Category Archives: Concrete Jungle
DIY Tomatoes and 99¢ Boxer Support
Goddamn hallelujah it is tomato season! The seedlings I planted in May have exploded into thickets of green and red. When water from the sprinkler hits the leaves, the sweet, sharp smell of their insides blooms up. When I try to arrange one branch this way or another vine that way, the delicate green-white outer skin rubs off, leaving a seeping window into a deeper, interior green.
I don’t want those tears. You don’t either. But tomatoes are scraggly, lurching vines. Without some kind of support, they really would weave through and around themselves along the ground into thickets.
A case in point. Notice that I'm double-teaming with both a dippy cage and a craptastic bamboo stake. Notice that I've already tried to bundle the beast into some sort of manageable order. Notice how Nature laughs at me.
And tomato cages only do so much good. That is, if you’re giving your tomatoes the sun and the water they need, they will outgrow any cages I’ve ever seen at the hardware store. And stakes are a joke, which doesn’t mean I don’t have some from back in the day that I will continue to use until they’re splinters.
But you need to tie the limbs of your tomato plant up to support of some sort or another. If you don’t, you’ll end up breaking branches when you pick the fruit. The bounty is just too heavy for the source. Continue reading
Concrete Jungle: The Kids, Various Neighbors, Garretta’s Laugh, & a Hundred-Plus Sunflowers in a Hurricane of Enthusiasm
Two Sundays back Shannon and I followed through on an idea I cooked up last winter. We would start seeds indoors, organize a children’s morning in our community garden across the street, and lead a hand’s-on, dirt-on-the-knees lesson in, well, all things Plant.
So I started some sunflowers inside, staggered the timing so we had one about six inches tall with its new yellow face and five just green, half-inch sprouts with plump leaves. We armed ourselves with about a hundred seeds of sunflowers of various heights and colors, two boxes of crayons, and a big bottle of tangerine orange juice.
We had, as we explained to Garretta, our neighbor and grandmother of our first four participants, an educational program. The explanatory exchange went something like this:
Jason & Shannon: Okay, kids, let’s talk a little about plants for a—
Garretta: You four get on over to that plot and start pulling those weeds!
(Kids shoot from the picnic bench like bees are at their butts.)
Jason & Shannon: Well, first let’s talk about roots. See—
Garretta: Pull those weeds because we aren’t gonna be here all day; we have to go to that park to play in the water.
Jason & Shannon: Damn, Garretta, we have an educational program planned here!
Garretta: Ha-ha-ha-ha….. Continue reading
Concrete Jungle: English Peas on Eastern Parkway
If you take Brooklyn’s shuttle train south to Botanic Garden stop you’ll come on Eastern Parkway between the intersection of Franklin Avenue and the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf. There’s a huge tree that has been propped up with a fifteen-foot-high cone of poured concrete and a great bicycle and pedestrian lane, canopied by trees, that runs almost all the way to Coney Island.
A bit to the right of that stop, you’ll find PitchKnives’ most recent installation of English Peas
Concrete Jungle: Pencil Pod Yellow Wax Beans, Manhattan Bridge, NYC
These are the source seeds. They are tenacious as hell. Props to Botanical Interests.
The Seed Saver Exchange, an organization that does just what the name states and with the authority deserving of proper noun status, has 4,000 types of bean in its collection. Among these is the Pencil Pod Yellow Wax heirloom variety. Pencil Pods are bush beans, meaning they don’t need the high vertical supports string beans and other pole beans do. They were developed around 1900, soon after folks started trying to breed the pesky “string” fiber out of beans (Check out Monday’s post) and are best raw or lightly steamed. They also have little black seeds nestled in golden flesh, giving the bean a cool bumblebee color scheme or—if you happen to be appreciate your Christian Hair Metal—making it a fine tribute to Stryper. Continue reading
Concrete Jungle: Laxton’s Progress Shell Peas, Manhattan Bridge, NYC
One of my pleasures in life—one that combines in a strategic way my humanistic impulses with my unbecoming “Told ya so!” competitiveness—is proving to people that they will in fact enjoy foods they now despise, so long as they have them my way.
Dark greens like kale and collards are prime catalysts for achieving this conflation of the altruistic and the vain, but so are peas, an early treat from the year’s bounty.
Most of us know peas as at best little green balls filling up a freezer bag best used as an ice pack and at worst mushy gray globs taking up plate space next to the mashed potatoes. This is a travesty.
Concrete Jungle: Rainbow Chard in BK, NYC
And here’s a little fact sheet, too.
