Probably Too Late but...

Okay, after a busy Sunday morning hosting plant trades and being posed for gardener-type photos, my wife and I headed out for something we never do. Brunch. We walked down to Cortelyou via Ditmas Park. To make a long story short: we went to the farmer's market and there was a man selling ramps. After brunch we went back and the man offered me three standard bunches, the kind that would sell for $4 each, for $5! That's right, 3 bunches for $5. He had at least two crate full and they weren't selling.

If your a ramp fanatic, try them next sunday after noon. Maybe he'll still have them, see if he's offering the same deal.

Prices tend to be cheaper for most items at the Cortelyou farmer's market. My neighbor says because it's Sunday the farmers don't want to go home with anything. I think that may be right. I used to think it was because it's a smaller market, but then the Court St. farmer's market has higher prices, and they're about the same size. Well, whatever it is, the prices are better and the ramps -you just might get a deal.

Some photos below from my short walk.

I like this garden. It's bigger than I can show here.

Serpentine, edged lawn between two houses.


Another garden I like, but it's at its best in late May onward; wild with perennials.


Now here's what I call front yard urban farming -taking on the form of farm!

Rows of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant.

The New Leisure: Looking At Manhattan

As a gardener, I am often aghast at what it takes to put a park together. Politics, of course, so many different constituencies. But then its the astronomical sums too.

Original construction cost of Central Park was about $14 million from 1858-73 (roughly $225 million in today's dollars). Central Park contains 843 total acres, including 136 acres of woodlands, 150 acres of water and 250 acres of lawns. Prospect Park, covers 585 acres and includes a 60 acre lake, cost $5 million (roughly $87 million in today's dollars) to construct.

The proposed, and somewhat begun, Brooklyn Bridge Park will have 85 acres including 6 piers and 1.3 miles of waterfront. The estimate for the entire budget, or today's estimate -we know what happens to those, to build Brooklyn Bridge Park is 350 million dollars. This is massive spending for a park that is, from what I've seen so far, a much less ambitious design than Central or Prospect Park. In today's dollars, it would have been possible to build both Central and Prospect Park for less money. Somehow, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benape sees this park as "a bargain."

What we get is a park that operates primarily as a plinth for the viewing of lower Manhattan, an interface for harbor activities, and concessions. Should this area be a park? Of course. Are we getting our money's worth? I don't think so.

Take the north end of Brooklyn Bridge Park, years ago re-configured into a public park where it was once a run-down, old NY kind of a hangout. There was a time when no one would accept a park in this location, if not only for the incredible amount of rattle and thrum from the trains on the Manhattan Bridge.

As city parks go, it's quite popular -people are sprawled out on the grass in warm weather, wedding photos are taken, tourists photograph the bridges, dogs are walked, little kids are bicycle-trained. The crowds accept the noisy racket of NYC and embrace the waterfront. The thematic embrace here is a bold revision of the city's infrastructure as a naturally sublime backdrop for leisure and a long overdue acceptance of the desire to near ourselves to water. The pleasure here comes from the calming of the watery middle ground as the Manhattan Bridge's massive, dark underbelly and rumbling incite.

The Brooklyn Bridge operates on the level of a functioning ruin in the landscape. Overshadowed by its slightly newer neighbor, the bridge incorporates engineering history into the schema of the picturesque sublime. The park grounds, benches, pathways and railings are all bland. There are hints of an ecological influence in its native planting. Only the massive stone ampitheater and kayak-launching beachfront under the Manhattan Bridge give us bold moments; a sort of big brother to those significant, original moments at Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens.

Touted for the new addition is the view of the palisade formations of lower Manhattan. Yet, much of what I get from the view of the lower Manhattan skyline I already receive on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, along with its quaint nostalgia for old New York. The low viewpoint offered from the piers has the effect of bringing us to the foot of the Emerald City, looking up, and if your me - wondering who's behind the curtain of Wall Street.

The sketch below, from the Urban Strategies Inc. website, proposes something of interest. It appears to add something new to the context between the bridges and I hope it survives the process. A fear of infant tourists falling into the sea might just divert this design proposal to the trash bin.

A park with this bold budget should have a bold design. Not only formally, but conceptually. A park that incorporates new conceptions of our relationship to nature. A park that gives us more than the plinth effect. I think it is telling that the park is named after the Brooklyn Bridge. After all, that's the part of the park that we know has a heart. That's also the part that is essentially finished and functioning as it should.

Guests Are Coming Over

Believe it or not, on Sunday, smack in the middle of my plant giveaway, I will be getting a visit from the NY Times art dept.

Like I said, believe it or not. 

They'll be photographing me and the garden for a story that I think is on soil-testing. Do not know when the story will come out either.

So today I began the cleanup because my parents taught us kids that we must clean house for guests. I pulled the garbage, swept the age-old detritus from the edge of the fencing, tied up some over-reaching perennials. After all, The Times is coming over, an institution is visiting my yard!

While I was out there I met a gardening neighbor. She was very nice and I told her that I learned from her how to keep the asters under control. She came back with a bouquet of convallaria majalis, Lily of the Valley. Sweet.

How Do I Like It?

I like new things, and clean places. I like repair and well-maintained. Although sometimes, it seems to me that the best place to be is in that broad space between total mess and well-kept.
One of our new street trees planted last fall. Its meager skirt of petals. The mud and half-missing curb, a puddle and a few weeds. Sometimes, that's just how I like it.

Pitter Patter

I woke up this morning to tomato seedlings battered by pelting rains and window sill drip. It was pouring last night as I left the station, rain angling from the south. I like to push it, so I left the tomatoes and cukes out. This morning the soil was washed from the tomato pots, roots exposed. Two cukes had been snapped in two by the torrent. Oh, it was a horrible sight.

I disposed of the cukes, unfurled their TP containers and used the soil to straighten out the tomato pots. Then I took the remaining cukes and stood their TP pots in the broccoli planter, wedging each in a square of the squirrel netting. The tomatoes that were out of the drip line were fine, so I moved to put all together. Whew! Another plant disaster averted.

Another Plant Give Away

The rose bush above is swamped with asters. I need to a) pull them and throw them away or b) dig them up and give them away to needy gardeners.

So this Sunday, May 10th I will have my second annual garden plant giveaway. I've got some yarrow, like the one below, to give away. And some spiderwort, another aster, some Chrysanthemum Sheffield Pink and some coreopsis too. Not a lot of everything, but enough to make a happy gardener or two. Early bird usually catches this worm.

Last year's giveaway went very well, maybe 15 people came by and one or two before the posted hour! I had a lot more to give away then because I was clearing out the side yard. Most visitors saw my signs up in the neighborhood. Only the Flatbush Gardener saw it on the blog and came by.

So here it is.

Perennial Plant Give Away
Sunday, May 10th
9 am - 11 am
rain or shine
Corner or Friel Place and East 7th Street.

View Larger Map

Thoughts on a Stroll Through Prospect Park

Last weekend (the hot one, not the wet one) the weather was for sprawling and strolling. So I strolled. All the way to the Farmer's Market to buy ramps, via the Midwood trails.

Prospect Park is amazing in a city filled with really good parks. We've seen a lot of restoration and it looks great. Yet I've always been let down by what I perceive to be lax maintenance and re-construction in the southern end, around the lake. This area is not only my entrance to the park, but one of my favorite places.

A woman pushing a stroller around a large muddy puddle.

The north side of the lake shows a restoration moving forward, defeating the phragmites and restoring plantings along the shore. The remaining perimeter appears unmanaged as we encounter compacted earth, belgian blocks falling into the lake or overwashed by it, trash littering the phragmites colonies, and muddy disintegrating pathways.

The lake sits in a large basin which extends out to the paved park drive. Rain water collects at the pathways. At the base of Lookout Hill there is erosion carrying soil deposits over the roadway. In both areas there needs to be an investment in rebuilding the pathways above grade and re-configuring drainage patterns.

This decrepit staircase leading to the Concert Grove should be fixed. Why has it been like this for years? The under-privileged staircase leads to a really sweet spot in the park that is rather under-used. Why? Disrepair like this is the visual cue that lingering here won't be pleasant. The grove has park benches, seasonal plantings, as the name indicates -large plane trees, a pavilion, and a statue of Abe Lincoln. Yes, thank you ghost of Robert Moses, the woefully ugly Wollman Rink is there as well, but not too visible from the benches.

Walk through the Concert Grove and you may notice the staircase on the left leading up the slope. Take the staircase up and not 50 feet from it you'll find the desire line on the right leading back down to the Concert Grove. Desire lines are a product of poor design and human will. I'm not sure which came first, the staircase or the foot path. Either way, plant in a way that interferes with the desire to avoid the staircase.

As I strolled up the East Drive, I see a family eyeing the Audubon Center. There is black chain link fencing between them and their destination. The horse trail appears to head in the direction they want to go, but they have strollers and are hesitant to get stuck in the gravelly sand. They ask me how to get down there. I tell them to walk up East Drive and they'll see the ramp that allows them down to the Audubon Center. Yet I know that they may be easily confused; it will feel too far as they overshoot their destination, then backtrack.

When people see their destination, yet the designed pathway to it is perceived to be out of the way, people begin to make their own path. The park management response is to create obstacles to this instinct -the chain link fence.

The photo above shows you the entrance to the ramp which takes you to the boathouse, crossing over the horse path, from East Drive. It is a poor solution to the problem, which is this: the Audubon Center is not meant to be approached from the East Drive. This is because the Boat House was built on top of Olmstead's design along with a number of other classical-styled buildings in the park. The McKim, Mead, and White period created a number of "destinations" in the park out of sync with the Olmstead design.

I finally made it to the area known as Midwood. It's been under restoration, and generally looks good.

It has a lacework of trails that can be disorienting to anyone unfamiliar with its meandering. Not a stone's throw away people by the hundreds are sprawled on the grass in barely any clothes paying little attention to those around them. However, in the woods, somewhat wary are the eyes of the few whose paths you cross. The wood isolates, and few bask there as they do the field.

When you come upon the aging Rick's Place sign you feel as if there is a history here you couldn't possibly know. Was he murdered here, did he just hang out here, or both. Maybe he planted trees or watched birds here. The old sign adds to the feeling of stumbling on a ruin, a ruin of one man's habits and preoccupations.

Midwood and its neighboring Ravine are the closest thing Prospect Park gets to the Ramble of Central Park. Like its Central Park cousin, it's filled with desire lines.

I exit the woods and make my way to the farmer's market at Grand Army Plaza. On my way back, I take to the road.

Maybe It Won't Ever Stop Raining, But The Garden Don't Care

Shepard on Shepherd

Deep down my left sidebar I have a list of books that have been important to the development of my ideas about landscape, nature, the garden, and us. There have been few more informative to my way of thinking than Paul Shepard. I picked up Man in the Landscape a half-year ago. As with another book of his I read a year earlier, its slow going at first, with fits and starts. The enormity of his understanding seems to be condensed into every sentence. Its easy to spend minutes unpacking them and since I do most of my reading on the subway, you'll see me holding the same page for multiple stops.

My training in art and my interest in landscape makes some of his ideas familiar territory, but his books read like a guide to the missing link. How does a fish eye evolve to a human eye and how is the woods like the under sea? What kind of God would a pastoralist dream up? What are the roots of class structure? And then I leap to new thoughts about the Venus of Wilendorf or what it may have been like for the first man to see another man "flying" on horseback (think -Tatars invading on horseback in Tarkovsky's Adrei Rublev), or why we wish never to die.

I'm still involved with chapter three, "The Image of the Garden." The quote below is the final paragraph from chapter two, "A Sense of Place."

"My point is that their origin is inextricably associated with a surplus agriculture, that cities tend to grow beyond what the local agriculture will support, and that there is an urban attitude toward nature which is insular, cultivated, ignorant, dilettante, and sophisticated. At the same time, by virtue of the very polarity in the landscape that cities create, they contain and educate and produce men who retreat to nature, who seek its solitude and solace, who study it scientifically, and who are sensitive to its beauty. The very idea of a sense of place is an abstraction, a sort of intellectual creation like sex or climate or fashion, which is impossible except in a world of ideas whose survival depends on the city. The dilemma is that those who yearn for the warm garment of landscape security are already deflowered. They can only go back so far. They can regain the hunter's, pastoralist's, farmer's nonverbal responses, limited to an extent by their self-consciousness; but the yearning is thrust upon them in any case, for they were all children once and they had wild ancestors and they dream and to some degree all have premonitions of special places."

Do You Know What's Up With This Tree?

I passed this tree in Prospect Park last weekend. What kind is it and more important, why does it have that criss-crossing pattern on its trunk?

Its All About Greens, Broccoli, and Peas

The heat lovers await their turn to ride in the grown-up boxes.

Meanwhile, the cool-season veggies reach maturity.

Spinach (bottom), Asian Greens (bottom-right), Arugula (bottom-left), Mesclun Mix (middle-right and center), Broccoli (far left), Snap Peas(way up top)

Asian Greens (Mizuna) and to the left a Norway Maple seedling. I didn't catch that one until I saw the photo!


The oaky reds of the Mesclun Mix

Side yard Broccoli 'Calabrese'

Front yard Broccoli 'Calabrese'. The plastic sheeting is from the overwintering. I left it on because the prevailing wind here is from the west, blowing by the building's g-pails.

And yes, we finally are getting some 'Sugar Ann' snap peas! Sadly, these plants will probably be pulled before they are finished producing. They're in the tomato planters.

Don't Eat Bronto Burgers

I passed this wood railing in Prospect Park. On it a graphic protestation to quit eating animals. Why here? Why not a dinosaur?

Lush Weather

The weather we're having now I consider lush. The garden loves it. Cool days, warm nights, wet, but not too wet. The garden grows, fills out, enjoys the moment. Gray days great for green leaf photography (none of those punchy highlights)


The irises are coming on strong. They seem to flower earlier every year. Last week's heat brought them to this point. Now if the weather stays mild, the blooms will hold well.

Planting

I finally planted the Cilantro seeds in a pot over in the side yard.

And here are the quick growing cucumber 'Salad Bush' sprouts. I planted these just days ago.

Lead Belly

This is the soil under my vegetable planters

I have received my soil test results from the ESAC. I had a sense that things weren't good over in the side garden, but I didn't think it would be as bad as it is. Although I suppose it could've been worse. I didn't test the front yard mostly because I do not plant veggies over there, but now I am thinking I will test it. In addition to the side yard analysis, I sent in my planter box compost, which is a mixture of Farfard product and an "I can't remember brand" of seaside compost I bought from Gowanus Nursery last year. I did this as a sort of control group, something to compare the yard earth to.

The good Dr. Cheng analyzed my soil himself. Below are the results, please click on the image to zoom in.

These numbers will mean little to you as they do me until they are put into context. Dr. Cheng has agreed to provide that context but asked me not to post that until some final details are worked out. Comparing the side yard soil under my gardening feet to the store-bought compost kept in pots:

• Arsenic is 3 x greater in the side yard



• Lead is 50 x greater in the side yard



• Cadmium is 3 x greater in the side yard



• Chromium is 2 x greater in the side yard



• Mercury is 9 x greater in the side yard



• Soil PH is a bit more acid in the side yard (expected and compost near neutral 7)



• Organic content (humus) is a low 8 percent of soil in the side yard



• Soluble Salts were half what they are in the compost (not sure what this means)

In regards to nutrients:

• Calcium (Ca) is 5 x greater in the compost (probably because of sea life in it)
• Magnesium (Mg) is 4 x greater in the compost
• Phosphates (P) are 24 x greater in the compost
• Iron (Fe) and Potassium (K) are just a bit more in the compost
• Manganese (Mn) is 3 x greater in the compost
• Copper (Cu) is about 23 % less in the compost
• Zinc (Zn) is about 95 % less in the compost

What does all this mean? Well, we can see that the compost has a greater nutrient load than the common soil. It also has a balance PH compared with the common soil. Only copper and zinc are lower in the compost over the side yard soil.

Clearly the side yard soil has much elevated Lead (Pb). Close to 1/10 of a percent of the analyzed soil is lead or put another way, for every 10000 particles of soil, there is one particle of lead.

EPA guidelines put Lead safely at 400 ppm, my soil is well over 900 ppm. Then there's the Mercury, Cadmium, Chromium, and really, who knows what else?

Why Not a Park?

This is one of my favorite parks. Its a "viewing" park, closed off by fencing all around.

As you exit the subway, dip below the overpass, you will encounter this grassy "knoll" (really, bridge embankment). Its mostly grass, a few huge dandelions, honeysuckle on the fence, and a few plane trees (or as I call 'em, sycamore).

Because of the dip below Ft. Hamilton Pkwy, the view is one looking skyward. A snippet of our pastoral ideal, a heavenly meadow skirting the sacred grove. A park, minus the shepherd, and therefore the tall grass. A simpler life, one of discourse, philosophy, idleness, and lovemaking.

Its at its prime a few times throughout the year. In winter it fills with garbage, to be expected. The DOT comes with weed wackers (mecha-sheep), decimating the grass several times each year. Looking nasty for about three weeks, it then bounces back. I wish they would let it go to seed, brown, or whatever it would do. Its lovely when the grass is 24 inches tall and waving in the breeze. Where much is said about our cut lawns, little ever about tall grass.

Pretty Sure Its the Biggest Tree in Brooklyn

This is an English Elm

Its near the Bowling Green, technically on the Parade Grounds.

Its about 24 feet in circumference.

Broccoli Report

There broccoli are slowly growing in the side yard -a little cooler and shadier there.


These brocs are growing in the front yard, full sun, and putting on the leaf. Hoping the hot weather this past weekend doesn't send them to bolt.


This guy, or girl, has been around the broccoli for a couple of days now. Get those caterpillars! When I put the camera real close for the shot, the spider turned around for it. Work it.

Squirrel

After entering Prospect Park I hardly could believe seeing this squirrel -completely eviscerated, saving its head. I made this b&w photograph because it removed some gruesomeness from the scene, but now I see how it also looks like a forensic crime scene photo.

You Know Its Frost Free Time When...

The Aphids come along.

I have three rose bushes in my front yard garden. One is a the climber, New Dawn. The other two are pictured here. On the left is Rosa "Knockout" and on the right is an old Tea Rose I ripped out of my grandmother's backyard before her house was sold. I pruned the knockout heavy this year. The Tea is about 50 years old.

The leaves and bud on the old Tea

As you can see in the above picture, there's not one aphid on the Tea. Whole plant completely clear.

The leaves on the Knockout

But the Knockout, literally 18 inches from the Tea has a good colony of Aphids on many of the young leaf shoots. Why do they prefer the Knockout over the Tea or the New Dawn? This isn't particular to this year either. I don't believe it has to do with the hard prune, but does it? The Knockout can handle it though, its one tough mother.