The New Green

Here’s a great video of Patti Moreno, the Garden Girl, showing how easy it is to build a raised bed garden and hoop house. She doesn’t get into it in depth, but she keeps chickens and rabbits in cages over the gardens to help fertilize the soil.

It’s finally starting to get cold here and I wanted to save some edibles from my garden. On the left is lemon verbena and on the right is flat-leaf or Italian parsley. I washed all the leaves and they are on this wire rack to dry. I put the parsley in the freezer to use it in sauces. I dried the lemon verbena to use as tea. It makes a wonderful tea mixed with mint leaves. You can also chop up the leaves and put them into baked goods.

My chickens are in the final stages of their molt. At least all signs point to that. Chickens begin the molt on their heads and kind of work their way down to their tail and wing feathers. Edie looks gorgeous and fluffy instead of mangey like she did after her bout with mites. I’m not walking into their coop to find loads of feathers these days. I think they should be well insulated for winter with all their new feathers.

However, when I check their nest box all I find are little fluffy feathers. No eggs. It’s been about 2 months with NO EGGS. I have to buy eggs from the store, which doesn’t suit me at all anymore. So instead of staring at an empty egg holder, I have decided to fill it with the gorgeous grape tomatoes that are still coming out of my garden. They are getting smaller and smaller as the days get shorter and cooler, but they are still coming. Winter is a mourning time for me when I don’t have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, so I’m enjoying each and every one of these little treasures.

The other day I did some work in my garden to prepare for the winter. I cut back and pruned a few bushes and cut down many of my tomato plants. I didn’t cut down my grape tomato plants because they are still producing. Fall is in full swing here in Brooklyn, so I took out my trusty Toro leaf vac/shredder and sucked up a bunch of leaves. The act of shredding the leaves makes them take up much less space than traditionally raked leaves. One bag of shredded leaves could be as much as 5-8 bags of un-shredded leaves.

I dug shovelfuls of beautiful compost that’s been cooking all summer and spread them out on my flower and vegetable beds. The soil looks so dark and rich, which is in contrast to the dry, lifeless, glass-filled soil that mostly exists in my yard. I still have straw and hay from fall scavenging, so I decided to add all of the shredded leaves to my compost bin. This is the one time of year when I have an abundance of “browns” in my compost bin. They will break down quickly though with the help of the amazing chicken poo. I swear that stuff is like steroids for the compost bin. I showed a friend my compost bin and she just kept saying, “Yeah, but where’s all the stuff?” She couldn’t believe she wasn’t looking at a bin filled with egg shells and broccoli stems.

I am not a compost maniac. I think that everything will break down on its own without a lot of fuss that many people suggest (shredding everything before adding to the bin, frequent watering, no cooked food, etc.) and my bumper crop of compost was evidence of my success. You can read my previous post about having an easy and successful compost bin.

My plants will be happy to have the added nutrients from the compost. I know my chickens were happy digging through the compost for bugs and worms!

In case you haven’t noticed, I am very interested in native plants as an (easy) way to help out wildlife. There’s a really nice article in Oregon Live by Ruth Mullen about an exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. They have a “before” section which looks like the typical suburban lawn right next to an “after” section. The “after” section has native plants, a birdbath, a bugbath (itty bitty water source in a concave rock) and less lawn. The native section is teeming with wildlife compared to the sterile suburban lawn. Take a peek at the whole article here.

Here are some great links to give you tips on creating backyard habitats and landscaping to attract birds, butterflies, frogs (less mosquitoes!) and other animals.

I keep taking photos of the beautiful tomatoes I’ve been getting from my garden. I said taking photos, not posting photos. Argh. I’m so behind on sorting through my photos!! I was lucky not to have the tomato blight that wiped out so many people’s crops. I bought a 6-pack of heirloom tomato seedlings this spring, but the names weren’t identified, so I don’t know what they are. I know the ones on the right are green zebra tomatoes, but the beautiful persimmon-colored ones are a mystery. I want to find out because they were absolutely sweet and delicious. The little cherry ones were so sweet, it was like candy from nature.

We’ve been getting shorter days (sob) and cooler nights, so the days of tomatoes are coming to an end. I have basil that needs to be cut and turned into pesto and lemon verbena that I have some ideas for. I planted some salad greens (a mesclun mix, mache and spinach), which are already coming up, so I don’t feel as though my garden has come to an end. I love the weather at this time of year, but it always brings a bit of melancholy with the shortening days and the approach of the winter cold.

I just stumbled upon a nice site that gives information about planting gardens to specifically attract bees (native bees as well as honey bees) and offer them a habitat in which they can live. It is fairly specific to California, but a lot of the plants (with an emphasis on natives) grow well in other parts of the country.

The site is called Urban Bee Gardens and is out of Berkeley. And the photo has absolutely nothing to do with their site, but everything to do with my warped sense of humor.

A couple of months ago I took a class at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on making a rain garden. You can see my post here. The teacher told us about different soil types (sandy, clay, etc.) and said that in Brooklyn you often have “rubble”. What the??? Well, they build and tear down a lot of buildings here and that leads to a lot of rubble. And if you’ve seen some of the construction here, you won’t be surprised that a lot of it isn’t disposed of properly.

Turns out I have sandy rubble soil. Every time it rains, and often even when it doesn’t I have big pieces of glass or pottery come to the surface of my yard. If it wasn’t so annoying with a kid and chickens, it would be kind of interesting archaelogically. I found a soda pull tab this summer. When did they stop making those? I’ve found a coin for a porno booth (at least that is what I think it is because it had pretty racy imagery on it). But the latest thing to erupt to the surface of my yard was this:

Holy guacamole! I totally freaked out. I saw this on the way to the chicken coop right before it was time to leave for the Berkshires last week. I asked Neil to come to the garden and tried to get Lindsay inside, but she didn’t want to go. I didn’t really want to alert her to the teeth (that I thought were human) sticking out of the ground. We ended up going away and hoping that our neighbor, who was chicken sitting wouldn’t find them and call the police. “Yes, I think my neighbors are burying bodies in their back garden.” Actually, a Gotti supposedly lived in this building, but I think mafia dons are like dogs and don’t want to dirty their own dens. He would probably bury his enemies in someone else’s yard I’m guessing.

So when we got back I decided to do a little excavation. Fortunately there was nothing other than the teeth. And fortunately the teeth didn’t turn out to be human. My guess is that they are from a dog. Any thoughts? It’s still pretty gross to find teeth in your garden. It’s kind of amazing how much the soil moves that after living here 15 years new things are surfacing. I blame the worms.

I learned something new in the Berkshires this weekend. There are male zucchini flowers and female zucchini flowers. The males provide the pollen and then drop off the vine. The females collect the pollen and then grow a zucchini.

See if you can tell which flower is which. I’m not giving any hints. I think you can handle it…

This is a nice story about Patrick Gabridge who took an ugly, unused strip of land in Brookline, MA and turned it into a community vegetable garden. He decided against planting without permission (aka Guerilla Gardening) and got approval from the property manager. He planted squash, cucumbers and lots of other veggies. The little 200 foot long patch of soil (which he had tested to make sure it wasn’t contaminated) will blossom into something much more beautiful than the weedy patch it used to be. Gabridge hopes that the neighbors will help themselves to the veggies as they ripen.

You can read about his project on his blog.