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.

Chinatown's summer produce

After a trip to the East Village yesterday - my last visit to Izumi, who has been cutting my hair for ten years, now, in her little silver-painted back room salon, and who is moving to Hawaii - I walked south through Chinatown to collect my post office box mail, which accumulates every month for me. 

I haven't been to Chinatown in a while, and was thrilled by the summer  produce. It is a forager's paradise. I bought an armful of yard long beans, which hang from my bag like a coiled lasso.. 

Waterlilies! I learned only recently that they are edible - I've known about lotus root for a long time, but one seldom sees the waterlily stems.

I passed on the dragonfruit and the longans (should have bought those, though) and acquired instead 3 lbs of rambutans - the litchi-like fruit whose skin is covered in wiry prickles.

But I forgot that, once you get to the fruit flesh, there is persistent little layer of skin right beside the pit that sticks to the fruit. Annoying. Litchis and longans don't do that. There were mangosteens, too, the even more beautiful version of the previous three, but at $8 a pound they were not for me.

At home I Googled the words written above these green fruit: trai hoc. Hog plum. Spondias mombin.

Giant bamboo shoots. 

I was already lugging a green papaya the size of a football, my beans, the mangosteens and fresh galangal (above), which one does not see, often: it's usually wizened little stumps in the dried spices section of an adventurous shop.

The lady who sold me the leaves above did not speak English. I had no idea what they were but thought they might fragrant, a herb rather than a vegetable. At home, they turned out not to be, and a posting to a Facebook page for plant identification soon identified them as kangkong, Ipomoea aquatica. We had already eaten then raw - and washed very well - in a spicy salad the blanched yardlong beans and green papaya, dressed with fish sauce, lime juice, galangal and ginger (yum), but now I know they are usually cooked quickly with a little soy, garlic and shrimp paste.

I'm going to have to go back.

Working weekend

It was a working weekend. The joys of freelancing, as my friend Johan recently quipped. Ain't no weekends, sometimes. No boss, either. And you can drink at your desk. This gin and tonic was packed with mint. I recommend it.

I was happy to be designing a garden again - herbs, my first love - this time for print, a new magazine that will launch soon in South Africa. More about that when it happens.

And every now and then I dipped into the pages of my book, just to make sure it is real.

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.

The book is born

Look what arrived by messenger yesterday evening!

An advance copy of my book, still smelling inky.

I hope, if you're in the hood, you can join us for a party at Book Court, to celebrate.

September 7th, 4pm. Bubbly, cocktails, and snacks made in this tiny kitchen...

[Here is the Amazon link, by Facebook request: 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life. The book will be released on September 3rd and will be available in real book stores, then, in the US and the UK. It may take a few weeks longer for South Africa and the Antipodos as the books clear customs. Funny thought.]

Summer roses

Munstead Wood, with strawberries and basil and hyssop

There are roses, at last. A sodden June and a hellish July made all roses, everywhere,  miserable. But for these shrubs, in smallish pots, with roots taking the sun's heat directly through those pot walls, I think life may have been torture. Sorry, roses. Really.

Abraham Darby - the best pot rose, ever

I started to feed them in early July, after my six week absence - fish fertilizer, and Espoma's Rose Tone. The stinky fish emulsion is weekly, via watering can (I try very hard not to drip it on my bare toes) the Espoma - granular - monthly.

Calamintha and Munstead Wood

Calamintha always takes a while to get going. The Munstead Wood buds and blooms are small (but fragrant) - a sign of stress. The next flush will be a better one...

And the Iceberg? It should be dead. I was steeling myself for euthanasia. A month ago it was 80% defoliated - the result of blackspot. Many branches had suffered from die back. So I cut a lot back, and out, while carefully pruning the stems that had flowered in the spring, in the hopes of a second flush. I fed it, contrary to good gardening practise (you're not supposed to feed a stressed plant). I also made sure it dried quite well between soakings, as I think it had been very damp.

And it's back.

Finally (this a case of last, and least), Lady Emma Hamilton. The woman is hot. And not in that way. I think the rose is simply affronted. You put me in what, up where??? Do you know who I am????

What reads as an interesting peach to apricot with hints of rose in pictures comes out as quite flat orange, in person. We'll see what happens in the cooler weather. September through mid November are good months for roses on the terrace. (If we're here in November, she mutters, darkly, twitching...)

Dontthinkaboutit.

I'll think about it next week. Today I am playing with watercolours.

Babel and its guavas

A quick detour to South Africa, back in time to early July - winter - and the best small plate of food I ate while visiting Cape Town. It came from a garden.

Babylonstoren, as I've written before, is the spectacular wine farm and kitchen garden near the town of Paarl, a forty minute drive from my parents' home. It is ten minutes from my aunt's house, which is in Paarl itself. So my mom and I collected her and the two sisters visited the spectacular kitchen gardens before we sat down to lunch in estate's bright white, glass-sided restaurant, Babel.

An aside: Lavender has the capacity to annoy me. In Cape Town it is hugely and unimaginitively overused in the design of faux Meditarreanean gardens (plant lavender and poof! - it's the south of France) and it gets old. But here, with every other medicinal, culinary and fragrant plant on earth apparently planted within the enormous grounds, I admired it.

Guava season, the trees lining a dirt road. I love guavas.

It is very, very hard to find a guava in New York. Usually, you have to head to Chinatown, and then you have to get lucky. So to speak. But the produce aisles of supermarkets overflow with them in South Africa, and they are so common that most people barely notice them.

So when a small plate of roasted guavas arrived - a little gift for the table, along with the farm's own herbed olive oil and wonderful bread - ahead of our ordered dishes, we were surprised. But after one bite, and then another, we wolfed them. They were the best part of the lunch which followed, which was very good. Cut in half, roasted in a hot oven and seasoned with plenty of thyme, citrus sugar, and salt.

Roasted fruit is big at Babel, whose philosophy is to preserve the integrity of ingredients,  rather than to chop them to ribbons. The entire, peeled and roasted naartjie (clementine) that accompanied my mothers lamb chop, and the roasted tree tomato (tamarillo) that nestled beside the Shirazy-y beef on my plate were somehow novel while remaining very simple. Novel and delicious.

The wine was excellent, inky and smoky and spicy, a Shiraz produced on the farm. Most of what we ate came from the gardens and nearby farms, and the emphasis is deeply local.

After lunch, a perfect cup of coffee. If you dip into this blog regularly you'll know I go off about coffee. This was one of the good ones.

These naartjies (NAAR-cheese, what South Africans call clementines)  were on a table outside, a goodbye gift, if you wanted one. They were ripening on the trees, nearby.

In short, if you are headed to Cape Town, put Babel on your list. And give yourself plenty of time to walk those walled gardens. Their collection of indigenous South African herbs is reason enough.

For garden geeks: Here is a link to the PDF of the garden plan, with plant list.