The roof: T - 4 and counting

Sundown, October. It always does this.

More boxes have been packed. We are down to one pot and one pan in the kitchen.

Cutting loose

I have been dismantling the roof farm. Many plastic pots will stay behind, to be adopted from the sidewalk.

I collected pear tomatoes, from the last, blighted bush. The black raspberry will move to Harlem with us.

The rosemary will come, too. 

And we will not forget the cat.

But we will have to leave her behind.

The fall season - things are afoot

The haul, yesterday evening. Plus martini with pickled field garlic, from springtime in Inwood. It was chilly on the roof, in a strong breeze off the water, but two sets of neighbors appeared on their own roofs while I worked, scrambling around and up from their small terraces. The silvertop farthest from us supported a circle of friends drinking sundowners, and next door Danielle and her boyfriend drank wine while he played the guitar. I cut back tomato plants, shrieking only once when I touched a hornworm caterpillar covered in wasp larvae: the uber-horror. (The cat refers to them as zombies).

Brooklyn evening.

I am beginning to dismantle the farm, piece by piece.

For a supper side dish, we ate fried green tomatoes.

And in a seasonal round-up of stuff:

September 28th: I'll be at Powerhouse in the South Slope to sign books. Melissa Vaughan will be testing and serving a couple of recipes from 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life, and signing copies of her book, too.
October 13th: my Wild Edibles Walk in Prospect Park. Tickets are $30.
October 17th: the Abrams Brooklyn Bash at the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg: Ginger ale pig, Brooklyn-brewed hooch and more.

I still have a few free spots to assign for this invitation-only event. If you'd like to be on the guest list please email me (click on my profile photo in the blog's sidebar) or leave a trail of crumbs in the comments..

And November 28th: that will be a Cape Town book party. Save the date. Book your passage. (And also get in touch if you'd like to be included on that mailing list!)

Winter Gold Nugget Squash

It was about the size of my hand, fingers outstretched. It was one of two squash plants in a pot, only one of which had set fruit. The plant looked like it was at the end of its tether (yellow leaves, a sense of desperation), so I picked the squash.

Inside, some of the flesh was a beautiful dark green, just below the skin. I peeled, sliced and cooked it till just-tender in simmering water, then added some butter and many sage leaves to the drained and hot saucepan. The squash was delicious - buttery and soft. We ate it with our bayleaf-grilled roadkill chicken. No, not real roadkill. See page 97 of A Delicious Life, for a how-to.

Though we did wonder about wrapping a chicken in plastic and placing it in the middle of Henry Street, and waving the next truck or ambulance over it.

But that would be Art, right?

And all we wanted was supper.

Cape gooseberries under siege

Photo: Vincent Mounier

I sowed them from seed collected from the Cape gooseberries that grow in the pots next to the swimming pool in my mother's garden.

It bears repeating that it is South Africans who call this fruit a Cape gooseberry. Physalis peruviana is the botanical name, but there are many species of Physalis. In the States, these would be called ground cherries, although that common name usually refers to a more ground-hugging plant. That plant's fruit is very sweet, with a bit of funk.

These fruit, the Cape Town ones, bear plumper berries on longer, more upright arms. The colour is more intense: a deep orange-yellow, to the ground cherries' muddier yellow. And there is a tart tang with the sweetness.

But a so-called English or American gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa, R. hirtellum and hybrids) it is not.

So. There they were. Delicious, in theory. Three little bushes on the roof. Lots of fruit forming.

I looked closely. What the...

The papery capsules have holes drilled in them. One perfect hole, each. And what was inside? Nothing, except some nondescript and dessicated debris. Whatever drilled the hole ate the berry inside and then just...left? It's a bloody mystery. Should I blame the cucumber beetles? This does not happen in Cape Town. The nerve.

As if that wasn't enough. We sat there this evening, with our drinks, looking at the whipping water of New York Harbor in the September sunlight, buffeted by the cold wind. I glanced over at the gooseberries to our left.

Leafless.

I knew. The bare branches had tobacco hornworm caterpillar written all over them. They'll eat anything in the Solanacea family and here was a smorgasboard in a row: tomatoes, eggplant, Cape gooseberries.

Photo: Vincent Mounier

I did not give him a bungee cord.

Later Vince went hunting and found four more. He hunts them like he hunts chameleons.

He can post his Frankenvurm images, later.

Let's just say they landed up in a cocktail glass. A caterpillar departure lounge.

How to leave

Around 6 o' clock last evening I went up to water the farm, and to pick some eggplants (I still want to call them aubergines) for our supper.

I wondered about planting cool weather greens. There is an open pot, now, calling for salad leaves. But we will be leaving at the end of October

While the Frenchman and I were prepared to absorb the radical, $600/month rent increase our landlord had imposed, we were not prepared for some of the conditions in his new lease. Like no cats. After ten years. While there is plenty of room for legal maneuvering, this is a battle in which we have chosen not to engage. It is clear that it is time to retreat, and to cut our ties with this lovely little space.

And it will cease to be lovely the minute we leave the building. Loveliness is the ember we carry with us.

It goes where we go.

At least, that is what I am telling myself.

I cannot pretend to be happy about it. But I feel strangely at peace. At least we know, now.

There will be moments of raw sadness, especially at this time of year, when the light is heartbreaking. The colours and shapes and textures I know so well change with the rising and falling light. The intense comfort of familiarity. The terrace's botanical clock.

There is a lot to look forward to. A new New York adventure. Murmurs of an apartment around the corner. Thoughts about Jackson Heights, Queens, and its glittering hot rooftops and Babelesque inhabitants. New food, new sounds, new subway line. The first step on a longer journey that will take us even farther away.

Perhaps it is easier to leave by degrees.

September evening

It was cool for the first time, last night. We took our supper up there - a chicken, a salad, some bread, and ate it with the earlier sunset, and a breeze that meant business, off the water. We wore sweaters.

Downtown Brooklyn behind us in the east, and later, as it grew dark, heavy Venus in the west.

September on the roof

Inspiration from above

Distracted by other things, I had not shopped for supper by the time supper time rolled around. Our supplies yielded the tail end of a steak, some baldo rice, Greek yogurt... Then I remembered the eggplants on the roof, and went to check on them. I had noticed a promising specimen the previous night, when I fertilized the farm (I found my organic fertilizer at Tony's Hardware eventually, after a fruitless search earlier in the week. I feed the whole farm rose food!).

Three were ready to pick, and I found the first ripe tomato, too, and a couple of small cucumbers. Mediterranean ideas... I roasted the eggplants in a hot oven after pricking them all over - after an hour they were soft. I seared slices of the raw steak, seasoning the meat liberally with cumin, sumac, salt and pepper. I smashed some garlic and mixed it into the Greek yogurt, with a little salt. The baldo was cooking.

The pulp of the eggplant was tender and soft and very mild. I slit each one down the middle, seasoned it with salt and sumac, and piled some of the brown pieces of meat on top, spooning a dollop of garlicky yogurt over both. The tomato (sweet) and cucumbers (crisp) were sliced and strewn with terrace mint.

Supper.

Persian cucumbers

To recap: the roof farm was planted late. Mid July. And I tucked these seeds in last, as an afterthought. Persian cucumbers, the kind I snap up almost every week at Mr Kim's on Atlantic. Small and smooth - I love them. And of all the plants on the roof, they are doing the best (with an eggplant exception; I think those may take over the world).

I picked the first ones last night. We ate them very simply, sliced lengthwise, in a salad.

 And perhaps there was one in my Pimms. It's traditional.

Weeds 'n roses

Name of my new band.

This is the rose I moved to the roof so it could live out its last days. But then it refused to die. The amaranth that germinates in its pot every summer shows solidarity. Amarathus retroflexus, pigweed. Lucky pigs. We have become so stupid about what we eat. It's an excellent vegetable, scoring high nutrition, flavor and texture points.

The amaranth seeds have spread to other pots and I leave the plants to grow to long arms before I cut them back and carry them into the kitchen.

The Frenchman - not big on salads, as a rule - wolfed a recent Caprese incarnation. We have perhpas a week of farmer's market tomatoes every night , and I am partial to the giant green ones, with yellow blotches, whose name I have forgotten. Their flavour is slightly sharp, and they are very juicy.

For this salad I sauteed the finely chopped leaves and seedheads of the amaranth with some thinly sliced preserved lemon, allowed the mixture to cool, and topped the usual tomatoes and mozzarella with the lemony green relish. The last of the purslane finished it off.

The Frenchman licked his plate.

A new edible weed: quickweed, or gallant soldiers

Galinsoga parviflora

I have discovered a weed newly edible to me, despite being a familiar gardening enemy up on the farm: quickweed, or gallant soldiers. The Edible Wild Plants group to which I belong on Facebook featured it some weeks ago.

Galinsoga parvilflora - and its flora are very parvi. Tiny flowers. Like small white and yellow daisies. You probably know the one.

Yes, you can eat it. Raw, it tastes like pea greens, slightly sweet. Cooked - spinachy, chardy, collardy.

The Galinosoga story is an odd one. I had sown an entire packet of Magenta Spreen lamb's quarters, from Johnny's Seeds, in two troughs. What came up? Galinsoga. It may be some fluke, or accident, or coincidence - the seeds I sowed were tiny and black. And I have no lamb's quarters... Certainly I have noticed Galinsoga in the past (though I had no name for it, then) - but as far as I know it did not set seed. I always yanked it out.

Spot the Amaranth?

And late summer is peak weed season. Peakweed. Pigweed.

 (Joke. Worse, pun. Sorry.)

Pigweed is the sloppy-looking green species of Amaranth that most people would not look at twice. Amaranthus retroflexus and A. hybridus, practically invisible, it is so ubiquitous. It has a handful of common names. As I have written before, it is nutritious and earthy, and I prefer the leaves' mouthfeel to spinach, which isn't in season in hot weather, anyway. Think of it as summer spinach, now that high summer has turned a corner and is beginning the freefall to September, with Glut at its heels.

Last night I picked two large bundles of each plant, stripped the leaves, wilted them, and added the just-cooked leaves to pine nuts, raw garlic, parmesan, butter, olive oil and, the key ingredient, lemon zest. (In the past weeks I have eaten up all the salt-preserved Meyer lemons of spring, so yesterday's green sauce contained the peeled zest of one fresh lemon. Yes, I made some more preserved lemons, too.)

It was very good. An instant hit.

The green weed pesto recipe is next door, at 66 Square Feet (the Food).

New appreciation for a tiny tomato

Before the farm, there was one tomato plant: an heirloom Mexican cherry tomato. I planted it on the terrace, in the sunniest corner, and it grew and grew. The next year, there were seedlings, popping out of the gravel of the terrace floor. So I potted them up in old coffee cans.

They appear every year. In truth, the tiny fruit are too small to excite me very much, now that I have tasted the Black Krims and Green Zebras and Striped Germans. But this year they are the only ripe tomato where before the tomato orchard would be about to explode.

Our late spring absence meant no mid summer bounty waiting for us. So the volunteer is welcome, and I eat the cherry tomatoes every time I go up to water.

One of the worst things about our possible move is that I look at the collection of young plants growing and the seeds I have sown in the last couple of weeks and want to cry. The summer squash plants, the pumpkins, the Beefsteaks. I think about the blueberry I have mulched with fresh coffee, and fed, and pruned, for next year, the black raspberry's newly trained canes, the fig's tender green branches. Gardening is as much about the present as it is about the future. There is always something to look forward to. What you do now, pays off later. If you cut off that future, the present and its investment become an existential crisis. What if you cannot reap what you have sown?

But we've discovered that our lease is up only at the end of October - whose crops are beautiful. So there is more time than we had thought.

And that might make all the difference.

Sunflower salads

These are easy. Sprinkle sunflower seeds into some nice potting soil, cover lightly, water, and wait a few days. Mine are on the roof, but they can be grown on a windowsill, too. Very accommodating.

I have already started to snip the wobbly and succulent stems, to pile on top of salads of shaved beetroot and fanned avocado. What's in them? Lots of Vitamin A, B, E and zinc. And protein. Eat your sprouts...

I ordered my sunflower seeds from Botanical Interests (as usual, creature of habit) - I'm not sure what the germination rate would be on store-bought seeds, made for eating.

People sometimes chew those seeds - still shelled - on the subway. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Food for gerbils.

Then they spit the hulls neatly into a loose fist, or right onto the floor.

Noo York, Noo York, it's a wonderful town!

High on a summer roof

Bitter Lemon and Pimms, with lime and terrace mint. And ice. Lots of ice. The Pimms has not been touched since last year.

Thus armed, I went up to the roof at about 6pm to start setting the farm to rights. Six weeks without a gardener reveals interesting things, like: all the mesclun and microgreens of spring bolted and gone to seed. Which means I have seed! Cilantro? Gone to seed. Dill? Gone to seed.

I have lots of seed.

Pretty green coriander/cilantro seed. Once dried, these will go into our next order of Brooklyn boerewors. We tasted Vincent's batch last night, and it was wonderful. He mixed and ground and delivered the spices to Pedro at Los Paisanos while I was away. Now I must deliver to them the copies of the Go Magazine in which my sausage story appears. There is a tiny picture of the butchers and the sausage and a big picture of me. Not quite what I had intended.

Radish, romaine and mustard seed.

The summer savory is very happy. Can't wait to chop it up for a fresh herb rub.

I should have taken a Before picture, the one where the table is hidden beneath clematis, rose and lily trimmings. But everything has been fed and assessed, and there is more to be done.

The end of the evening (and the drink). And the discovery of out of season parsnips, which will be too stringy to be fun. I had removed the soaker hose, rearranged pots, pulled out weeds, planted trays of Beefsteak tomatoes, eggplant and peppers (found at the humble but useful Midtown Florist on Atlantic, ironically the the only plant shop that had vegetables - fine, fruit - for me, that very first July when I started the farm...), planted cucumber and dill seed, and watered, fed and bagged all the trash.

It was 7.30 before I came back down, still surprised by the long light of each day. My back was sore, and I took yet another cold shower. 

Supper - boerewors and Frank's garlic scapes, plus a roof sorrel and potato salad - was cooked on the terrace (well, not the potatoes), fine ash floating like snow onto the leaves of everything green.

Inside, we sat in the airconditioning, sipped cool red wine,  and fed the cat bits of meat.

Home again. Mostly.

Fruit on the roof

 Photos: Vincent Mounier, newly fledged gardener

...apparently more than one man can eat. So I suggested that The Frenchman freeze the berries, and I'll whip something up when I return to Brooklyn. The man loves a fool.

You know: whipped cream and fruit. But he did marry me...

I am really happy about that blueberry bush's performance. I was worried about cross pollination (two cultivars are best for good fruit), as my neighbour Danielle's shrub was ailing. But apparently the bumble bees were successful. Maybe there are others in the hood? Last year the bush was straggly, with old wood, gangly limbs, and small berries, so the cutting-back in summer produced nice new growth, upon which the next crop forms. Add a pound of fresh coffee as mulch (to increase acidity - and I repeat, ad nauseum, that used coffee grounds are no good: their pH is practically neutral) and organic rose fertilizer (!)...happy blueberries.

Very sorry to be missing the black raspberry. What a pretty little tart its fruit would have made.

Alpine strawberries, freshly watered by the novice gardener. Growing in a muggy New York summer. 

I have always loved fruit, and growing even these potfuls thrills me. Virtually, for now.

Proof of life

Fruit photos snapped by: The Frenchman, on his tour of duty yesterday

...on the roof farm above Henry Street...

Although every time I write "farm" I think of the recent op ed in The Times that pressed all my buttons. Even if the clever Marielle Anzelone did write it. I mean, why even talk about urban gardeners  and a "craze to farmify our surroundings"  (really?) in the same breath as habitat deprivation for native pollinators? The gist of the piece - habitat creation through native plantings, and how pollination works - is great, but creating \ a conflict on paper where none really exists is very distracting. Urban gardening and native planting are not mutually exclusive. Gardeners are not the problem.

Here it is.

Greedy Gardeners

Back to the er, farm, which, if you remember waaay back, was created as a sort of urban gardening joke. Before I fell in love with it. Here is a bumble bee (all-American) doing what it does best to blueberry flowers.

Black raspberries, below. 

The cilantro (white flowers) bolted, of course. I'll leave it to set seed for a batch of boerewors.

The farm was kept alive by a simple soaker hose, turned on for twenty minutes every day by Amy and Dinah. I was sorry that neither was able to enjoy sundowners on the roof during their stay, but access to the roof can be tricky, with the lifting of the hatch and the hanging on like a lemur to the ladder.

May 21st

The fava beans are full of beans, now, and some tomatoes are hanging in, but I think I'll do some cheat-planting when I get back. Last year's tomatoes are still a vividly delicious memory.