Exciting News.

I received some really exciting news in the garden today. I was out fertilizing the tomatoes and the rest of the plants, after the last week of heavy rains, when the director of the garden came by, bringing some great news. See, I had mentioned to him a couple weeks ago that being as fortunate as we are with this garden, the space, the ability to grow our own healthy and nutritious food, everything, that it really felt wrong to not be growing things for the community food bank. I had already come to the conclusion that with my own personal plot I would reap a huge amount of food and that I'd give 10% of my total harvest, but we definitely could do more! So anyway, he said that I could have an extra two or three rows to plant things. This essentially doubles the size of my growing plot and multiplies by 5 the amount of food I'll be able to bring to the food pantry! So far I've doubled the amount of potatoes I'm growing, added two more tomato plants and planted zucchini and yellow squash, all of which are good at producing lots of food. I also bought two bulk packets of green beans which tomorrow I'm going to begin succession planting to make sure there's a constant supply of green beans!

When it comes down to it, 1.4 million of my fellow New Yorkers depend on soup kitchens and food banks to meet their food needs and too often people use food banks to get rid of their canned foods that they themselves don't want. (Hint: If you don't want to eat the year old spam, why would someone else want to?) Further, those dependent on these sources to feed themselves often live in what are colloquially termed food deserts, where low-cost, nutritious food is almost impossible to find. I know whatever I'll be able to squeeze from the land won't individually solve the hunger problem that this city faces, but I'm an "either help bail the boat or get out" sorta guy and so I'm very excited for this opportunity and hope the success I've had in my own plot will carry over into this new project. I'll keep you informed.

First Harvest

There's lots going on in the garden. I've cleared out the front garden, possibly with the help of child labor (we'll talk about that later). My two plot neighbors took the back patio area on as a project and made a really awesome rock garden (they might've found astroturf buried under rocks, with weeds growing through it). I buried a pumpkin with a friend, It was a 'love pumpkin' that she had bought with her partner, whom she had just broken up with and then it collapsed in on itself, so we buried it, as you do (or should do) with past relationships. It was solemn and ridiculous, just how I prefer things.

What's most exciting though is the garden is suddenly exploding in growth! The Potatoes have grown past the rim of the trench and today I mounded the soil up around their vines for the final time, next stop HOME GROWN POTATOES. All my Green Beans have their second set of leaves and so soon I'll have fresh Green Beans! Some of the Tomatoes are now double their starting size and all are covered in flowers and most have tiny little fruit on them!

Best of everything though is yesterday I harvested my first meal from the garden:

Fresh Arugula! The Arugula needed to be thinned and waste not want not, so I made a light lunch of Arugula microgreens. Granted, it was only 1 oz. of food, but drizzled with a balsamic vinegar reduction and olive oil, seriously, so delicious.

And tonight I had my second meal from the garden. Pasta with a deconstructed tomato sauce with mushrooms accented with fresh from the garden Basil. Yes, of course the only thing from the garden was the Basil, but for real, it made it so yum.

I'm so excited for the garden to really start producing food and to be able to make full meals with produce from it. Every day there'll be more and more! Here's a few more photos of the garden to show its progress:

 Green Beans!

 Baby Tomatoes!

 The New Tomato Stakes (details in blog post to come!)

 Cucumber sex! Er. Well Cucumber flowers, which is sorta like sex, but with pollen. They're growing up the trellis quite nicely and have tripled in size since they were planted. I CANT WAIT TO MAKE PICKLES AND CUCUMBER DILL SANDWICHES!

That's about it. The latest seeds I've planted are some Romaine Lettuce (to be shaded and hopefully prevented from bolting [going to seed] by the cucumbers), a mess of Carrots, a new crop of Arugula, more Beets to replace the first seeds that washed away, and a quick crop of Radishes, that'll be kept cool by the towering Potato vines. Next time I'll tell you all about how I discovered someone in the garden crazier than me!

Gardening Footwear

There's nothing that compares to the relationship you have with a sibling. I love my sister more than it could possibly be said, how else are you to feel about someone who puts up with your insanity (and I, hers)?  This is of course before a few days ago.

Now, I had always considered her to be slipping just a little bit. Who moves from NY to NC, I mean, of course, owning your own home might seem better than sending to a landlord, a check every month or finding a place grander than a hovel for less than 500k, but really. Have you not met a New Yorker? We're delightful. An absolute treat. But being the ever loving and supportive brother I am, I chalked up her geographic silliness as a passing phase and let her go on her southern adventure. (We won't talk about how approaching 3 years later she's married, a home owner and about to birth her first baby, cause you know, that would make it seems as if I might be wrong about NY or NC. And that's just not a possibility I'd like to entertain. I swear she inflates the husband and house and pregnant belly whenever she needs to show her idealized American dream and really she lives in a double wide with a man name Cletus and his mother, Franny.)

Having said that she pushed me too far and crossed the line in expecting me to accept her lifestyle. After days spent in the garden, destroying, one by one all my converse, giving up and switching to flip flops (oh god I can even describe the amount of dirt left in the shower) and finally going with an old pair of top siders. She suggested I buy a pair of crocs, for the garden. I know. If I hadn't saved a screen capture of the text I wouldn't believe it either:

 Crocs just remind me of the sort of utilitarian footwear you'd want to wear while hosing off corpses in a morgue, except not, because you wouldn't want body water sweep through the holes. In fact, I now know of a fate worst than death, being dead, naked and hosed down by a schmo wearing crocs. Nothing with that much plastic should find a place on your body, plastic doesn't breathe! Gah. I can't even. I know there are converts and ardent followers of Crocs, but I think they're a mark of the beast and their inventor, the Antichrist.

All I can say is she too will be added to my list of people to pray for, her Cletus and Fanny, especially Fanny, with her speech impediment. She tried so hard.