First Harvests

The lettuces are tender and juicy, colorful and perfect. This is Red Sails. I plucked it from the 'brassica bed' and will post photos of the 'lettuce bed' soon.

This lavender was already growing in our terraces. We harvested quite a lot since it was overgrowing our precious strawberries.

Summertime seedlings

Peppers to replace the lost ones: Some-Like-It-Hot pepper mix, Early jalepenos, Mixed Colored Bells, Bridge to Paris, and King of the North. We also bought a few plants to get started a bit earlier.

These are sage and rosemary, with some succulents in front.

Double yield cukes. These didn't do very well in the Brooklyn community garden, probably because they only got 4-5 hours of sun. We'll make them happy here.

Sweet potatoes. I cut 6 slips and put them in water, each have rooted pretty well at this point and as soon as the weather is consistently warm I'll put them out.

Bonsai

The bonsai is a juniper and spent the winter 'hibernating' at colder temps, 40 to 50 degrees for a few months was the goal. We gave it some bonsai food this spring and moved it outdoors in early April. The growth is amazing and the plant needs a haircut.

We call this one year old darling 'Snaggletooth.' Its a scrub pine from Cape Cod and would benefit aesthetically from a real bonsai pot. Hopefully we'll collect more bonsai this summer.

Outdoor sink

Conor built us a beautiful outdoor sink and we christened it with our potluck picnic last Friday (lots of dishes). The water drains off into a barrel and will be used to water the gardens. The sink structure needs a paint job, but otherwise she's a beauty!

Crop circle

I planted out some 'crop circles' with lettuces in the front bed. They're a mix of Red Sails Lettuce, Bok Choy, Kale, Batavian endive and romaine. More lettuces are started in flats to set out as we harvest these.

The cold frame has done its duty, although the weather warmed up much more quickly than expected this year. When we went to Florida we lost our early tomatoes and all the peppers to a blight of some sort so I set them out in the coldframe to see if any would pull through. The Rutgers tomatoes appear to have recovered fairly well. In the back, we didn't get to the broccoli raab this week, too busy with finals, and they flowered. Still tasty though.

Some Batavian endive that didn't make it to the community garden. I'm hoping to braise these with the recipe from my new cookbook.

Sunrise and cabbages

Conor worked until dawn this week and caught a great photo of our hawk in the sunrise.

The brassicas and crucifers are looking nice - but some purpling on these cabbages which are in the 'pool bed' on the lawn. The soil is terrible and I wonder if the manure we added wasn't composted down enough? Any pointers would be helpful. The same cabbage variety is nice and green in other soil, tucked in with the flower beds and at the community garden.

In the tumult that was finals we took a few photos but didn't manage to get any posted. Lots happened in the garden though. The peas are growing tall despite some competition with our new archnemesis, the Japanese knotweed (photo soon). We had to grub out quite a lot of roots around where the shed once stood, and sadly peas were also growing there. Fortunately we planted lots.

We named this extra apple tree by its variety: Baldwin. It just seemed a fitting name. The hostas were already in the garden, and a nice mini maple of some sort. We've been steadily filling these terraces with strawberries.