Flowers for feathered travelers

For two days in a row our small terrace has been visited by the tiniest of birds, making the mightiest of journeys. 

You hope, when you plant a seed, that something like this will happen at the other end of the growing season, but you never know.

It has been magical, watching from a few feet away as this miniature creature flashes from flower to flower, sometimes pausing in midair for seconds, suspended.

There are three vines, in two pots. One is grown from a seed given to me by our friend Don in Cape Town, two are from Botanical Interests. But I don't know which is which. I call them lablab beans, but most Americans know them as hyacinth bean. Lablab purpureus is African, so hardly a native food for the ruby-throated hummingbird. (Weeks ago we saw them feasting on trumpet vine flowers - native eastern Campsis radicans - out at Jamaica Bay. But our tiny terrace is no match for that perennial twiner's aggressive behavior.) 

Still, can a foreign flower be worse for hummingbirds than sugar water? It's definitely less problematic in terms of passing on pathogens. And much more photogenic.

If only we could pack them a tiny lunch, for sustenance along the way.

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Book a Walk and Picnic

What was, may be?

In freezing January it is helpful to look back at scenes of another life lived, just a few months ago. I am still sorting photos dating back to the middle of last year, and here are some good - and occasionally perplexing - moments.

The aperitif - honeysuckle cordial and basil - sipped on the warm July terrace, with the book I just bought, written by a new friend, Serena Bass. We met through social media, before feeding each other at our respective Brooklyn homes. She is a chef and formidable cook (the two don't always go together, curiously), and a truly delightful human. One of the rare ones who makes you feel special, and consequently a lesson in How to be a Better Person.

This was really perplexing. Looking at the photo I wondered...what is it? Sour cream? With garam masala? What's the golden stuff? Was it a marinade for a grilled supper? I checked the date on the digital file, checked my diary, and found a forage walk. Phew. Checked my emails, discovered the menu for the walk and... Lilac honey, cream cheese, full cream yogurt and ground spicebush (Lindera benzoin fruit). So that took eight minutes. It's slow going.

For the picnic we spread it on persimmon focaccia. Under mighty tulip trees, in an old cemetery. A good memory today, with howling wind, and grey-and-white light.

Also in July last year the Frenchman and I returned to the Hudson Valley woodland paths where we had stumbled upon a trove of chanterelles, in 2019. This beautiful green place was unreachable for the whole of 2020, while a massive COVID-testing site mushroomed (sorry) nearby and all access was shut down. We felt very lucky to find them again, and we stocked up!

One of the meals I made with the chanterelles was this one, where meatballs studded with pine nuts cooked with the apricot-smelling mushrooms in a pan sauce of vermouth and cream, gooseberries and summer squash.

Summer means lilies. The Silk Road is statuesque, and I hope the bulbs will weather the very low temperatures we have just seen, and will experience again in a few days' time. They are very cold-hardy, but it's the frozen pots that pose the problem: the base freezes and prevents drainage. The bulbs can rot. Fingers crossed. They have grown in each of my four New York gardens.

The windowboxes undergo seasonal makeovers, which gives me an excuse to shop for plants. These pretty yellow hyssops (Agastache) came from the Gowanus Nursery, and replaced the hard-working Nemesias (which are a South African wildflower; it always makes me very happy to see them).

Nemesias out (the cut flowers saved and on the table), Agastache in. On the left the flourishing bay tree (now indoors until April). 

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My Books

July terrace

July, and the Silk Road lilies have opened. They are taller than I am. During these hot days they hold their breath, but towards late afternoon their scent is increasingly released. By evening, the whole terrace smells like cloves.

The right hand side of the terrace is also home to the Thai limes (Citrus hystrix). I recently re-potted them - again - due to suspected root rot. They were doing very well and putting out new growth, but a week of tropical and daily rain in early June, followed by a mad and humid day in the 90's, apparently resurrected a dormant pathogen. This time, in their very mixed potting media (with lots of big bark chips) I included a fungicide, a very expensive additive that is my last and extremely reluctant weapon in the root rot fight. Now we wait. 

Also, the black raspberry has been removed. It came from its nursery last year with a virus that I was too ignorant to identify at the time. Its pot was scrubbed and sterilized, and a new raspberry is in its place. And I bought a self pollinating hardy kiwi, too. 

The other side of the terrace is now home to the healthy yuzu (Citrus juno) - moved far (that's relative) from the sick limes, just in case, as well as Liatris, a collection of hyssops (Agastache), fennel and Calamintha, whose long-lasting flowers are all so attractive to pollinators. Except, I've barely seen any insects this summer. Still, the chimney swifts patrolling above us must be eating something. Inbetween are the happy, undemanding bay tree and prickly ash. And, of course, the stone table, where we so often eat supper, and watch the world above our heads (last night it was a low-flying osprey).

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Find me on Instagram @66squarefeet

Not drowning, but waving

 

Our evening supper table on the terrace, with zinnias from the farmer's market. 

My Saturday visits to the market are a highlight of my week. The produce is glorious and delicious, and it all grows within a few hours' reach of the city. Organized by the not-for-profit Grow NYC, entry to the market is controlled strictly to avoid crowding, and every farm stand has fresh chalk marks and boxes drawn on the ground where customers must stand to wait their turn. Marketers choose your produce while you point - and everyone is masked and gloved. It is hot work. The one farm that now allows you to choose your own produce wipes down every basket handle and requires you to hand sanitize from a giant dispenser before you pick one up. 

If the whole country was being run this way we'd be in good shape.

When I focus on these good things (fennel and balloon plant - native to southern Africa - above) it's easy to forget what we have missed, this year. A trip to the south of France (our tickets were refunded, at last). Chanterelle hunts (the state park that is home to "our" patch is closed). And late this month I would have traveled to Vermont to be the late summer Culinary Artist in Residence (isn't that a wonderful title?) at the Marble House Project. A kitchen to play in, and complete freedom to forage the land and choose from their kitchen garden anything I liked, to channel the seasons through food, to chart and document and compile. We would have ended with a wild-inspired forage-to-table community dinner. The residency will carry over to next year, but, as we are all learning, the more we know the less we know. Next year may as well be in another galaxy.

Finding - and recognizing - the good things under our noses remains inspiring, and I may be fortunate, that way. Lockdown inflicts boredom on some people but it's not something I have ever suffered from. Sometimes adventure lives in a windowbox. Or in a collection of summer vegetables from a farmer who grows them upstate. 

Or in a ripe peach.

Sometimes it's the new fruit on the fingerlime. Or a freshly-dug piece of galangal rhizome in a green curry.

So while I have space to grow plants, I still have the opportunity to experiment, to observe, to learn, to play, to create. Every meal is an evolving piece of the season, and a source of pleasure. Every changing month brings new things to fruit, to seed, to flower. It is all noted, edited, filed, and this tiny garden (and my local rambles) continue to fuel both work and imagination. 

In that sense, as my dad would say, we lead a privileged life. And I am thankful for it. 

(But I really would like to go and find some chanterelles!)

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Help Beirut - Donate to the Lebanese Food Bank

The great windowbox makeover

27 June 2020

On the first steamy weekend of late June the windowboxes on the Windsor Terrace are looking good. To the north of us cumulus clouds gather like folds of dangerous whipped cream. We feel like we are in the eye of the pavlova. (Stay with me, we're about to make sense.) It is definitely summer.

14 March 2020

The windowboxes weren't that happy in March. After a year's service their coir linings were disintegrating and looked like rats' nests (I have never actually seen a rat's nest; am I being unfair?). I would never buy anything with coir again. But these were the most reasonable planters I could find, and live with, in spring 2019. There are seven of them. Their black iron cages matched the black railing, and I faced the coir outwards, so it wouldn't offend us. But maybe it offended the neighbors? The other thing I hated was how fast water poured through the coir. No retention at all. I always emphasize how important good drainage is for plants, but, as my father would say if he were around to say it: Not that goddamn good.

14 March 2020

So in cold March this year I removed: the soil, the single layer of black landscape fabric I had lined the coir with (to help prevent soil washing through to the neighbor's ground-floor garden), and the coir. It was a painstaking process. Result, empty boxes. I then searched fruitlessly for every kind of liner to insert into the frames. I looked even for cheap plastic windowboxes to slip in. Nothing. But in my search I did find mention of burlap. An idea.

18 March 2020

It was a layer cake approach (I never crave sweet things but that's twice now in one post). I used one-inch chicken wire and folded it into forms to fit the frames. Prickly business, especially with cold hands. 

18 March 2020

Then an outer layer of double-folded burlap (and in two cases, sheet moss gathered from a friend's log, upstate, followed by the burlap), and finally an inner layer of a thicker, double-folded landscape fabric. Its visible edges would be hidden by growing plants, I hoped. Pansies, arugula seeds and a mesclun salad mix - a bonus packet from a Botanical Interests order. And some more chicken wire against the squirrel/s, to whom fresh soil is irresistible (it has been very effective - removed once plants fill out). The double layer of fabric has proved much more effective at holding moisture longer in a dry planter. 

23 May 2020

The mesclun came up, the pansies settled in (slowly - it was an exceptionally cool and cloudy May), and I added some strawberry plants. This terrace receives far more sun than I had estimated when we first moved here, and it's always only in Year Two that you really begin to figure things out. This is our second summer. So I wanted strawberries again - the ones in our first Cobble terrace (the original 66 square feet), were incredibly productive (although I can't find that cultivar anymore; it was called 'Fern' and it seems to have been discontinued).

2 June 2020

We began to eat little lettuce leaves.

21 June 2020

In June the lettuces leaves grew big enough to become wraps. 

27 June 2020

At the end of May I had swapped the pansies for summer fillers, choosing as a theme deeply predictable but very dainty white petunias. I wanted a change from last summer. And flowers that would be luminous as well as scented in the evenings, when we spend the most time on the terrace.  

I added a warm yellow portulaca - I grew it last year (vivid orange) - low-fuss, hardy, and popping with flowers. In the boxes nearer the windier, western edge of the terrace I tucked small lavender plants, and transplanted summer savory from last year's saved seed. Chamomile I had forgotten about germinated.

The strawberries are making strawberries. In fact, today some are ripe (too sunny for a good picture - I must wait for evening).

The portulaca began to spill, as intended.

And now the boxes seem svelte, at last. 

It is a pleasure to reach out a hand to crush some lavender, or summer savory, to smell their strong fresh scent. 

The salad up there has leaves from the terrace only: two kinds of shiso, three kinds of basil, mint, and the windowbox lettuces. It was a foil for the soy-bathed skirt steak grilling on the braai, out of the frame, stage left.

At supper now, the fireflies are beginning to light up in the gardens below. Mosquitoes have appeared down there too, and they keep people indoors at night. Not a bad thing. Very few make the climb to our level. Two American kestrels living nearby keep us entertained, and we watch for a lone black skimmer who sails past to the west every evening. Once, an osprey flew right over us. Heading home from the lake in Prospect Park.

And that is the windowbox story, three months in the making, to the backdrop of lockdown jitters, new nightly fireworks, and the extraordinary ferment (as opposed to foment, which has negative connotations) of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Things are happening. 

But garden on.

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Read

The long view

A scamper up the fire escape while supper was grilling gave me a dove's eye view of the terrace. I don't go to the roof often - maybe we should. For a drink or a picnic. Lockdown is very much roof time. We see lone figures on faraway rooftops, sipping drinks where people never sat or sipped drinks, before.

I like our view of neighbor's gardens, each one very much a reflection of a personality. And I love the Boston ivy covering most of the wall of the laundry building that all the gardens back onto. Life would be very different, aesthetically, without it. Its rich, textured green. There is a real fear of ivy on buildings in this country. It's beautiful, it's cooling in summer, it catches air pollution, softens noise pollution, and only damages a building if you really decide to rip an old vine off its support.

Supper was grilled lamb kebabs, molded onto fierce swords and flavored with terrace-grown rosemary and marjoram. Also a Waldorf salad (what can I say, I had a craving), and a potato salad with lots of dill, shallot, and sliced radishes, dressed with a vintage common milkweed vinegar.

A fighter jet tore past over the harbor behind me while I was up here - the sound always chills me. Earlier there was an unusual sighting of an AWACS. And, just as I was wondering aloud whether we might see it, the space station sailed north in the blue-black night.

The Gowanus Nursery

I was happy to be able to write at last (for Gardenista) about an inspiring place that is dangerously within reach: the Gowanus Nursery. Follow that link for more photos and the story.

What does its owner, Michele Palladino do every day? Water. For one-and-half hours. And then she works. She keeps a remarkable collection of plants in the nursery, and designs and plants and maintains gardens on the days when the nursery is not open. A lot of labour.

And the 'g?' Dutchman's pipe - Aristolochia tomentosa, a species with petite flowers.

Moving a garden

Wednesday evening, above. Vince and Estorbo waiting for hummingbirds. Both of their mouths open.

Yesterday afternoon, above - plants in transit.

Yesterday evening. Roof exposed, with stone slab for our table - the lighter rectangle. I was out all afternoon (cat, cab, vet, $600 later), and, regardless of the upheaval, this was a lot of work for our landlord and his helper. Really heavy work. It may sound perverse, but I like the exposed look, because it interests the roof garden designer in me. This is excellent support for a roof garden: steel I-beams, laid on supporting walls, well off the delicate membrane - the real deal. It takes and distributes weight so well, with deck above the beams. The roof membrane below must have been very dirty/ I am sorry I didn't see it before it was hosed off. Years of debris would have collected - the spaces between deck boards are a little wide and a lot can drift down. Another rule of roof gardens is that you must have access to that under deck area for periodic cleaning, and also to the roof drain, for clearing. I lay awake at night in Cobble Hill during downpours. The deck was nailed down over the roof drain. Terrible idea.

The pots are now in our landlord's front yard, below our front windows, right on 127th Street. I hope none of the plants walk. I don't think they will. The white tarp is covering his woodpile, which materialized this summer. For the freezing winter to come. 

Today work on the leaky roof is set to start. Hopefully it does. Hopefully we'll be back out there to enjoy what's left of the very lovely weather New York is enjoying.

The Harlem hummingbird

It happened. A hummingbird came to the terrace. It buzzed once, disappeared up a dark building shaft, an impossible green speck, then reappeared a few minutes later, from the other side of the terrace. It visited the jewelweed, flew off, and came back a third time. Long enough to allow Vince to take some really good pictures with an appropriate lens. I was frozen in place with my 50mm, which I had been using to shoot pictures of garlic and fennel, for a food story. But I snapped away, anyway.

The cat was sitting nearby and at one point I saw his eyes light up:

I took his picture. I thought he must be looking at a bee. But minutes later the hummingbird hovered into my field of vision.

Don't worry -  he doesn't eat birds. But he likes to watch.

I was transfixed by the sweet creature. Very, very happy.

It stayed longest at the jewelweed, which is in full bloom. I planted a few seedlings that I had brought from Inwood in the spring, in case of poison ivy contact (it's reputed to prevent the rash), and I also thought it might do well in this difficult, shady corner (it has). Little did I suspect that hummers are drawn to it. It touched on the cardinal vine several times, and on the scarlet runner beans, too. All winter  - the long winter of my discontent -  I dreamed of a summer terrace, to stay sane (it was touch and go) and ordered seeds of plants I thought might attract these tiny birds.

I hope it makes it all the way home. Wherever that is.

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                  September Botanical Walk Schedule

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* Summer Botanical Walk Schedule *

Life imitating art

The Harlem terrace. A mojito. The latest New Yorker. A blueberry bush in the background.

But no. I won't be having kittens, any time soon. 

Can the people in the picture also smell the weed, wafting up from the neighbours?

Cliff edge gardens

The ones on the Fifth Avenue, anyway.