Category Archives: Gardening

Overwintered Salad Goodies

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Remember that hoop house video I posted in October?  Well, I’ve come to brag and to confess.

Confession:  Winter is crazy-time work-wise, and I haven’t directly watered our hoop house greens in probably two months.  I’m a bad person.

Brag:  After getting only what water they could absorb from the soil surrounding the plot, I picked this for dinner:

That's Ragged Jack Kale, Chard, and Rocket Arugula

This came from a potential harvest big enough to make about twelve monster salads.  I’m talking full-meal salads, no side or garden numbers.

Just think what I could have pulled off if I stayed on the watering and picking.

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 →

DIY Tomatoes and 99¢ Boxer Support

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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 →

Yo, Did You Know That Monticello Has a Sweet Garden as Part of Its Deeply Ambivalent Legacy?

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Monticello is the Virginia plantation that Thomas Jefferson spent 41 years building and the home to which he brought all of the inventions of clever common sense he found in Europe or Antiquity’s texts: a machine that duplicates with one pen on a piece of paper the motion of the pen worked by a human hand on another; a Lazy Susan for books; a clock to hang in a continent of folks who’d never seen one.  He invented a plow and designed into the house components so simple as to be plucked from the seed of artfulness just before passing the threshold of “invention”: a weather vane on the roof attached to swing a compass on the ceiling of  the vestibule; the weights that turned the clock unspooling up the wall along a seven-day calender, telling the time.

Jefferson imagined an America of gentlemen farmers.  He himself was a farmer, would have been a gardener were it not for the free labor of 200-odd slaves whom the museum now refers to as “enslaved workers.”  I like how it shifts the emphasis.

Jefferson considered the introduction of horticultural wonders a responsibility.  His slaves cut his vegetable garden out of the side of the mountain with hand tools.  They created a small bluff over sloping fields he would try unsuccessfully forever to turn into a vineyard.  The garden was dinner, botanist’s experiment, and showpiece.  It included a pavilion with a pyramidal roof and a reading bench.

The garden is kind of awesome. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: The Kids, Various Neighbors, Garretta’s Laugh, & a Hundred-Plus Sunflowers in a Hurricane of Enthusiasm

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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 →

When You Just Can’t Get That Garden Going ’til July

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A reader in North Carolina posted this comment last week:

Love the articles! I’m buying a house and will finally have a yard to start a garden. I’d love to get your opinion on the best times of the year to plant certain foods and some that would be easier for a first time gardener.

Thanks!

So we’re going to oblige.  Because we’re cool like that.  And believe that if you have the means to buy a house, you most definitely should rock a garden in the backyard.

This is a cool photo that has nothing to do with the content of this blog post

The best way to find out what plants will succeed when planted mid-Summer is to check with a local plant nursery or find region-specific info on the internet.  Since a plant’s suitability to your garden depends significantly on the temperature and on frost, the answer to your question varies depending on where you live.

Also, a good rule of thumb for less experienced gardeners is to buy seedlings, rather than seeds, to plant.  Doing this will give you an added advantage in that you’ll save time that you don’t want to spare since we’re already well into the season.

So, some recs…

Tomatoes! Good, homegrown, heirloom tomatoes are about the best thing you’ll ever taste.  They typically take up to two months to produce fruit, but if you pick up some seedlings at a nursery and get them into the ground, you’ll probably be able to start harvesting by mid-September, only about a month beyond when the “normal” tomato crop comes in.  The plants will keep producing well into Fall; I routinely continue to harvest tomatoes in Brooklyn in mid-October. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: English Peas on Eastern Parkway

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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

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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 →

Our Newest Contributor Is…You!

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fifties cookSure, we love writing for the blog, but it’s not just about us, us, us. One of the reasons we started PitchKnives is so we could hear your stories about food and gardening. So in our second month, it’s time to make your voice heard. All you need to do is write to us at submissions@pitchknives.com

Here are some easy ways to get involved:

  • See one of Jason’s Concrete Jungle signs? Snap a picture or tell us about how you found it.
  • Have a great restaurant you’d put up a fight for? Tell us about it and you might just get picked for Grub Match. Next up are NYC brunch favorites, but other themes and cities are already in the works, so elect the place you love most.
  • Need a lunch date? Convince me that there’s a spot near your subway stop that I have to try, and you could be part of our Lunch at the End of the Line series.

But that’s not all. You (yes, YOU) possess the power to write an awesome food feature. Did you just make a rad new chimichurri sauce? Did you just discover the secret to growing the perfect carrot? Did you put together the perfect picnic? Send your ideas to submissions@pitchknives.com. We love photo galleries, too.

So, go on! Make our mouths water!
–The Editors