Gardens in high places

I sat in a beautiful room in a former factory in Manhattan yesterday and talked about plants and about how to get trees to high flors (which reminded me of this SoHo garden, one I was rather fond of) and about Draconian Swiss recycling laws.

These water towers stood guard beyond the windows. Hopefully, by early summer, there'll be some roses and herbs and, well, generally, a garden, too. Inbetween the room where I sat and the water towers, that is.

Floyd Bennett Field

I spent some hours touring Floyd Bennett Field with David Burg the other day. David is a Bronx resident and the founder of Wild Metro, a small not-for-profit organization committed to helping protect and restore and recognize wild green spaces of New York City. He wanted to talk to me about weeds. This national park is overrun with them.

I packed a picnic lunch and David provided a split of Champagne (I was suitably impressed) and fruit tarts for dessert, and we sat in the pale sunlight in a clearing of trees and invasives, accompanied by an adorable and heart-breaking little feral cat to whom I tossed bits of my lunch. David talked, I listened, trying to keep up with a story that traveled from Medieval Europe to Floyd Bennett Field, connecting all the dots along the way. He is a born raconteur and educator.

We walked, later, through plenty of Sandy damage - salt-killed pines and piles of debris being hauled away, still, by contractors. David painted a picture of grasslands allowed to return to their natural state (grassland, mind you, not woodland) and described, as we walked, a vision of herds of elk picking their way over the flat expanse. 

It's hard to reach these parts of Floyd Bennett, unless you drive. It is huge. I wish they rented bicycles at the entrance, which is across the road from where Vince and I usually enter Dead Horse Bay, after riding the 3 subway to the end of the line and then hopping on a bus. But walking around Floyd's entire expanse is simply lunatic, with miles of concrete and enormous parking lots to negotiate. A bizarre place.

If you would like to see the American woodcock in courting display, this is where you do it, according to David. Now, in March, of a moonlit night. We met two young botanist doing survey work and they told us that they had chanced upon a woodcock with its head caught in loop of string. They freed it.

Our own great plains.

To help protect and restore natural wildlife habitat in this national - albeit beleaguered - park and its Gateway cousins, you can sign this petition, proposed by the Audubon Society. The fact that some of the signees leave comments about Canadian geese, notwithstanding (this drives me nuts), these habitats need a hell of a lot more support than they are currently receiving.

Gardening through the rough patches

In its own very personal, myopic way, it's been a rough couple of weeks. Very stressful. I don't like to write too much about the internal stuff because it's boring. It really is. The point is, late one afternoon this week I went up to the roof and I gardened. It was like taking a calming pill. I think. I'm not very familiar with pills.

I wore a jacket of Vince's, too big for me, but waterproof, and the longer I stayed the more drips ran down my forehead from my hair. It wasn't cold. It was spring-like, and I looked up often and saw a grey wall over the harbour, obscuring Governor's Island and the water,  until I looked up again and saw the wall breaking up and lifting and turning into layers of low cloud.

I sipped from my drink, a concoction of gin and San Pellegrino pompelmo (grapefruit). My hands were dirty, and wet. I left mud on the glass and on the pocket of Vince's coat where I returned the unused seed packets - I held off on planting lettuce as we're expecting several more freezes. But the fava beans and peas and chervil  are in, and so is the spicy mesclun  blend of hardy brassicas.

And I breathed. And looked up and out. I have not been doing enough of that. I have been looking in. And I have not given myself a view. Or gardened.

I must garden. It is as simple as that.

I have heard from and about many people who have been having a difficult time recently. For me, this work - labour with promise -  helped. Things seemed to straighten out on the roof, as I shook plant food into the damp soil, and troweled it in and pushed the seeds down, and stretched chicken wire, and looked across the water, and imagined small green crops to come.

In other seed news: We have two Botanical Interests seed winners! Lyn, and Meg. I've contacted them and am waiting for some mailing addresses.

Thanks you to everyone for playing - lots of really lovely green ideas for making crops into meals. The winners were chosen at random.

Meg wrote, about what she would do with her seeds: "I would love to roll some home-made sushi with the addition of fava and pea shoots, and add a melange of microgreens. Probably with smoked salmon, and avocado. Maybe even find a way to sneak in a rat-tail pod. (They sound like a furtive ingredient to me... until found out, of course.)"

So - I hope they both have fun with furtive Rat Tail radishes. I have my own, and should plant those too.

Spring foraging

Tama Wong (author of Foraged Flavor, about which I posted, recently) left a comment on that post saying that I really should eat lesser celandine - Ranunculus ficaria. I had mentioned that some other local foragers are wary of it. But they have not eaten it, to my knowledge. It is eaten in Europe.

And I could not be happier. I know of several patches of it within the five boroughs, nice and clean, and I have always wanted to eat the young leaves as salad. She says to catch them before they bloom, when they turn acrid.

Here they are in bloom, in Pelham Bay Park.

It is a wonderful forageable because of how invasive it is. Yet another weed. And its flowers ain't bad, either. I am quite excited about early spring. It's just around the corner, waiting for the slow curtain to rise.

On the 29th I'll be doing an informal foraging walk, by the way, in the woods of Manhattan - we could easily accommodate one or two additional walkers, as long as they like picnics and field garlic, and perhaps owls, too.

Let me know if you would like to join us.

Seed Giveaway from Botanical Interests

My cool weather greens from the roof farm

They're here!

Two beautiful boxes of seeds arrived today from Botanical Interests, and they are waiting to be claimed by you in a pre-spring giveaway for edible gardens. (My own fava beans are soaking, prior to planting, as we speak. My seed order happened to arrive today, too. See last year's fava leaves in the basket above, right in front.)

I have grown all these seeds myself with the exception of the intriguing Rat Tails and the sunflower microgreens, which will be new for me this year. I chose these thinking of container gardens, but there is no reason they will not work well in-ground, too, as long as they have good drainage and enough sun.

"Speckles" butterhead lettuce

Two readers will receive the following collection of seeds (a total of 10 packets, each):

Bordeaux spinach - with a pretty red mid rib and veins
Cherry Bell radishes
Chervil - a feathery, cool-weather herb with delicate anise flavour: think omelettes
Fava beans - for their tender tips, and also for the later beans, of course
Lettuce -  Red Sails, a red-frilled leaf lettuce, and Speckles, a butterhead (Boston lettuce) with red spots
Rat Tail Radishes - planted for the harvest of their peppery seed pods
Shelling peas (for their sweet shoots, but you may want the peas, too...)
Spicy Microgreens - my favourite mix of mustard, peppergrass cress, cabbage and radish
Sunflower microgreens - very juicy young seedlings

If you would like to enter to win the seeds, please leave a comment with:

- your name
- a one sentence description of a delicious thing you would make with one or more of your crops. It does not have to be complicated.

Cut off time will be noon ET, March 13th.

After Estorbo and I have drawn the two winners (in our most scientific and objective manner), I'll ask for mailing details so I can send them on as fast as possible.

And thanks very much to Ryan Schmitt and Botanical Interests for providing these seeds. Clearly, I am a fan.

We watch, and wait, and order bulbs

In small garden news, there are shoots:

This Nepeta, above, was such an impulse buy that I do not remember the species - fond of semi shade, flowers like blue salvia....Ah. N. subsessilis.

Agastache "Black Adder"

Here it is, last year:

And the irrepressible "Etoile Violette":

Last summer:

Other good and cheering news is that I have ordered my lilies (all nine of them!) from The Lily Garden: Silver Scheherazade - a white sport of the tough-as-nails lilies that closely resemble my Dunyazades. Also some Seafarer, which I think are the most beautiful lilies, ever, with peach undersides and green topsides (and which Dinah might enjoy, if they bloom before we return from South Africa in June) and finally Madame Butterfly - very exciting: a Lilium henryii hybrid with those sexy recurved petals, white, with green stripes over an apricot throat. The Lily Garden - a small, family-owned business in the Pacific Northwest - is my go-to excellent source for lilies. I have tried several other well known companies and am disappointed by their small (immature) size or packaging.

(By the way, if you do want to order from The Lily Garden, you can order via email, rather than download and print their form. Just be sure to have your lilies' names and codes in the email. Then call them with your credit card number.)

One lily that I shall not order more of, is Silk Road - she's going strong and is is so imposing that the terrace can only handle so many specimens:

In the meantime, I have other people's gardens to help plan.

Comet Pann-STARRS

Temperatures in the low fifties (or celsius teens) sent us up to the roof for the first time this year, to sip some premature gin and tonics. I had learned that a comet might be seen low in the western sky, and see it we did, though I needed binoculars. Comet Pan-STARRS orbits the sun once every 100 million years. Think about it. We are nothing.

In the Northern Hemisphere it will be brightest tomorrow (Sunday) evening, actually, right after sunset. Look above where the sun disappeared. It will resemble a short contrail. We will never see it again.

It got cold, fast, and we hustled back down, with the unfinished drinks and Vince's heavy photo bag being handed down through the hatch. The cat found his own way home, via the terrace.

Salade Niçoise in the offing...