Garden Update

New Mums


Fire Escape Bursting with Plants


Tomato Plant lashed to its supports for dear life- its windy up there!

The tomato plant with a bad case of the spider mites

Orange = hot

Status Quo with a little bit of a yellow tint. The garden is doing pretty good. As with any garden, somethings are going gangbusters while others are struggling. We haven't had rain here in a while and its been very hot so I'm having to water twice a day (which is good practice for when I'm finally allowed to have a puppy). Because most things need to be watered twice a day, they look really bad when I don't water them. When I got home from work/birthday celebration last night I found the watering pot in the sink, filled with water, waiting for a window box and knew that I had forgotten to water something. Luckily, it appeared that I forgot to water the drought resistant box.

One box, the odd geranium super hot pepper box, is very drought resistant. I've written before about how each box has its own weather conditions and this one is full sun all day, lots of wind, and never gets any rain because of the roof over hang. I planted different types of geraniums and these super hot (I mean the plant tags are actually warning labels) peppers and they seem to do better when I forget to water them. I have to learn about how to transplant the geraniums for next season. The problem now is that I have a bunch of hot peppers but they're too hot for normal cooking. What's a girl to do?

My herb box is totally gone to flower. Both basil plants have beautiful little white or purple blooms and attract tons of different pollinators. They literally buzz when you open the window. After the great green/yellow/black catepillar parsley invasion of early August, the parsley, that appeared dead, is starting to send out little tufts again. I hope it makes it since fresh parsley is a nice addition to any meal.

The veggie box has 7 regular peppers, 1 almost done eggplant, and the tomato plant has new little tomatoes all over it. These three plants all started to turn a sallow yellow color a few weeks ago. Now, I'm a science person by training, but I don't apply science to my hobbies. I don't test pH, have no idea what is in the soil, and don't follow directions on the plant food. I just dump some in when things look, well hungry. The plant food (only the organic best for my babies) has perked up just about everything except for the tomatoes, they still have branches that are turning yellow though two of them are still flowering and putting out new fruit. The herbs in this box are going great (and make great herb butter) and believe it or not, there are still flowering pansies. They look like freakishly bolted, super leggy pansies, but there they are.

The balcony is in fits and starts. Can we talk about the string beans? I have 5 string bean plants coming out of the same pot and they all tresseled and climb very well, but they keep just sending out new creepers with no flowers or fruit. I suppose science could help me figure this out (there is probably some book out there that says "to get your green beans to settle down just do X, Y and Z) but I just kind of let them go. My mom, who gave me the magic bean seeds, hadn't had any either. Well, this week, in both gardens, there were flowers! So maybe these guys are just late bloomers? If the plants do start to produce green beans, we'll be up to our ears in them, the vines have totally taken over the giant dead honeysuckle bush.

Finally, I addressed the shame of the garden. Well, two shames of the garden. The first is perhaps more like blight than shame. Our block has a very active block association that tries to win the greenest block of the year award. Apparently its a big deal among the Park Slope Block associations and our new president has made it her mission to win. So, I put out a few potted plants in the beginning of the summer. I didn't know what would do well at street level and didn't want to spend a lot of money (there are lots of kids in the 12-15 range around here) so I put in some petunias, geraniums, and some pretty little things who name I shall never know. Well, those pots in that location put a lot of pressure on the plants and some immediately flourished while other immediately died. The geraniums took over one pot and filled in quite nicely. Everything died in the other pot and had just sat there, the blight of the neighborhood, for a few weeks, maybe months. Well, after staring at this sad little pot, with its dead plants hanging around its rim, I ran down to the giant big box hardware store and bought some mums.

On a side note, I've been buying my plants at the small, local, women run nursery in Red Hook. They are totally organic and when I bring them home, all the bugs, fungus, and ook jumps off the new plants and runs onto my plants. They also don't have mums or anything pretty, so I went to Lowes where they probably have illegal immigrants dumping DDT, napalm, and tortured puppy tears on the plants and bought some pretty mums. I'm not going to eat the mums (I don't think the recession is that bad yet) so I figured I would be a bad person just this one time.

The other shame was one of my front boxes, again, again very visible from the street. I had some raspberries in there which were immediately killed by the grass that was in the pot (thanks gowanus nursery!). Once the grass took over, I stopped watering it and after two months, it finally died. Leaving, you guessed it, a big mops of dead grass hanging out of the box. I'm sure the block association was furious. So, out went the dead grass (which of course was still alive underground) and in went the toxic mums. But they're so pretty!

Finally (no really this time), my poor tomato that was besieged by spider mites. The good news is that I seems to have killed the spider mites though regular sprays with soapy water and just pulling off the webs and mites with my hands (yuck). The bad news is that I think I'm too late. The plant looks really sad, though it did just manage to ripen three of the tomatoes that had been sitting there for a while. The plant is still in time out but I'm not sure its going to make it.

My mom has had a horrible critter year. Everything seems to be eating out of her garden except her. Oddly enough, even on the fourth floor of a Brooklyn apartment, we are besieged by critters (and peanut shells WTF?) as well. The moral of the story, if there's food, someone wants to eat it.