Welcome to the first growing season here at Farmtina3, my brand new apartment with a brand new concrete alley "yard". Yes, this is the third apartment where I've been on this gardening adventure. And like I have with every new space, I'm discovering new problems-- no, wait-- new challenges to be conquered. Challenge Number One:
I do not have access to water in my new gardening space.
There is no outdoor water supply for watering my plants, which is sort of a big issue. I know how to get around having no soil, and even no sun, but no water? Doesn't work!
So I'm researching rain barrels. A rain barrel is just what it sounds like: a container that catches rain water and stores it to be used to water your plants.
But, oh! A rain barrel is more than just a bucket of water! It needs to be sealed off enough so you don't lose water to evaporation and don't become a mosquito breeding ground, yet open enough to actually catch the rain. It needs to have a hose connection to make it functional for watering plants. And it has to be durable so it won't rust and my friends the NYC rats don't chew through it to get to the water on hot days.
Even if you do have access to water in your garden, you might want to consider supplementing it with a rain barrel. Here are a few benefits:
Here's my yard right now, and well... I'm moving again. In July.
I've been doing this urban gardening project for about three years now, and this will be the third place I've lived in those 3 years. This is one of the main challenges that makes NYC gardening so difficult: We are a city of renters (about 70% of us rent instead of own our homes, according to the New York Times), so we have to figure out how to grow long-term plants in temporary spaces which we have no control over.
My solution to this problem has always been container gardening. I grow everything, even 6-foot tall corn, in buckets & bins so that when I move I just pack the binned plants into the back of a van and bring them to the new yard. The place I'm living now was an especially exciting move because it actually has soil in the yard instead of a fully paved space like I had before, so when I moved here I began transplanting my bucket plants into the ground.
Now that I'm moving again only 8 months later and in the middle of the growing season, I'll need to get a little creative (and I may even have to leave some of my babies behind). I still have the majority of my plants in buckets, but I did already move my lily bulbs to the ground (and OHMYGOSH did they thrive like never before) as well as my strawberries, mint, chives, and smaller spring flower bulbs. I had also been starting seedlings with the intention of transplanting them into the ground, but the time to transplant came about the same time I learned of the move, so I didn't do it and I sacrificed a few seedlings because they had nowhere to go.
But, dear readers, don't be sad, because this is actually good news and I've been sneakily hiding it from you for 4 paragraphs. The reason I'm moving is because I bought a home!!!!!!
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It's a condo in a building with 8 units, and I'm on the first floor with a private backyard. The yard is a total blank slate concrete slab, with not so much as a single flower pot or chair. I can build permanent planter boxes! I can set up a greenhouse! I can get chickens! My yard is protected on both sides, so no more kids jumping my fence from the street to smash my terra cotta pots!!! Life is good.
The first thing I'm going to do is build my planter boxes. I was totally inspired by Dave at Fancy Hands, who used found & recycled materials to build some really cool designy furniture at their office. I cornered Dave at a bar on Friday and coerced him into offering to help build my planters. I didn't ask! He offered! All I did was say I needed help... and a circular saw... and oh, would he like to come over my new place for dinner on July 1st? And maybe bring his saw?
So first I'll build the planters, and then I'll dig up the plants I currently have growing in the ground and move them to the new planters. Then I can worry about the rest of the move. As long as my transplanted plants are safe, I'll feel unstressed. Hopefully.
Gramulator (as I call her) was born in the 1930s and raised in New York City by a very young immigrant single mom, my Great-Grandmother BabiBabi. BabiBabi kept an urban garden on the roof of their tenement building to be able to feed the family, relying on found & recycled objects such as the wooden gun boxes she used as planters. She was "upcycling" not because it was the fun trendy hobby it is today, but because she had no other choice.
Gramulator has told me lots of stories about her childhood, and I know she's happy that I'm continuing the urban gardening tradition. She recently emailed me a story that I'd like to share-- that's right, Gramulator uses email, IM, and even Facebook. I told you she was cool!
Hey dudes, sorry about my gloomy post yesterday! To get you excited for spring in my new Bushwick back yard, here's a peek at what's already sprouting.
1. My favorite of the flowers I grow, my hydrangeas, are growing nice and green in their plastic containers:
When I talk about my FarmTina project, I often hear the response, "I wish I could grow food but I just don't have any space!" To that I say, PHOOEY. Excuses, excuses.
Yes, lack of space is one of my biggest challenges in gardening in the city, but that has actually been a fun obstacle to overcome. As a reminder, I've had only a paved patio for the last 2 years, no ground soil at all, so everything I've grown has been in containers of some sort. I suppose I could've filled my yard with fancy terra cotta pots and structured grow beds, but that just seems wasteful and expensive. Instead, I got creative.
For example, I punched drainage holes in the bottom of found tall metal trash bins from Ikea to grow my potatoes. I also drilled drainage holes into large Rubbermaid storage tubs to grow corn. I used a long, flat under-the-bed plastic storage box as a lettuce bed, a box which I had used for storage for years and was going to throw away because it was cracked. I even created quite a bit of vertical grow space using an industrial pallet that my mom "found" (ok, maybe stole from) in front of a warehouse.
My most recent space-saving project was featured in an episode of GROW, a Whole Foods video series documenting urban farmers around the country. I simply needed more space, so I decided to build an outdoor-strength vertical grow bag that would hang on the fence surrounding my yard. And, of course, it would need to look cute.
Check out the video to see the grow bag in action, and then make your own! The "instructions" are more like beginner's guidance, and I'd love to hear your updates & improvements to my first-time experiment. Here's how to make my outdoor vertical planter (written instructions below the diagrams):
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...
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.
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?
This year I'm growing edamame, an East Asian soybean that is picked immature before it ripens. This was a total experiment and I had no idea what to expect, but they've actually been incredibly easy to grow and are already starting to develop bean pods. Take a look:
These beans have a small root system so I was able to plant them in containers pretty close together. This 14 inch pot is successfully holding 9 healthy plants. For comparison, I'm using the same sized pot to grow ONE eggplant plant. Talk about using your space well!
The edamame plant grows upright and does not need any support like my string beans do. It first developed tiny purple flowers (so tiny that I almost missed the flower blooms!) and then the flowers push out fuzzy green seed pods. I'm really into the fuzziness factor. That's pretty much the best part.
Here's a look at the plant in context of the garden (edamame are in the 2 pots in the bottom right corner of the photo):
I'll harvest the soybeans when the leaves have turned a slightly yellow color and the beans inside the pods are plump. I plan to eat half my harvest fresh and then freeze the rest to use throughout winter. To do so, just blanche them for 2 minutes before putting them in the freezer.
Ok, now here's the good news: you still have time to plant your own edamame! If you plant seeds now (near NYC), you should have a harvest at the end of summer/early fall. Do it, do it! So easy! Fuzzy plants! FUZZY PLANTS!!
If you want to grow edamame, look for seeds labeled Green Soybean, though some seed companies simply label the seeds "edamame" for easy identification. I found my seeds at Whole Foods, but you can also get them online-- check out this seed company specializing in varieties of edamame.
Every garden has them: those unwanted plants that freeload off of the care you're giving your plants, and often grow even bigger and crazier than the plants you are constanly nurturing. Weeds suck up the water and fertilizer meant for other plants, they block out sunlight when they get too big, and their roots can choke and kill the roots of your intentional garden. Keeping your garden weeded is just as important as keeping it fed and watered. Let's talk about weeds!
IDENTIFYING WEEDS
A weed is simply an unwanted plant growing in a space that is being purposely cultivated for something else. For example, a dandelion is considered a weed when it sprouts up in the middle of your perfect green lawn. But a field of wild dandelions in a forest clearing is not only beautiful, it actually helps bugs and wildlife thrive through shade, food, and groundcover. Dandelion greens are delicious and edible, and the entire plant has been used for traditional medicinal purposes. But I still don't want them on my lawn. Heck, even a healthy thriving tomato plant can be considered a weed if it pops up unexpectedly in your bed of sunflowers.
My biggest weed fight is against the morning glories, shown at left on my balcony a few years ago. The little dudes sprout up in every single planting bed I have, constantly, from February through November. Morning glory flowers are beautiful and create great vines, and I keep a few pots full of them underneath window grates where the vines can grow and wrap. But the vines also produce a massive amount of seed pods that not only blow around in the wind, they can survive for quite a long time in bad conditions before sprouting. So I have learned to identify their seedlings at first sprout, and I weed out morning glory plants from at least one plant bed almost every day. That is not an exaggeration. Even if I got rid of my purposely-planted morning glories, I bet it would take years before I stopped seeing them sprout up in my garden beds.
Some weeds are pretty smart. For the last two years, I've noticed this weed that grows around my hydrangeas (among other places).
It has leaves similar to the hydrangea plant so I never pull it out in the Spring, but as both plants mature, it becomes very obvious that it's an unwanted weed. The growth patterns are different, the stems mature differently, and of course, they flower into totally different plants. But for at least 2 months, it's almost undetectable! Can you see the differences in the two plants above? Look at the patterns made by the leaf veins, the shape of the leaf edges, and the shininess of the leaves. Pretty cool survival technique. It's similar to a chamelion or a stick bug blending in to avoid predators.
So how can you tell if you have weeds? Well if you're growing a garden, you probably know exactly what you planted where, which means you know what you DIDN'T plant. And those are your weeds! When growing flowers or food, you want to keep the space around them clear of any unintentional greenery, especially if you can't identify the plant species. Many weeds have large networks of underground rhizomes that could be quitely killing your precious tomato plant. So even if the weeds seem harmless (or even pretty) from above, don't take any chances!
GETTING RID OF WEEDS
If weeds pop up in your garden, you have a few options.
Hi! My name is Martina and I have a "farm" in my New York City backyard called FarmTina.
My definition of "farm" is really just a living space that brings together home grown vegetables & fruits, animals, flowers & trees, and concoctions that use all of these ingredients together... read more
