Mission: Accomplished.

It's always been about the tomatoes. Unless you grow tomatoes in your backyard, or if you live on a farm (and in that case, why haven't you invited me??), you just can't get a good tomato. Tomatoes you get in the grocery store are either a dull red that are hard as a rock or a beautiful red that are mushy as hell, whichever way, they're at best tasteless and at worst, plastic flavored. Unless you have some magic grocery store produce guy who conjures produce from heaven, those are your choices for tomatoes. It's really a consequence of the modern Agro-industrial complex, which demands year round produce in huge yields all at once. Most commercial tomatoes are picked green and pumped with ethylene which causes them to turn red, often times while they're in transit or far from the farm. Further, because tomatoes in the wild (like most plants) grow and produce fruit overtime and not all at once, modern industrially produced tomatoes have been breed to produce fruit all at once. What this has created is a hard, tasteless tomato. Now, of course, Farmer's Markets which offer fresher and tastier tomatoes than grocery stores, exists, they are both obscenely expensive and not as fresh as walking two blocks, picking a tomato off the vine and coming home and eating that fucker. 

And that's exactly what I did Monday night. My very good friend Nicole, who writes an awesome blog about vegan food and travel came to visit for a week from Berlin and while the tomato I planted so it would have fruit to eat when she was here, wasn't ready, two others were!

 Nom Nom Nom Nom
 It will be a matter of a few weeks before there's an epic avalanche of tomatoes and I'll be canning and jarring tomato yums well into the night. 

We made a really awesome pasta dish and while I'm totally game for pickling and preserving and showing that stuff here, I'm going to jet you over to Nicole's blog for the delicious tomato yumness that we made. You can find it here.

I'm having a moment

I'm having a moment.

I am not a very organized person, but I like to say (and to an extent, believe) that my chaos is planned. Growing up, as a result of my parenting, of course, my room was a mess, a royal mess. Like if the Queen was caught in an orgy, high on coke, dressed in a furry outfit, mess. But there were paths, I knew vaguely what was where, albeit crumpled on the floor, there was order in my chaos.

Now certainly as I've grown up, I've become better at periodically battling back the mess and making more order of the chaos. I like piles. Piles make any thing look more organized. It's perhaps a crutch to keep me from freaking out at the chaos, because in some small way, there is order, my order, in all the noise.

This is not the case with the garden right now.

I believed the cucumbers would stop at the top of the trellis. Where they would go after that, I have no idea, but they would stay where they were told to be, piled if you will, and though sprawling, they would be ordered.

I believed that the green beans would grow quickly and compactly, ordered between the rows of tomatoes, neatly in front of the potatoes and then they would be done and we could move on with the summer.

I believed that the patty pan squash would grow up and swirl neatly out, displacing the beans and the arugula, as their own season faded, politely taking their places, that were kept warm by them, earlier in the summer.

I believed that the potatoes would grow tall, flower and then fade, leaving behind mountains of potatoes, ready for the fall.

The tomatoes, I had such faith in, there was to be this genuis method of staking, weaving twine between the vines to hold them straight up, compactly and uniformly, held taunt by stakes placed at either end. They would reach upwards and be graceful and weave themselves effortlessly through the twine.

These are all things I believed. I had faith. There would be piles of vegetables and it would be ordered. I would conquer Mother Nature and make order of her chaos.

I will pause now and allow you to quiet down with your laughter. Done now? Great.

As I'm sure you've guessed by now, the garden is anything but ordered. Shit has literally gone bananas. I've taken to just walking through the garden staking plants up and tying back plants with twine and bamboo poles. Trying desperately to pile plants on top of themselves. It's not really working. Yesterday, in a fit, I ripped out two basil plants that I had planted next to the patty pan squashed, but that had now been subsumed by the squash. It was entirely reactionary; I put them in another part of the garden, but today they looked miserable. I can't blame them. 

Of course, this is a blessing, an actual gift, but it would have been nice if perhaps stuff stayed politely piled on top of themselves. Neatly. Really, the only thing that is at all ordered is the little herb garden I've planted on the side, in neat little bunches.

Tomorrow I'll have a really awesome post, where I'm not having a nutter panic attack episode. I promise. Stay tuned.

Bam: Canned Beans.

Today was a really great day. It's been pouring here on and off. One minute it's bright and sunny and the next it's the end of the world and you can slice the rain with a knife. The rain is good for the garden and the drop in temperature means that the tomatoes will set more fruit. They get very annoyed when it gets hotter than 80-85 and refuse to do anything. Me too, Mr and Ms. Tomato, Me Too. So during the burst of sun I dashed into the garden and decided the green beans had gotten big enough and it was time for pickin'. I got nearly a shopping bag worth of beans out of the first spit of beans that I planted way back in May, and there's still some nearly mature beans (which I'll probably save until my friend Nicole gets here) and a bunch of little baby beans. This harvest means I'll have fully recouped my money for any bean seeds I bought. If I haven't mentioned by now, with the odd cucumber I've gotten out of the cucumber vines, I've also recouped all the money I spent on cucumber plants. So far Mr Garden is pulling his weight.

What really made the day great though is I finally was able to accomplish one of the goals I had set out to do with this garden, pickle and jar things. Now I've made a couple of quick pickles with the few cucumbers I've gotten, but I'm talking water bath, mason jars, the full deal. A few of weeks ago I had bought as\ really awesome book (Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan, who has a really awesome website and whose recipe for Dilly Beans I used). Although I spent some of the later afternoon whining to my sister about being too tired (yes I complained about being tired to a mother of a 10 day old, either I'm a very brave man or my sister is a very forgiving soul, perhaps a nice combination of both), I decided tonight would be the night. And so bam:

Dilly Beans. Now I've got to wait 2 weeks until the flavor fully develops but I'm a sucker for anything dill flavored, so I'm excited to try.

Right now I'm debating how much more to show on here of what I can, just because I like to give canned stuff as part of my holiday presents to folks (I like giving DIY sorts of gifts more than just buying crap, it feels more heart-centered). We'll see. I know I will do a post or two of the tomatoes I can and it looks like by the end of the month I'll be swimming in tomatoes, so expect that at least.

Wonderful things.

This blog post is incredibly delayed. So much has happened in the garden and in life in the last week, a single post won't even do it justice. So as to not rank anything in importance, I'll start with the beginning of the week.

After putting all the tomato, squash and zucchini plants in the food pantry plot (henceforth known as FPP) and sowing rows and rows of beans and radishes and digging a trench for potatoes, the next couple days were the most trying since I finally got a hold of the garden gate key 'way back' in May. An extremely hot and sunny day left all the plants withered and dead looking and the earth cracked over and dusty. I was pretty heart broken and felt like the run of success that the original plot had been, had suddenly came to a screeching halt. Perhaps it's the New Englander in me, but I often am cautious about glorifying too much success, for fear of the old line, 'pride comes before the fall' being proven again. I was therefore, I thought quite lucky that a good soaking, a few prayers and fingers crossed perked up all the plants and after a week of some TLC (of both the Waterfalls variety and the tender lovin' care sort), the FPP is looking pretty great. The Potatoes have sprouted, the radishes and beans have all germinated and the Tomatoes, squash and zucchini seem to be taking, so in about 15-20 days, we'll have out first basket for food to bring to the pantry, radishes!

Here's a picture of the FPP from this afternoon:

More so, this past weekend I had the extreme honor of traveling north to see my Aunt marry her now wife, who she has been with for 17 years! The wedding took place just outside Augusta, which isn't very far from where my mother's family is from. This is the first trip that I can actually remember going on and it was a bit jarring and centering all at the same time. Inland Maine, where Augusta and my ancestral home is located, is centered in the middle of the paper and wood industry and for many, it meant good union protected jobs. Up until the Paper Mills took advantage of the slump the American economy went through in the 1970's and 1980's, and busted the Unions, a job in the mill meant a secure and permanent position in Maine's middle class. What exists there now is just terrible poverty. My great Grandparents' house looks run down, beautiful Victorian homes, adorned woodwork, sit with peeling paint next to double-wide trailers. It's just all very sad and in a way interrupted my previous imagination of a sort of classic New England image I had of where I came from. More importantly I think though is the resolve I also saw while driving through the backwoods of Maine. So many gardens, huge gardens! Each tucked into the yards houses in every neighborhood and along most every road, the realization that for many, gardening wasn't some frivolous hobby, but the only way of putting and keeping food on the table. It was a good reminder of the ancient faith that gardening really is and I am grateful for it.

Perhaps what is most exciting though is I became an Uncle on Monday! My Sister and Brother-in-law welcomed into their family a little girl named Caroline Mary, who is literally the cutest baby I've ever seen. I know. Everyone says that and I won't lie, I did for a second worry that there was the (unlikely) chance that maybe the baby would have features she'd have to grow into, or come out covered in hair or any a plethora of typical wrinkly newborn baby things, and I'd have to spend the next couple of months dodging the SHE'S SO CUTE line, but seriously this baby is absolutely gorgeous. I'm not entirely convinced that my sister gave birth to her and instead perhaps she took part in a con of the entire family, carrying an increasingly inflated basketball under her shirt and went out on Monday morning to Babies R Us and picked out the cutest baby they had. That's what they sell at Babies R Us right? Babies? I just assume.

And although my original plot has suddenly taken a back seat to all stuff babies, it too has exciting things happening. In just the weekend I was away, the arugula has given me another harvest of leaves, which equaled two dinner salads, the beets have finally gotten to the point of being thinned out (which'll happen tomorrow perhaps), the potatoes are just ridiculous now and have started showing flower buds, which is a good sign that little baby potatoes are happening below, the tomatoes all have at least 5 tomatoes or varying size and development, one plant alone has 21 tomatoes ranging from tennis ball size downwards, the cucumbers have exploded in growth, all the plants are covered in the yellow flowers and baby cucumbers, which mean cucumber sandwiches and quick pickles wont be too far away. The pattypan squash are HUGE and the male flowers have started flowers, and that means in a week or so, they'll be joined by the female flowers, which means I'll soon be pickling and jarring them too and the green beans all have purple/white flowers on them and come up to above my knee! Also, the little side garden full of herbs and a more arugula and romaine have come along nicely!

Here's a few pictures:

 Future cucumber salad!

This little baby has 21 tomatoes!

 

If you were curious of what potatoes look like (and what my pinky finger looks like) here it is! Future Gnocchi and roasted potatoes!

Baby beets, which to be honest I'm not particularly thrilled at their progress. I might pull them all up and just plant another succession of green beans. LAME


What an awesome week!

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.