FarmTina

Grow! A FarmTina Video Short

About 8 months ago, a film crew came to FarmTina to film for a long weekend. They were working on a documentary series called Grow that was tracking the new generation of farmers around the United States. This included large-scale farmers with 50 years of experience, families raising meat in small city yards, and me! Me me! Me, among all the other real farmers!

Each episode is a short focusing on one person's story. Here's mine.

Guest Blogger: A FarmTina Family Seaweed Secret

My mom Jo Ann taught me how to be an artist, a gardener, and an independent & curious thinker. She has a great city garden in Quincy, MA where she has found creative ways to produce loads of veggies, herbs, flowers and compost within unusual spaces, all while balancing her time-consuming career and constant world traveling. She learned this really cool seaweed trick from my great-grandmother, so I asked her to share it with you as we all prepare for the spring.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

See weeds? Use Seaweed!

As a young girl, I remember spending time with my grandmother on Cape Cod. She had the most amazing vegetable garden, and spending time with her, my job was to pull weeds. Often, we would walk down to the nearby beach and collect seaweed. My grandmother would use the seaweed as a mulch to keep the weeds under control. She would spread it out around the plants, both flowers and vegetables, and have very little weeds to tend.

How My Garden Relates to Pantone's Color of the Year

Pantone, the international color authority, has announced their official Color of the Year for 2012: Tangerine Tango.

Goofy name, but awesome color! It's like a natural tangerine fruit got a sunburn, and then went dancing so his cheeks got red and sweaty and he had that free-wheelin' happy glow. And I must say, for the record, that I predicted the 2012 Color of the Year would be a lavender, but my Domestic Partner was spot-on when he predicted "a mesa orange". He's obviously a genius.

I did a quick brainstorm of plants that are in the color range of Tangerine Tango. From left to right, we've got an actual tangerine (not quite tangoed), Chinese Lantern, Ranunculus, Hubbard squash, Tulip, and fall in New England.

"What about Amaryllis?", you ask. Well here's where the universe gets awesome: I was already planning to write about Amaryllis today and then the universe chooses this color of the year and validates my place in the world.

Amaryllis flowers are one of those things that people often confuse, kinda like the difference between macarons and macaroons. This, my friends, is not a true Amaryllis:

Christmas Trees: A Tale of Murder, Recycling & Rebirth

Holidays are over, and I'm finally back in Brooklyn after a very loooong visit with my parents, grandparents, sister and cousins. I spent nearly five days in the suburbs for Christmas! FIVE! Thank goodness I'm home.

Now that I'm crafting a home with my new Domestic Partner, I'm making some discoveries. (Sidenote: I borrowed the phrase "crafting a home" from a cute DIY home blog and I need to give props to the blogger Kim. It describes me perfectly!) I'm doing a lot of new things in this home that I never did before, such as sharing a bedroom (which means no more pink lace comforter) and sharing my food (guess who ate all the Pignoli cookies?!) (Ok ok, it was me. If I don't confess, he'll start a rant in the comments). BUT I DIGRESS!

What I'm saying is, this is the first time I've had my own Christmas tree! I never had one in my early twenties because I needed to save my money for drugs (KIDDING, MOM), and then I had a Jewish roommate for 5 years who didn't want one and it didn't really bother me. For Christmas 2011, we decided to go with a teensy apartment-sized potted-plant tree. It is literally 2 feet tall and I love it.

I chose a live Christmas tree in a pot because I love houseplants, so I hope to keep this lil' guy all year 'round and he'll grow a little big bigger each Christmas. It will be pretty neat 15 years from now to say, "We've had a home together long enough that our Christmas tree is now 4-feet tall!" But also, it's very possible that I can't give it enough light and nutrients indoors and it will die on me by Valentine's Day. Here's a good blog entry on the Norfolk Island Pine, a "year round Christmas tree".

I've always had mixed feelings in general about the whole concept of a Christmas tree. If you get down to the basics, the tradition of Christmas trees simply involves cutting down a 15-year old evergreen tree so that you can keep it in your house for 3 weeks and then get rid of it. Tree murder! Additionally, Christmas trees are a real fire hazard: The NFPA quotes an average of 240 home fires each year that start from Christmas trees, which basically become tall piles of dry fire wood after a few weeks indoors.

Despite all of this, artifical trees are no better. They are actually less eco-friendly than real trees because they produce more greenhouse gases and are made of plastic, which uses more water and other resources to produce, and can't be recycled when you're done with them.

So even though I thought I was anti-Christmas tree for a while, my official position is now: If you're gonna get a tree, get a real one, and get it from a farm. Christmas tree farms eliminate the need to cut trees from forests and create habitats for animals, help reduce soil erosion, produce oxygen, and of course, the trees can be recycled in many ways.

Here's how you can safely and sustainably dispose of your Christmas tree (and do a little good at the same time):

A New Farm

Hello from the brand new FarmTina spot! Holycrapimsoexcited.

It's been a long process, but I've successfully moved the location of FarmTina from a paved back alley in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn where I lived for 2 years, to an almost-real-backyard 20 minutes north in Bushwick, Brooklyn to another rental apartment.

My new yard is "almost real" because although it is still a tiny space surrounded by tall buildings, the yard is only halfway paved. Which means the other half is SOIL! True earthy soil, where I can plant my garden directly in the ground! This is mind blowing.

Next season I'll continue to explore container gardening in my city space, but I'll also be learning old fashioned in-ground gardening for the first time. I'm very excited! Read on for photos of the new space...

FarmTina is moving!

I have some exciting/scary news: I'm in the process of MOVING FarmTina.

Here's a little peek at the almost-clean paved alleyway that was my garden for 2 years. I'm moving everything over to my new home, another neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I have... wait for it... wait for it... A BACK YARD WITH SOIL. Soil! Real land!

FarmTina Prepares For Hurricane Irene

But the sky looks so blue...

This is the view right now looking up at my beanstalk trellis here in Brooklyn, NY. But 24 hours from now, New York City is supposedly going to be in the middle of a massive hurricane. Now listen, dear readers: New York City does not get hurricanes! But then again, we don't get earthquakes or tornadoes either, and both of those have happened here in the last year.

Today Mayor Bloomberg announced a mandatory evacuation for certain areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn because of the impending Hurricane Irene, mostly neighborhoods near the coast. But, you know, Manhattan and Brooklyn are both small islands, so "coast" takes up quite a lot of surface area. I'm not in an evacuation zone (here's the official map), but I'm still expecting high winds and fierce rains.

My poor garden!

Since I didn't create my garden with the thought that it would ever need to withstand a tornado, earthquake, or hurricane, there seems to be little I can do to "prepare" for the storm. I have already...

Food or Seed? Survival Questions For a Farmer

I've been cleaning up after last week's tragic heat wave disaster where I lost quite a few of my plants. The plants I was especially bummed about were my edamame soybeans- I lost 9 out of 14 edamame plants, dried up and brown. They had been growing beans for a few weeks and were just about ready to be harvested when the heat wave hit.

But as I was accepting defeat, cutting and cleaning and getting ready to re-plant in the space where these soybeans once grew, I realized they weren't a total waste... I had accidentally made dried beans!

Beans, such as my edamame, grow in pods. Some bean pods are edible (snow peas!), but some pods are just cases to hold the food. Humans figured out long ago that beans can be stored for long periods of time by pulling them out of the pods and drying them into hard little rocks (the oldest presered soybeans ever found were in Korea, dating back to 1000 BCE). When you want to eat the dried beans, simply soak them in hot water and they are magically rejuvinated! This method of preservation is so simple and smart that we still buy dried beans from grocery stores today.

Aside from being food, beans are also the seeds of the plant. In their natural environment the beans would grow on the plant until the end of the summer season, when the pods and beans would dry out and eventually fall off the plant into the soil. The dried seeds would hibernate there in the soil until warm wet spring, when they will sprout into new plants. The circle of life! AHHH!!

The heatwave did all of this for me. It dried up the nearly-ripe beans into nice preserved little balls, so when I cut down the plant, I had handfulls of dried soybeans. I collected all of the beans. (And PS, you can see in the photo below that I'm wearing my slammin' new Sally Hansen Salon Effects nail strips in the pattern "Girl Flower"!)

Once I had these dried beans, I instantly thought of real life farmers. When something like this happens, they have to make a difficult choice: Do they use these dried beans as food for their family, or do they save them as seed for next year's crop? If I was living only on the food I grew and the heatwave demolished more than half of my soybeans, this would be a life-changing decision. We lost our crop so we don't have enough food to eat-- maybe we should eat these beans? But losing the crop also means we'll have less seed to plant next year-- maybe we should save it to guarantee we won't starve one year from now?

Thankfully I'm not a subsistance farmer, but this is a very real situation for farmers all over the world. Since I have plenty of other food to eat, I'm not hard pressed to make a decision yet and my dried edamame beans are in a ziploc bag in the fridge.

What do you think: Food or seed?

 

 

The 2011 New York City Heat Wave: Not Good For The Garden

You may have heard of, or been affected by, this heat wave that's been moving across the country recently. From what I read, New York City hit 104 degrees last week, and the heat and humidity lasted for so long that the 91-degree day we had this week felt like a cool rest from the heat. But here's the thing: I wasn't in NYC for any of this.

I took an 8-day roadtrip down the Pacific Coast Highway last week, driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a fancy new (rental) Mustang convertible, stopping at tiny towns along the way. And yes, it was fantastic, thank you for asking. A good friend offered to care for FarmTina the entire time I was away, and I was grateful for the help and felt a little guilty about leaving her with the daily responsibility. But then my guilt grew when, sometime in the middle of the week, I emerged from a tiny no-cell-service valley town to find texts from her that I had missed while in the dead zone: What special care does the garden need when it's over 100 degrees?

Honestly I had no idea what to tell her. I responded, water the plants multiple times each day, instead of just once. Water early in the morning so that the plants have time to absorb the water before the heat evaporates it away. I thought, move the plants, which are all growing in buckets, into the shade? But that seemed ridiculous, like one of those TSA 8-oz liquid rules that gives the appearance of doing something helpful but it really has no effect on anything.

My kind friend worked very hard to care for my babies, and I am so apologetic that she had to deal with the garden at its worst! Despite all her care and attentiveness, some of the plants didn't make it through the intense heat and sun. You might remember dear readers that this is the second disaster to strike FarmTina in the last year... Brooklyn tornado, anyone?

The wilting plant in the yellow bucket is my edamame, gone beyond repair. Bummer! That bucket is a found & reused Ikea metal trash can, and I'm sure that material contributed to heating up the soil beyond healthy levels. The second edamame plant to the right in a plastic pot is a little brown around the edges but salvageable. The eggplant (the other plastic pot and the black pot) are looking great and are still thriving and blooming!

My poor cucumbers! Before I left they were vining and looking healthy, but now they've totally collapsed. It looks like some cucumbers attempted to ripen during the extreme heat but eventually gave up when their vines died. However, the marigolds growing in the cucumber pots, which act as a natural deterrent to cucumber beetles, are doing fine.

How Do I Know When My Eggplant Is Ready?

I am growing eggplant for the first time ever, and it looks beautiful! The plant has large leaves and big purple flowers, and the fruit looks like deep purple marbles before it really takes shape. I know that often times the food I grow in my own garden doesn't look exactly like what we're used to seeing in a grocery store-- the food I grow has imperfect shapes and coloring and minor bruises, but I expect that because I'm not using standardized growing systems and chemical treatments. So herein lies my problem: if I don't know what it's supposed to look like, how do I know when my eggplant is ready to pick?

If I wait for it to look like a long, smooth, perfectly plump purple droplet, I might lose my chance to pick a ripe eggplant. But having never grown this vegetable before, I have nothing to compare it to other than past eggplants I've purchased. Here's what my eggplant plant looks like right now, with one especially large ripening fruit:

(Yes, I know I had a caterpiller problem, but I squashed those little suckers early and you'll see that the newer leaves are perfectly intact!)

I'm pretty sure those tiny little eggplant dudes aren't ready yet, but what about that big guy? He seems to be growing out and wide instead of down and long. Is this a trait of the eggplant breed I planted? Is this normal for home-grown eggplants? Will it start to lengthen out soon and end up looking normal?