyone is well-trained, by now, and very considerate. (At least, the people who sign up, are!) There will be more, and it feels good to be creating wild food treats, again.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

Tropical winter

I've been traveling. In the last couple of snowy months, I have visited the tropics. Twice. To get there, I traverse Siberia. Sort of.

At the end of a two mile hike straight across Prospect Park, I reach Grenada. On my way there my basket is empty. Heading back, boots squeaking in the freeze underfoot, it is brimming with fruit from the Caribbean. I need huskies.

It began in December, with a thoughtful gift of grenadillas and an unfamiliar canistel (Pouteria campechiana - above) from my friend Hannah Goldberg. She bought them at Labay Market, a West Indian grocery store in Brooklyn's Prospect-Lefferts neighborhood, on the east side of Prospect Park. Hannah is a regular, often in search of good things for her catering company Tanabel Table.

So I had to go. After a quick look at Google Maps walking made the most sense, because snowdrift parking is not much fun in this city. And a four mile hike is decent exercise (cardio-with-a-reward).

I went this way.

And down there.

And landed up here.

The corner store is lined with bins that spill produce flown in from the Dominican Republic and Grenada. And so I met sour, fresh roselle for the first time. It has numerous common names and may be best known simply as hibiscus; it is not the flower, but the calyx of a hibiscus species that actually resembles okra, in terms of its blooms. Its botanical name doesn't mess about: Hibiscus sabdariffa var. sabdariffa race ruber. I made a fermented syrup from them and they candied as they fermented. 

Not plantains, or bananas. But you can have as many green coconuts as you like chopped open for you on the sidewalk.

The owner, McDonald Romain (who goes by Big Mac) presides inside behind a slipping facemask and a clear-ish MacGyvered COVID screen between his cash register and his customers. He takes his time to chat with each person as they pay, over the thumping sounds of loud Christian music (his Facebook page explains that he is "covered in the blood from head to toe"). And he grills me about what I plan to do with his produce, giving instruction, when necessary.

Once you squeeze past the counter (it's not a large store, and I am double-masked indoors, these days) you reach a jumbled motherlode of seasonally changing fruits and vegetables that are rare-to-non-existent in supermarkets: squat bananas, unripe, fat plantain, grenadillas, mamey apple, breadfruit, soursop, real Key limes, sour and sweet fresh tamarind, and, most recently, black sapote. In an open refrigerator are bags of frozen, peeled sugar cane, and elegant bundles of fresh taro leaves. Shelves are lined with West Indian delicacies and staples like canned callaloo, sacks of brown sugar, bags of mace. On ice at the back is a collection of whole, fresh fish. There is a kitchen too, but I have not seen it in action.

And so I come home with loot. It is urban foraging at its happiest.

The black sapote (a.k.a. chocolate pudding fruit) is the large green, round one, above. Amazingly, to me, it is closely related to persimmons: It is Diosypros nigra; Asian persimmons are Diospyros kaki, and the little native American persimmons are D. virginiana. 

Big Mac suggested I would soon be back for the chocolate pudding fruit, but its thick creaminess and bland sweetness didn't thrill me. Possibly it was picked too early, someone suggested (when I posted it to Instagram) - it has many passionate supporters.

But I will be back for the taro. I prepared the large leaves first in a Jamaican curry, and then in a non-traditional Hawaiian lau lau - packages of pork belly wrapped in the leaves and steamed slowly (taro must be cooked for a long time to destroy the calcium oxalate crystals that otherwise irritate your tongue and mouth; this is not a green to blanch and eat vividly green). 

The leaves have a delicious and distinctive flavor, and a silky, melting texture, once cooked. My lau lau also featured fresh ginger, because Labay's is the nicest I have ever eaten, it cooks till tender and chewable, as well as good Japanese soy (Ohsawa nama shoyu, from Gold Mine Natural Food Company). 

Spring will come. But this is not a bad way to spend winter.

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Find me daily @66squarefeet on Instagram

In closing

From the winter terrace, where the daily parade of small things is our entertainment.

Some of us have had a better year than others. Many have been stretched thin, or crushed by events and personal loss. If I remember one positive quality from 2020 it will be the generosity of others - kind words, cards, messages and money: Through donations here we have been able to help two families far away, suffering from the effects of COVID - loss of work, and the loss of a mother - without the means to tide them over in hard times. 

Thank you.

Wishing for you that 2021's peanut-filled pine cones are within reach. Even if you are not quite sure how to get back to where you began. 

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Find me daily on Instagram @66squarefeet

Just leave (s)...

The leaves all fell overnight. I had a funny feeling they might. But I have never noticed this phenomenon, before. Is that what they do, after an initial, exploratory flutter? 

Look at those oak leaves, up there. I wear a size 11 boot (if I didn't, the nearly six feet of me would fall over). Those are 14-inch leaves.

I may be walking more than before, too. Every day. So you see every little, interesting change. Your neighborhood is overflowing with surprises. The more you see, the more often you see, the more you...well, see.

If we thought the week before the votes were counted was bad. If we thought the last four years were bad. How about these days? 

So we walk.

These - above - are cherry leaves. The native Prunus serotina.

Ginkgo biloba. Ancient tree of the dinosaurs.

Japanese cutleaf maple. Acer palmatum var. dissectum, and probably a cultivar called 'Something' in single, inverted commas, as cultivars are. Cutleaf maple was one of the first trees whose botanical I name I learned, long ago, working at a Manhattan nursery while I recovered from whooping cough. It is a knee-jerk nursery staple. The trees at Green-Wood are mature and gorgeous, and have won me over. 

Sweetgum leaves. Liquidamber styraciflua. Native to North America.

                            Magnolia leaves. But I don't know what kind.

And more oak. Quercus. Pointy tips, so in the red oak group (white oaks have rounded lobes). Dozens of oaks are native to North America and I still have a lot to learn about them.

I am planning  a picnic menu for a very rare forage walk this Saturday. It's the first picnic since March. And before we are locked down again. We will walk in shoreline dunes with fresh breezes. The walk sold out in hours. Everyone wants out.

It looks like this:

Quails eggs with fresh field garlic salt

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Persimmon and mugwort focaccia

Field garlic goat cheese spread 

Beach plum and autumn olive drizzles

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Ginkgo sticks

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Roasted carrot hand pies with pine honey, juniper, elderflower vinegar, and sweet white clover

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Pine honey madeleines

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My Book

Breezy Point - Backroads and Beyond

With the season turning towards fall the Frenchman and I migrate like birds back to the open spaces of Fort Tilden and Breezy Point, situated near the end of the long and skinny Rockaway barrier beach (the very end is a very gated, very white community* - to reach the point itself we use our legs, walking along the beach). 

[*Since I posted this the New York Times wrote about Breezy Point's Trump enclave.]

The reason we go back now is simple: we're allowed to park in the fisherperson's lot, again. After June 15th and before September 15th you need a permit (and to obtain it you have to show up at the permit office with a fishing rod). 

I walked alone on the deserted backroads, which were fragrant with autumn clematis in its glory. The roads are the abandoned infrastructure of a Cold War nuclear missile base - ponder that. The Frenchman left in the opposite direction, on his five-mile run along the low-tide beach while his camera gear waited for him in the car.  

Autumn pokeweed berries have been eaten from their fuchsia panicles by transiting migratory birds (as much as gardeners may dislike poke - Phytolacca americana - it is an important and native food for birds; and humans can eat the cooked spring time shoots - see Forage, Harvest, Feast for recipes and more detailed information).

In mid-walk my phone rang, which it never does. Frenchman. Birds on beach! Big birds! Beautiful wings, red beaks! They sounded like skimmers. He was running back, fast, to the car for his new camera. I about-faced and headed towards him. We met on the beach and speedwalked back out to the point, into the bright western sun.

On our way we passed little furries of piping plovers sanderlings [see comments].

I love how they scurry back and forth, pursuing the edges of the advancing and retreating water.

And at last, after a mile-and-a-half or so, the big birds that had excited the Frenchman: beautiful black skimmers in flocks on the sand. I have only ever seen one bird at a time. They all pointed neatly into the wind. Summer residents up the Northeast coast, they are also on their way south as the weather chills.

Cars are allowed on this beach, with permits. With dwindling safe habitats for shorebirds, and increasing pressure on their populations, I have never understood this. Shoreline ecology is exceptionally fragile. Tire treads just kill it. If you want to fish, walk.

Conservation should be at the forefront of any administration's funding. Instead, it is a distant afterthought.

On our more sedate walk back we were treated to the extremes of human behaviour. This lone fisherperson wearing their mask.  

And a hundred yards behind him: A massive, unmasked, packed-like-sardines gathering of humans at the Silver Gull Beach Club (which lies at the eastern end of the gated Breezy Point community). Do they all have COVID-resistance? Are their parents or grandparents and children and friends immune? What about their colleagues at work? What about the staff working there? 

Is this what is meant by a superspreader event? 

We didn't even like walking downwind of them.

(Honey, is that a tickle in my throat?)

And that's all, folks (or perhaps the beginning, for some). 

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NYBG Class, 15 October

The Park

Until two weeks ago I had never seen a chipmunk off the ground. Now they are elevated. Here's one eating the seed heads of statuesque Silphium perfoliatum, reached from a handy pin oak perch in Prospect Park. 

Last week I saw a chipmunk chomping on spicebush fruit, hunting the ripe red drupes along the slender branches.  I suppose they have always done this. But suddenly I am noticing it.

I walked in the nearby park with the Frenchman, recently. He was hunting migrating hummingbirds with a new camera lens (we found them). But before we did - in a patch of jewelweed - we visited Lookout Hill, where in late summer a small, fenced-in meadow is filled with the season's rough flowers: Joe Pye-Weed, a giant persicaria, golden rod, and daisies. I see this hill several times a week, because I run up it to counteract sedentary evils. But no matter how familiar I think it has become it always shows me something new.

The tall flowers were bobbing and bending with seed-eating songbirds.

On our walk home the baseball fields were filled with masked children and parents, warming up for complicated pandemic schooling.

The park is all things to all people.  Now, more than ever. And that can get complicated. But most people are trying.

Our New York City city parks require New York City funding, and the local government has never been generous. And now the parks' budgets have been slashed. They rely on private funding.

The parks feed our souls. 

And what is that worth?

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