The harvest is all in, with the exception of all the delicious herbage and greenery that I am using as cover crops this year due to unknown toxic loads. (Still unable to find a lab willing to do small scale test for under $500.)

Time to evaluate this superweird gardening year in order that next year be more successful. To note, we had a million rainy days this summer, (yes, one million) which mucked up the whole works including washing away the seeds, rotting the seedlings, incubating our largest mosquito population ever, and delaying the warm stuff. I also felt like nothing put down deep enough roots to hold water well, so when the rains slowed, everything wilted in a day. (This is Catscience, so please ignore if it sounds nuts.)

Total harvest was around 100 lbs, so all in all, a good year, with some surprise underdogs. (*=successful plants from last year, repeating this year; **=plants started last year, but squished by cat-love or melted in great seedling death of ‘08)

• Multicolored Pole Beans: WINNER! Multiple poundage, lots of variety. Early plantings rotted, so direct seeded in early May with first harvest 7/4.
• Scarlet Runner Beans: WINNER! Planted 5 year old seed packet, maybe even from my garden in SF (10 years ago). Same as pole beans. NEED MORE SUPPORT, maybe horizontal next year.
• de Bourbonne Pickling Cucumbers: RIP: rain. Direct seeded. They came up (or other variety did), but no fruit. Lots of flowers.
• Little Leaf Cucumbers: RIP: rain Direct seeded. Three stunted, ugly fruit that tasted like soap. Lots of flowers.
• Northern Pickling Cucumber** See notes on other cukes above.
• Red Russian Kale: DANGER/POISON Easy to sow, easy to grow, still going strong and beautiful. The first few harvests were tasty until I learned about danger of cruciferous family taking up toxins.
• Be my Baby Cherry Tomato: RIP: Every last one washed away.
• Genovese Basil* WINNER DANGER POISON. still going strong
• Thai Basil* WINNER DANGER POISON. still going strong
• Borage* WINNER! As noted in prior posts, seedlings easily rot from top watering and torrential rains, but easily recover, self seed and pop up in every crack. Direct seeds were in bloom by mid-June. A happy volunteer that I will gladly host forever. Probably best to tie up because it looks terrible when it falls, and can knock down bean vines because it’s so heavy. First two plants carpeted with aphids, but after a couple weeks, I didn’t see another aphid. There were ants, though, but couldn’t see that they were farming them.
• Flying Saucers Morning Glory RIP: rain. All but one seed rotted, but it was beautiful sprouting out of burned out guitar planter in late August. Blooms were about 4″ across, streaky and stunning.
• Daddy Mix Petunia: RIP: rain
• Pink Wave Petunia: RIP: rain
• Mission Bells California Poppies: RIP: Rain. We do not have this kind of rain in California, and they never popped up at all. So, not poppies but poopies.
• Beneficials Mix (to draw nice bugs): Middling results. These were damned impossible to tell from weeds. Yes I know they’re weeds by another name on purpose, but still… Some pretty pink and white flowers. I noted a couple tiny waspy things on them that weren’t drawn by other flowers, but the bees preferred the borage and lemon balm by far. Bachelor’s buttons included, which I loved. Also, the easternmost bean container’s leaf cutting mystery coincided with emergence of the white tufty flowered plant. Useless info without photos, I know. Next year.
• Black Beauty Zucchini: RIP: rain
• Bouquet Dill* RIP: rain
• Lemon Cucumber* RIP: rain
• Chadwick Cherry** RIP: rain
• Pronto Beet RIP: rain
• Butter & Eggs Marigold** WINNER! One of few plants that survived transplanting. Very leggy, needs to be planted with lower growing ornamentals or basil? Not anything super dense, though, because choked out last year by pink petunias.
• Caserta Zucchini** RIP: rain
• Cascadia Bush Snap Pea** WINNER! Several pounds harvested, DEFINITELY plant on St. Patty’s day. (added note to calendar to remind me every year.) Organic peas never dropped much below $5/lb, so a significant money saver. Plus, they’re delicious.
• Scarlett O’Hara Morning Glory** RIP: rain

Perennials

• Concord Grape: WINNER! Over 40 pounds harvested. 27 pints of grape juice canned! Harvested about a week late due to rain.
• Rosemary Alta: RIP: rain
• Mints: (some survived, not sure which) Only icky mint survived. Bought new one at farmer’s market. WINNER!
• Lavender: (seems to have survived) RIP: rain
• Paul’s Glory Hosta: Still going strong. Not too much blooming because of the rain.
• Chives WINNER! This the first year I cooked with the flowers. Very nice for fancy pasta salad.

New friends:

• Cherry tomatoes: as noted in prior post. Farmer’s market. Lots and lots of pounds. I failed at weighing them, but I would say upwards of 10 lbs, and with organic tomatoes in the $4/lb range because of late blight, definitely a money saver.
• Butternut squash (Volunteer) WINNER! I think this is my favorite argument in favor of composting. I didn’t plant this at all. I will say it’s a descendant of Hubert’s squash because the squashes were nice, but I’ve had other squashes since he forayed to the Golden State, so it’s parentage is in question. That said, 20 lbs of food from a plant that sprung wildly from a garbage heap is pretty f’ing awesome.
• Liriope From the Bronx, a plant with no home. Happy, if a little dry. A little boring, but surprising August/September purple flowers.
• Bleeding Hearts: Also from the Bronx. Transplanted just after bloom, unsure of color/variety. Should come back next year.
• Lemon Balm: another Bronx transplant. Seems invasive, but smells so nice, I don’t mind it yet. Easy to weed. Loved the wet weather, but roots seemed ill suited for dry spells.
• Thyme: DANGER POISON from farmer’s market
• New Rosemary: DANGER POISON

By next year, I hope to have the toxics issue sorted out, but it certainly didn’t make me want to dig around in the Gowanus-tainted dirt. It’s probably mostly fine, but small amounts of PCBs and PAH’s can be very bad for the living, and I’m not a fan of that kind of risk. All in all, very successful in hindsight, though the mosquitoes and potential PCBs made it tricky to work down there. The nice thing about gardening is that next year is only a few months away. I saved a bunch of seeds, which will make next year cheaper.

Several folks have asked why there haven’t been more updates: the skeeters have driven me out of the garden. Even running down with DEET on for two minutes to dump compost and grab as many tomatoes as I can, I get bitten all to hell through my clothes. I seem to be allergic to these f**ers and get quarter-sized lumps from them. Maybe one of those beekeeper outfits would do the trick? Are they mosquito proof?
Totally depressing.

In good news, the rogue squash growing from the compost pile has been identified: it is a butternut squash.

Since I took these photos on Monday, the visible squash is almost full size, though still green. I think we’re gonna be making and freezing butternut ravioli again! Yay! Lowfat, filling and delicious. And cheap. Did I say cheap?

The tomatoes don’t seem to have late blight, but I’m watching them as much as I can. Another pound of tomatoes today, some fugly cucumbers and more beans. The beans have been surprisingly bountiful, and very very pleasing.

And today, the grapes are ready.
Harvested for 20 minutes, lazily in the heavy rain (no mosquitoes) and got 3.5 lbs of grapes. They’re sweet and grapety grapey. In Cat News: Gary is a fan of grape detritus.

I’m gonna see which grapejuice extraction method is going to be best, as the Interweb is divided evenly between juicer and boiling. Then, in the next few days, any and all are welcome to come to my house for harvesting, stemming and canning of grapejuice. Then, popsicles with the new popsicle mold Paul found on the street.

Again with the rain. I haven’t needed to even hook up the irrigation system or the rain barrel. This is silly.

Lots of tomatoes ripened in the couple sunny days this week, almost a pound yesterday. Which makes about a pound and a half thus far. The beans have slowed dramatically, and irritating neighbor cut the stray ones back. Grr. I even left him a nice note inviting him to eat the ones that strayed to his side of the fence. What I thought was a volunteer tomato in the kale/bean/borage box is actually a sungold, which must’ve sprouted from a wayward seed from the cold frame when I transplanted the kale. So sad that all the rest of the sungolds washed away, because they’re so delicious.

The kale is taunting me, it is so beautiful, but no soil lab has said they can test for the contaminants at issue, so the kale is just for pretty right now. The herbs don’t scare me as much, which is irrational. Kale is meatier and therefore more likely to be poison?

The basil box is fluffy and prolific, but growth has slowed again with the renewed rainfall.

The borage dropped a lot of seeds when it fell over, and I crawled around on the ground yesterday picking them up. I think I collected almost a full seed packet’s worth. They are pretty and black and ridged. I think by now enough of them have been washed around the yard that next year will have more than three volunteer borage plants. I collected about half a packet’s worth of snap pea seeds, though I’m pretty sure they were a hybrid and won’t come true from seed. It can’t hurt to grow them, now that I know the St. Patty’s planting day secret.

I think this week, I’ll try for a second planting of beans and marigolds.

Two red tomatoes today! Sarah at the store got one, I’ll have the other with dinner.

They’re the ones all the way to the right. I looked at the tag, but forgot the variety on the way upstairs.
I know they’re from Silver Heights Farm Nursery, and that I put them in on Memorial Day. I bought them at Union Square market, and it was the leggiest specimen there.

That seems to be how the plant looks, though. I just looked at the Silver Heights catalog, and think it might be the Silvery Fir Tree Tomato. (All organic nursery! Yay! And lovely ladies working there too.)

Something is eating the leaves of the red flowering beans. I turned over lots of leaves looking for the culprit, but couldn’t find anybody. Lots of cut leaf margins, and a couple vinelets stripped wholly of leaves: could it be ants?

I went to the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s Goo Gone event the other day about the nomination of the Gowanus for Superfund status. Very well presented and attended. It did, however, put the fear into me about toxins that I might inadvertently be putting into my garden.

While my containers are all fresh new soil, I have been composting weeds and giant trees and grape offal that sprout from the actual soil between the cracks in the patio. Calls to CHEJ and a soil lab they recommended up in Boston have eased my mind a little, but they recommended testing for sure. Steven Lester at CHEJ pointed out that the fruits are most likely fine, as plants have a barrier that prevents heavy metals from being taken up from soil and deposited into their fruits, and that the larger molecules of concern (PCB’s and PAH’s, in this neighborhood) are too large to get taken up by most plants. He warned me that there are, however, some plants better at uptake than others. Thus, testing is a good idea, if only because dust and loose stuff from Gowanus could be blowing around the neighborhood.

I hope to hear from the labs on Monday. In the meantime, I will wash all the produce I eat, steer clear of the greens until I know more, and assume the best case.

Half a pound of various beans harvested. Paul has the camera, so no pictures today.
The scarlet runner beans seem to be a different variety than I’ve grown before. Rather than all purple beans, they are green flecked with little purple stripes. I am a fan. The yellow beans (no idea of variety) are long, flat, fuzzy and very sweet. Also, first squash and cucumber blossoms opened today. The spiky vine growing out of the composter identified itself with blossoms today: it’s a squash! Bees were making time with it today, so soon we will know what kind of squashlings have volunteered.

Today’s harvest is the last of the peas, First Beans (!), rosemary, chives and thyme to take to a party. In addition, I’m bringing bounty from the Borough Hall farmer’s market: Eightball Zucchini, sweet potatoes, garlic scapes, red spring onions, beets and more for grilling.

Everything local, and everything gorgeous. I have more pics of yard, but it’s been raining a lot a lot (26 of last 28, I believe). So not much fruit, but much greenery. Hopefully, July will dry out some.

The herb stairs are very pretty, and the Lemon Balm is ready to have balmy babies, so let me know if you want some.
Happy 4th!

I was just passing messages back and forth with Christa about hating to harvest. As seen below, my veggies look so happy that I am loathe to bother them.
The Cascadian peas are sweet and dripping with rain:

I don’t know when to harvest the Red Russian Kale, but it looks so pleased next to beany buddies.:

Happily, I need not worry about the tomatoes

or the grapes (which are trying to get into the guitar store) until much later in the season.

Note the bright blue planters that I built. They are made of old shelving units, my former neighbor’s nightstand, and some cedar wainscoting that was on sale for having a ripped package. They are painted with AFM Safecoat Very Low VOC Exterior paint in Cerulean Blue. I love this paint and the people behind it are lovely, upstanding folk who make their product in the US and have gone about it the right way, by not putting any toxic garbage into it. I thought the blue would be very nice against the green, especially once the marigolds and petunias pop up everywhere. So far, not too many flowers, but that will change (I hope).

The grapes flowered last week, (maybe 5/29?) and I believe I am allergic to the pollen, but only sneezy. Hopefully the bees and wasps and whatever pollinates them went nuts, because it has rained most days this week. If we get as many grapes as there were flowers, we will have a bumper crop and possibly, a collapsed grape arbor.

I planted the tomatoes from greenmarket sixpacks on Memorial day. I spent 20 bucks replacing the seeds that didn’t germinate well or don’t grow well from seeds. All told, I believe only $5 of fedco seeds weren’t successful, which is a million-fold increase over last year’s results. (75% have been successful, and wildly so.) Yay Fedco! (To be fair, some of last year’s failures were 100% successful this year with better planting habits and timelines, such as Cascadia Snap Pea from Seeds of Change.) I probably should’ve thinned the peas, but can do next year.

In other big news, the white Bleeding Heart plant that I rescued from a garden project in the Bronx has come back from the dead. Good to know, as it was totally flattened by the wind in the back of the truck. It resprouted all over the place, and should be healthy enough to put in a prettier container soon.
The Liriope and Lemon balm looked good the next day, but I knew they would be forgiving.

Next week I will post pictures of the Herb Stairs I made, as well as the rain barrel which I am acquiring from NYC DEP’s Rain Barrel program. If you are at all intimidated by rain barrels, I assure you they are easy peasy pie, and only make your life better and cheaper. I hooked up (and will again) connect a drip system to it, which makes your life even more betterer and cheaperer.

I am off to harvest, tenderly and lovingly, some mint and peas for dinner. Maybe we’ll have Kale too!

So much news makes me despair. I think this project is one of the most hopeful I’ve seen in years.

From their website:

The Farmer-Veteran Coalition seeks to help our returning veterans find employment, training, and places to heal on America’s farms. At the same time the Coalition hopes that some of these young men and women may help address our country’s critical need for more good, hard-working people entering the field of agriculture. The coalition is acutely aware of the high number of soldiers entering the military from our rural communities and the need to improve both job opportunities and veteran services in these areas. We believe that our family farms, the sustainable farming movement and growing support for local and regional agriculture could all be well served by people already accustomed to hard work, discipline and dedication. If given the opportunity, our returning veterans can benefit from and help to stimulate the growing green economy, even in these hard times.

Donate here.

The garden is coming along, but I underestimated the work involved in rebuilding all the containers and the volume of dirt needed to fill them. I used almost a full bale of peat moss in the big blue bin, but I didn’t think I could do the beets and beans in a shallower container. I think I may put one hill of squash and/or cucumbers in that one to take the place of the kale once that is done.

Seedling notes for next year:

• The cold frame definitely worked to germinate, but they really slowed down after that. I think I should have maybe transplanted when the first set of true leaves came in, or else made the germination mix an inch deeper.
• More than half the beans rotted in the soil even in the cold frame. Maybe plant later? (I planted a second batch to see if they fared better, but then it rained for 9 days, so that might’ve been a bust too.)
• I think the plexi might work better, since the glass door was tough to vent because it was so heavy and bent all the hardware and had to take it off earlier than I thought I should. (Perhaps reason #2 they grew slowly)
• Even with the coldframe, early eggplant seeds didn’t sprout until it was very hot a couple weeks ago.
• Borage seedlings are terrifically susceptible to overcooking as well as rotting leaves from top watering. Maybe direct seed or plant in cups in the cold frame and remove as soon as they’re sprouted. The direct seeded ones are almost as big as the transplanted seedlings.
• Red Kale looks like it’ll be a weed based on every single seed sprouting. Yay!
• Thyme grows really f-ing slowly.

I think it’s almost time to start a new compost pile. Will move the old pile to the side fence under the utility pole, perhaps where last years carbon pile was.

I wish I had access to some sort of small chipping machine. Last years grape prunings are about 3 feet tall but haven’t decomposed at all. It would make beautiful mulch, because I don’t think the cats would like walking on it. Also, chipping would be a great solution for the big giant Trees of Heaven. The trunks are just too big to decompose on their own without some help. Anybody out there have a chipping implement?

Neighbors have reported an opossum in the back.
It might be what keeps opening the compost bin.

Must bury food in bin better, maybe padlock the lid on.

Ew!