Category Archives: Concrete Jungle

Shannon and Jason Own the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Chili Pepper Festival

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IMG_0922The advertising promised “5 Blazing Bands, 7 Hours of Chocolate Debauchery, 23 Years of Spicy Culture, 2 Legendary Fire Breathers, 52 Fiery Food Artisans, 52 Acres of Glorious Gardens.”

Fire breathers and free spicy food?  We’re there!

We visited every stall.  Every. Stall.  And here are our picks:

Shannon’s Pepper Picks:

Brooklyn Delhi: I cringe at paying $8 for a jar of salsa, no matter how good it is, because I could (and might very possibly) eat the whole thing in a single sitting with a spoon. But with achaar, Indian pickle, a little dab’ll do ya, and with innovative combinations like rhubarb ginger on offer at the Brooklyn Delhi booth, the price suddenly seemed entirely reasonable and left me wishing I’d packed some naan in my purse.

IMG_0925Queen Majesty: Do you know that the easiest way to catch fruit flies is with vinegar? That whole thing about catching more with honey is such a lie! Anyway, I love vinegar in many forms, and even though sweet-hot sauces seem to be all the rage these days, Queen Majesty makes beautiful vinegar-based ones that still have plenty of complexity. Try the jalapeno, tequila and lime flavor for a delicious tangy kick. Continue reading →

A+ Number One Lazy Man’s Irrigation Scheme

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I have such noble intentions.  I understand that new acquaintances might not always deduce that.  For instance, that woman I called out on the corner of Broadway and Houston for throwing her cup on the ground might have been surprised when, after I called her lazy before realizing she was hammered at five on a Monday afternoon, received my middle finger and a laugh in response to her threat, “I’ll clean you so bad you won’t even know!”  Certainly a small handful of supervisors and employers have been unsure of how to assess my exuberance, vehemence, volume, and proclamations at holiday parties.  But I almost always start out on the right track.

Such is my way, I’m a bit ashamed to confess, with my gardens as well.  To reach my flagship model, I have to scooch around Rachel and Tim’s hand-me-down futon, clamber over the garden paraphernalia and assorted whatever “stored” in that corner, thrust open the ancient window, leg it out on to the fire escape where I clamber over more paraphernalia, drop the ladder, and climb down.  Every year I tell myself this is but a small hassle, and it’s not like I’m trying to grow dates in the West Bank.  Continue reading →

It’s Fiddlehead Fern Season!

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I have missed out on fiddlehead ferns for the past three years because they show up at IMG_1196the farmers markets, ramps playing Poncho to their Lefty, and are snapped up in two or three days.  But annoying that cab by biking up the narrow lane east of Union Square Park yesterday paid off because it put me at the market on one of those two or three days this year.  Hell yeah.

So, a haiku for you, fiddleheads…

Oh, fiddlehead ferns
Thank you for getting it on
With Shitakes in my pan

 

I Stank I Can, I Stank I Can: All Aboard the Forager Express

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You know Ginko trees, those numbers with the stanky yellowish berries that I, and perhaps you, called “stinky trees” as a wee lad?  Well, I ate some of that stank.

This came about because Shannon is awesome and for an anniversary present took me deep into Queens to spend an afternoon with Wildman Steve Brill.  A name like Wildman primarily conjures in me images of either a crazed and burly mountain man type or a happily-hard-livin drummer in a band opening for Dokken in 1987, but Steve Brill fits neither of these molds.  In fact, this is the picture he has of himself on his website, which more perfectly sums him up than anything I could write this morning.

Our afternoon with Steve, billed by Shannon as “New York’s top wild food foraging expert,” was spent walking Forest Park learning about and filling up a bag with wild roots, berries, and greens (or weeds, if you want to be classist) that we could incorporate with dinner.  It was nothing less than unflaggingly awesome. Continue reading →

Rabbit Poop, Warhol Chickens, and How to Crush an Avocado Stone with Your Bare Hands

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I had the good fortune this summer of working with the Learning Gardens program of the City Parks Foundation, a program that hires public high school students to learn about garden basics while maintaining community gardens.  One of our field trips took us the EarthMatters, a pretty fantastic composting facility on Governor’s Island.

Amongst the things learned:

1 – Avocado pits are hard as hell.  And yet…

…three weeks in a compost pile big enough to generate some real heat, and I could crush this pit in my palm with only a little more effort than it takes to squish a banana.  I find this absolutely, completely fantastic, though no one else to whom I have detailed this little miracle seems quite as excited as me. Continue reading →

Cabbage Worms Begone: A Safe, Organic Critter Repellent to Save your Crops

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My broccoli and cauliflower plants were getting hammered by some critter that skulks forward in the dead of night and goes to town on their leaves.  This happened last year to my Brussels sprouts, taking out one of four plants before I found an organic pest repellent.

There are a number of things you can do to minimize pest damage to your garden without spraying on pesticides that you’ll subsequently have to eat.  Marigolds, of course, are excellent to keeping damaging bug punks away.  Mint and lemongrass plants are as well.

But those guys are significantly suggestions.  Last year, to perform triage on the Brussels, I discovered Neem oil.

The Neem plant is indigenous to India and has a variety of Ayurvedic uses.  It will also keep everything from the Japanese beetle to the cabbage worm away from your crops.  The bottle I shown above cost me about fifteen bucks.  To use it, you mix half a tablespoon in a pint and a half of water in a spray bottle, add a little biodegradable dish soap (as an emulsifier), shake, and shoot.

It works like a charm, and it’s not harmful to mammals, birds, earthworms, lady bugs, etc.  Continue reading →

Compost Tea & John Rambo’s Cracker Head

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Permaculture, the school of garden design that maximizes outputs while minimizing human and environmental inputs, turned me on a while ago to the idea of compost tea.  This isn’t tea to drink, but rather to be drunk by your plants.  They dig it.  It’s known as a foliant feeder, meaning it juices up your leaves.  Since leaves are the main sites of food production for most plants, healthier leaves translates into heartier plants.

To make the tea, you simply tie up a wad of compost in an old rag or T-shirt (yes, that’s an old pair of boxer briefs), drop it in a watering can, and let it steep in the sun for two or three days like a tea bag.  Shake things up occasionally, too.

(You can see that, having a watering can with a rather small fill hole at the top, I instead steeped the compost tea bag in a giant plastic bear.  This bear once held animal crackers.  Since then, it has been used to transport soil for various Concrete Jungle experiments.  Basically, I dig Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Jay’s Pop-up Tomato Shop, Instructions Included

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The tomatoes I started from last year’s seeds took off.  I fixed a three-bulb lamp about 20 years older than I am with CFLs and kept it on the guys all day for about four weeks, and produced this.

So I was left with sixteen seedlings (Beefsteak, Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, and Hillbilly varieties) that I decided to give away to passers-by on a Sunday afternoon, re-potting instructions included.  It was all so very Golden Age of Brooklyn, what with an ethnic and sexual-preference spectrum that would make a recruiter for a small liberal arts college weak in the knees, and folks ranging in age from about their 60s down to the seven.  Pascal, Naomi, Erin, and Pepe were amongst the takers.  I promised everybody I’d include care instructions.  So….

Caring for tomatoes is pretty easy.  You’ve got some gear you need, but you can DIY  share of it, and once you own it, you can keep reusing it. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Urban Space-Crunch Seed Starting in the Land of Implacable Cats

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This is my first year planting from saved seed.  Last fall, I saved seed from three heirloom tomato varieties, and last week I needed to get them going.  I’m behind.  I should have been doing this in March so I could have six-inch-tall seedlings ready to be transplanted into the garden around now.

Oh well.  Life is too hectic and, as if in correlation, my apartment is too small.  It’s not small as far as New York apartments go, but it’s definitely too small as far as starting seeds indoors goes.  This is our only South-facing window, the only place I could start seeds without reliance on artificial lighting and, really, about the only open spot in the apartment to begin with.  It’s also a favorite sunning spot for the cats.  That pot to the left once contained a mum so vibrant that it could be killed only by Bruce’s laconic insistence on curling into a doughnut on top of it over, and over, and over again.

So what’s a guy to do?

Hang the boys from the ceiling.

Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Easy-Peasy Seed Saving for Next Year

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I’ve been meaning to save my own tomato seeds for years.  It always felt like one of those things that was not merely a good idea but a full-on AWESOME, supremely Jay kind of thing to do.  But, probably for curious reasons that are worth me pondering further in solitude, I never found the time to learn do it.  It was proving to be a bit like learning to bend notes on the harmonica.

Except that bending notes on the harmonica is really tough, and saving your tomato seeds is shockingly easy.

All you do is…

  1. scoop seeds out of your tomatoes and cover them in a cup with maybe an inch of water,
  2. cover the opening of the cup with a paper napkin or towel to let them breath,
  3. remind yourself over the coming days that the mold soon growing across the water and your seed goop is perfectly normal,
  4. remove the seeds after a week or all of the seeds have sunk to the bottom of the glass on their own,
  5. wash them clean in running water,
  6. dry them on the counter, turning to make sure all sides dry,
  7. and pop them in the freezer wrapped safe in an envelope, stored for planting next Spring.

Like most vegetable (i.e. – fruit) seeds, tomato seeds are covered in a protective waxy coating.  In the wild (and this is all my personal deduction), this coat ensures they survive until they’re safely nestled in the ground.  Then the weather and soil wear the coating away so the seeds can sprout into new plants. Continue reading →