Gardening

My Balcony Garden

Abbreviated view of my balcony garden. Just as water is life, so is sticking my hands in soil. This summer, I am growing 6 chili plants, New Zealand spinach, tomatoes, borage (pictured) and red orach (a voluteer). I’ve also started seedlings for my fall garden (brassicas). Not pictured is the ginger I thought would decompose but instead took root. I am very proud of my garden as this year shows my patience has increased. Never before have my chili plants got to the point of producing peppers! For the past few years, I have been buying dried chilis to make my own chili powder. The reality that I’ll soon be able to make that powder from my own homegrown peppers is incredibly freeing…and a sustainable practive that drives me crazy with delight! The plan is to dry the chilis and grind into powder as needed. I hope to have enough to last through to next spring when I will start the process all over again but this time with allium (onions and garlic) powder.

All Things Purple (1)

(Part 1. Part II will be about Prince)

I’ve been wondering, the past few days, about how to integrate my love of gardening into this blog. The other day I went to get some cabbage out the fridge to shred for tacos and found this:

I was amazed that it grew in the refrigerator so much and was actually taken aback to the degree that I did no barbering of the plant/vegetable and just popped into the soil nilly-willy, as you can see. The next day, I was calmer and tore off all the old leaves and composted them. This is what it looked like after that:

I am amazed and totally obsessed with this plant: the fact that it grew, unnoticed, in my fridge; it’s full-throttled desire to go to seed, etc. Deep as that aspect of my love of this plant is, there is an even deeper aspect and that is the color purple. Whenever, I say that phrase “the color purple”, my mind immediately goes to Alice Walker’s book, of course. I still remember the first time I laid my eyes on the words that make up that beautiful story. I was sitting at a round table in a high school classroom. One of my tablemates was discussing it and had a copy in her hands. I don’t remember what she said but I remember it was enough for me to ask to see the book and once it was in my hands, I started reading. Celie resonated with me from the start! I wanted to steal the book from my tablemate but instead, I went to a bookstore and acquired it the only way a teenager with no money could in the pre-metal detectors 80s. I read it all the way home. Then I read it again and again and again. That book changed the trajectory of my life. First of all, I had never before read a story written by a black woman centering black women. Never. It wasn’t even a part of my consciousness as a young black teenaged girl. Little Women, yes. Jane Eyre, yes. Toni Cade, no. Toni Morrison, no. The Color Purple changed all of that and I am forever grateful!

Here are a couple of Alice Walker quotes related to purple-related quotes :

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”

In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)

Alice Walker’s website:

The Sun Is Real
https://alicewalkersgarden.com/

Scenes from a Balcony Garden Vol. 1

Early spring, I went to a local (aka non-big box) gardening store. The experience wasn’t pleasant at all but I came away from the encounter with this growing bag in which I am growing sunflowers and amaranth (loves lies bleeding). The smallest sunflower is a variety I haven’t grown before (Endurance) and I don’t think I’ll grow them again next year. They freak me out a little because they don’t seem to follow the sun like the other two (Russian Mammoths).

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These are my petunias. I didn’t grow them from seed but they are growing “like weeds”. They make me happy just looking at them. I don’t usually give my plants names but these I call Little Princelings for His Royal Purpleness (Prince).

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I am dedicated to trying to make my garden, small as it is, contribute something to the well-being of birds, bees and butterflies. The photo directly below is milkweed which is the only source of food for the endangered Monarch Butterfly. I hope it grows. I hope it grows!

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I wanted to grow sweet potatoes (for their edible leaves) in soil. I don’t know if it was the variety of sweet potato I selected but it didn’t work this year However I am still trying to grow sweet potato leaves but it’s going very slowly:

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I’m hoping that they’ll grow enough so that I can put them in soil and have delicious sweet potato leaves for the fall. Crossing my fingers!

Last year I tried to grow summer squash but it turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. I don’t have pictures of how it “just simply” died on me. I’m sure I did something wrong but what that was, I don’t know. So this year I’m going for butternut squash. I know it’s a fall/early winter vegetable but I’m starting it now. Since space (and money) is an issue I’m growing it in a bag.

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Amaranth. Amaranth. Amaranth. I chant it like a mantra because it is so important and valuable to me! This variety is green amaranth. I’ve already started snipping it to eat because once I found it was the source of the callaloo I ate as a child, well that was all she wrote!

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Potatoes are the bane of my gardening life. They take so damn long to form the tubers I love that I annually lose patience with them. This year is no exception! The pot in the background is a transplanted potato plant that I hope grows. As you can see, the AC is on my balcony and that makes things harder because of all the hot air backwash. The foreground potatoes seem to be doing well. In the spirit of companion planting, I’ve also planted mustard greens with them. When they grow their true leaves, I’ll start to thin them out.

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I’m growing other things as well; primarily greens because I really want to try my version of homesteading by freezing what we can’t eat so that during the coming winter, we’ll have fresh, homegrown greens to eat. At this point they’re too tiny to share.

 

 

Collards

They’re not on my list of favorite greens. That honor is bestowed on sweet potato leaves, callaloo (amaranth), various kinds of kale and spinach. However stopping by a community garden I saw the collards below.

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In a garden overly devoted to beans (monoculture), it was a welcome, glorious sight. I made it a point, when I was in the neighborhood, to park near the garden just so I could look at it. A few weeks ago, I stopped by and it looked like this:

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Some one, some family, will eat well, I thought. I was also inspired to try my hand at growing this green admittedly not one of my favorites. I bought a starter plant from a local farm, re-potted it and aside from lackadaisical watering, basically left alone. Yesterday, it rained, heavily. This is what the plant looked like earlier today:

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I am also practicing what I call lackadaisical gardening with some kale planted in my mother’s yard. I have watered it even less than I have the collards. It appears to not need my care or attention:

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When we lived in Brookline and community gardened, my plot neighbor had kale growing taller than me! I neglected to ask her how long she had been growing the kale but it had to be a minimum of 2-4 years. It could almost be said to be growing wild, if such a thing is possible in a community garden. Of course the growth is due to the self-seeding nature of the vegetable.  Now, kale is not on my list of native plants that I want to populate my mother’s yard with but the nutritional value outweighs that consideration.

With both the kale and the collards I plan on continue to not paying them any attention. I want to see how they do, especially with winter around the corner!