Roof Garden 10003

Photos of the massive improvements Deborah has made on the garden this year with this article in the New York Times.

I spoke to Deborah at Counter a couple weeks ago and am excited that she is going to continue and expand this garden. She said her plan was to double the number of beds and focus on herbs and chilis for use in the restaurant.

This season I've started a new garden in Brooklyn. This one is in a vacant lot and seems another world entirely compared to the roof.

Continued the long-overdue pre-end-of-season maintenance yesterday. Brought the pepper plants downstairs to spend the winter inside our apartment. Had to do a little transplanting on three of the plants as the scotch bonnet was in a big bed, and the poblano and jingle bell didn't have as much soil as I wanted in their buckets. Wilder came upstairs to help, though he was reluctant to get his hands dirty. I accidentally dumped the jingle bell as I was transplanting it, but I think most of it may survive. W was very sad that I dropped it.

All the (not unpleasant) struggles I went through at the beginning of the season looking for organic soil amendments and it turns out that I have an excellent resource on the corner of my block. Turns out that Saifee Hardware has a rather respectable selection of organic fertilizers, containers, tools, and soil amendments. Not cheap but I can't beat the convenience.

Tonight we enjoyed the first salsa cruda featuring garden ingredients: brandywine tomato, serrano and jingle bell peppers, supplemented by greenmarket onion, garlic, cilantro, and lime. It was a delicious complement to fresh corn cakes. Yeah garden!

Chile abundance greeted me in the garden this morning. A bunch of poblanos have popped out, ditto on jalapenos. If I can get the same thing going on with the habaneros I will be satisfied. Is it all about the fertilizer? I'm thinking of alternating between liquid feeding to the roots one week and then folar feeding the alternate week.

Lately the smell of the white sage is intense. Just pulling off a few leaves, not even crushing them, yields this deep resinous smell that's almost intoxicating. It's so strong it seems to linger in my nose long after I leave the garden.

There was joy in the garden this morning. A few ripe tomatoes and serrano peppers, nice comeback by the mint plants after the underwatering of last week. Most exciting is the emergence of fruit on both the poblano and jalapeno plants. Maybe I should fertilize more often - big bursts of growth after each application of liquid fertilizer. At this point I'm thinking that I should have used more fertilizer at the beginning.