Asparagus Bushes and Fig Trees

Many momentous events have transpired over the last couple of months(my engagement for one thing :D ) , thus I haven't had much time to practice the field craft of organic gardening.

However, over Thanksgiving break I was able to go home to my garden in PA and prune the Asparagus plants with my father. The 8 Asparagus crowns that I had planted 2 and a half years ago have now turned into huge 4 foot tall bushes. During the late Autumn, these bushes would turn yellow and then brown. At this point the standard maintenance procedure is trim off the entirely of the bush above ground level and apply heavy organic compost on top of the root crown. The trimming of dead above-ground foliage disrupts the life cycle of the stem burrowing beetle, while the compost gives the Asparagus roots plenty of nutrients to grow delicious asparagus shoots in the coming Spring.

Upon returning back to the City a few days later, I was at my fiance's parents' backyard. And before us was a Mediterranean Fig tree. Since Figs are intolerant of extreme weather, we proceeded to shield it from the elements. Winterizing a fig tree involves first a great deal of pruning. This is to remove dead, tangled, and generally excessive limb growth. After I had finished pruning, Marisa and I pilled 4-5 feet of leaves around the trunk of the tree to provide insulation, the leaf pile was secured with chicken wire. Then the leader branches of the tree Canopy was binded tightly together with rope and then covered in layers of wool. With this protection in place, the fig tree will hopefully survive the winter and yield figs for us next year!

Eco-Tourism in Northern Appalachia

Two weekends ago, we decided to investigate a small community in Northern Appalachia known for it's Eco-Tourism initiatives. I'm referring to the fair town of Wellsboro, PA which hosts the famous grand canyons of PA. It is well known, that the Mountain communities of Pennsylvania were once famed for
their steel works and other heavy industrial plants. Some 30 years ago; however, the tide of globalization began to move the industries away from that area, and a general degree of impoverishment followed. Many cities and towns suffered a huge drop in population and commerce, but surprisingly, some communities have attempted to re-fashion themselves to suit the post industrial economy.

Driving in our fuel efficient Toyota Corolla, we swiftly left the coastal center of New York and entered the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. The roads traversed hills that gradually became mountains. I was surprised by the steepness of some of the highways. It seems that the transportation infrastructure in the Appalachia is not nearly as well developed as the coast. The countryside was extremely beautiful, filled with hills, woods, and farms scattered here and there. Every so often, we would drive by herds of cows or goats or other fine ruminants. Most of the towns that we passed seemed to be shells of their former selves. Many communities looked genuinely impoverished, what with all the abandoned factories and run down houses in many of these towns. We drove by one town which seemed to have invested a large amount of resources in the creation of vast windmills on the hills surrounding their settlement.

After about 3 hours of driving, our Car's GPS unit took us onto a one lane dirt road which ran up the side of a rather steep mountain. That was quite intimidating to Marisa who urged me to head back, but I kept driving on. After a few miles on this dirt road, we ran into a pick up truck heading directly towards us! Upon seeing this, I decided to head back down the mountain and go back onto the highway. After talking with the gentlemen in the truck, it appeared that the dirt road(called Rattler's road ) was indeed meant to accommodate 2 lanes of traffic! How that works is anyone's guess. After that little adventure, we drove for another 10 miles and finally reached the town of Wellsboro. I must say that the town is Beautiful. It seems to be a highly urbane, cultural center in the midst of many poverty stricken communities. We came to a pretty looking bed and breakfast in the middle of town and decided to get a room there. Wellsboro boasted of very decent lodgings and the restaurants were superb. At that point, both of us were wondering how such a prosperous community could exist on Eco-Tourism alone. After talking with a young waiter at a local restaurant, we learned that like is apparently the entire town hosted a huge number of Pensioners from all over the country. The regular town's folk were basically taking care of a large number of wealthy senior citizens, this along with the eco-tourism income has kept this community prosperous. With that question settled, we retired to sleep.

On the next day, we drove about 5 miles out of town to check out the Grand Canyon itself. The views were very impressive, the top of the canyon was about 2 thousand feet from the Susquehanna river tributary at it's base. The town had built out an elaborate series of trails all along the canyon. We took the "Turkey" Trail which was very scenic but also extremely narrow at certain points.

The ambiance was extremely beautiful, the entire trail down was through a dense cover of mostly Coniferous trees, probably owing to the acidity of the native soil. Every so often, we would catch breathtaking views of the entire Canyon. As we descended, we noticed many small streams all along the breadth of the ravines. As our descent continued, we noticed that the streams were gathering into larger streams. And eventually into a series of spectacular water falls, one larger than the one preceding it.

As we kept walking down, we saw that certain sections of the trail were carved into the mountain side itself, such that a cross section of the mountain was made transparent to us. In such cases, we saw the miracle of biology at work. Trees surviving on top soil only a few inches deep were implanted directly above solid bedrock. The roots of these trees, along with lichen were literally mining the bed rock for minerals. This kind of a biological system is incredibly stable, and the fertility that these minerals can supply to the trees could easily last of tens of thousands of years. I figure that humanity could create a forest garden of useful trees on these mountain sides, it would be economically productive with no maintenance for an indefinite period of time.

At any rate, we gradually came down to the base of the valley. There, all the waterfalls were happily unloading themselves into the Susquehanna river. The river itself was broad and it's waters extremely clear. All of this was exceedingly beautiful and of course we had to take a few glamor shots! :D

And that was pretty much our visit to Wellsboro, we later went to the town's Historical Society to learn it's history before going back home. I must say that Wellsboro definitely has a great beginning in sustainable eco-tourism.

Mid-summer Gardening work!

Last weekened, we journeyed back to Pennsylvania to work on the Suburban Garden. The time is high summer and the garden is overflowing with food. Since I've been living in NYC for the last 2 years, my father has largely taken over the daily operations of the Suburban Garden. And over that time, the man has grown to love my garden as his own. One can easily tell by the vast amounts of food that he is producing from the land!

Garden beds 1 and 3 has recently been harvested. My father gathered some 70 lbs of potatoes from those 2 beds. So with that in mind, I found time to plant some winter sugar beets and coriander in the newly accessible beds. Meanwhile, my dad was on his knees gathering large handfuls of bush beans. This was hardwork in humid, 90 degree summer weather. But since this is now my 4th year gardening, I've grown to love this act of productive labour.

The tomatoe bed is now a dense bush of vines and tomatoes. All 4 tomato plants are thriving and giving us buckets of tomatoes every day. As we harvested the ripe ones, I couldn't stop eating the cherry tomatoes. They were so sweet and juicy, like bright red grapes, and twice as tasty! As we were picking, I noticed that there were tomatoes in the interior of the bush which were quite inaccessible to us. This is a bit of a design snafu on my part. A good garen design should always have the most productive plants also be the most accessible ones. Next year, I'm going to put in wire mesh cylinders which will separate the 4 tomato plants and allow a person's arm to reach all the way into the middle of a garden bed.

The pepper plants are ready to be harvested and my father took in 4 huge green peppers. Next year, we will grow smaller red peppers and more Habanero peppers.

The Perennial plants are doing great as well. All of our Rasphberry and Blackberry bushes are producing abundently. The Asparagus bushes are thriving with huge, thick shoots. They will be ready for harvest next year. The Apple Trees are doing well, the sickly golden delicious tree that we planted 2 years ago, seems to finally be growing quickly. This year, we got the very first golden apple from that tree!

Miniature Ecology on Fire Island

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been working like mad on my day job, clocking 80 hours a week. As such, I've been rather negligent on my blog postings. In any case, 3 weeks back, Marisa and I journeyed to Fire Island, a far-flung strip of land near the southern coast of Long Island. We wanted to see the impacts of an ecology in relative isolation, and Fire Island presented the most accessible case study. Upon first glance, the Island seems almost utopian. There seems to be no crime, no industry, and almost no automobiles in sight. All the people are either walking or riding bicycles. Even the roads are narrow things meant for a "human" sized world.

The island itself is over 30 miles long but only about 1 mile wide. There seems to be a dense concentration of vacation cottages all over the entire island, though it would appear that most of these cottages are only inhabited for a couple of months out of the year. After walking around for several miles, we realized that the vegetation of the island seems to be in the midst of a significant transformation. The island used to be home to mostly shrubs, grasses, and native pine trees. Now, exotic trees and Bamboo shoots seems to be taking over the entire interior of the island. Upon further inquiry, it appears that these exotic were intentionally planted decades ago by the vacation cottage owners for ornamental purposes but has since then spread beyond their control. As we walked around the island, we noticed bamboo "forests" growing 15, sometimes 20 feet high all around us.

And as our journey continued, we noticed that the island was infested with deer. The Deer herds can be found everywhere, in people's backyards, in groves of trees, wandering the beaches. They were walking along roads, blocking pedestrians, even begging children for food scraps! After hours of walking, we met up with William, a fellow New Yorker temporarily vacationing on the island. We went to his cottage and had several hours of splendid conversation and wonderful pastries! :) During that conversation, we learned of how the deer problem came about. Apparently, the deer themselves were released onto the island by game keepers during the 70s. Lacking any natural predators, the deer population exploded during the subsequent decades.

When the authorities finally talked about culling the deer populations to control the spread of diseases, the local property owners balked at the suggested animal cruelty and passed laws to prevent the killing of any deer on the island. As such the deer population surpassed their natural holding capacity and either had to be fed by people or die from starvation. On our journey, we noticed a deer with it's leg broken and horribly infected. It was surviving on a bowl of food scraps that a little boy placed along the road. This experience was disturbing and yet strangely touching at the same time.

Update from the Suburban Garden

My father has been maintaining the Suburban garden back in Pennsylvania for the last couple of months. During the past several weeks, he dinner table has been inundated with delicious vegetables from our garden beds.

The tomato harvest has begun!

The summer greens we had planted months ago continues to produce.

My father is still getting some peas due to the unsually mild and rainy weather in July.

And finally, a whole lotta squash! :)

Urban Garden Update!!!

My little fire-escape Garden

continues to produce peas like crazy. From 1 planter-box and a single pot, I'm getting large handfuls of peas every 2 days. Still, peas are cool season crops which can't endure excessive heat for long. Already, some of the smaller pea shoots are beginning to dry up and turn yellow. I expect my pea plants to complete their life cycle by the end of July. After the peas die, I intend to plant some pole beans in succession at the same location.

All of my lettuce plants have bolted. I always find bolting to be such an fascinating part of the Lettuce reproductive cycle. The plant undergoes a profound metamorphosis. What was once a ground hugging leafy plant shoots up 2 feet into the air within a matter of a few days. The lettuce leaves become bitter as tiny yellow flowers crown the tips of each plant. Upon closer examination, I realized that our friend, the lady bug, has decided to make the lettuce pot her temporary home. The Lady bug was voraciously devouring the aphids on these leafy plants.

The single tomato plant is now 4 times it's original size. It has 5 Green tomatoes growing on it. Tomato plants consumes enormous amounts of water. I'm watering it just about once every day. That one plant alone takes upwards of half a gallon of tap water per day. There are many little yellow flowers blooming all over the tomato plant, harbingers of a great harvest in a couple of months!!!

The tomato flowers along with the onion, lettuce, and pea flowers are attracting honey bees and even a couple of bumble bees to my little garden in the sky. Along with the bees and ladybugs, I've seen 5 different species of birds resting themselves in the shade of the garden: Sparrows, Robins, Pidgeons, Finches, and a single Bluejay!

Carp invasion of the Great Lakes!

Last weekend, Marisa and I decided to take a little field trip to the great lakes region. I was recently contracted for the design of an advanced Aquaponics system. For those who are not in the know, an Aquaponics system combines the best elements of classical aquaculture(Fish Farming) and modern hydroponic gardening. In effect, animal waste is fed to fish. And the waste of the fish is then fed in solution form to garden plants through a hydroponics setup. The plant remains of those hydroponic crops are then fed to a variety of herbivore fish called Carp. The entire system is a closed loop operating within an environment the size of a large green house, talking in animal manure and turning out delicious fish and vegetables. There was only one problem, Carp has a notorious reputation as an invasive species. Thus, I consigned myself and my girlfriend to an investigative trip to the great lakes region. The source of the Aquaponics revolution and well as the epicenter of the Invasive Carp outbreak in the U.S.

So with that, we took off. Flying across a continental landmass always held a fascinating obsession with me. It seems all too miraculous that human beings can be lifted a mile into the air and shuttled near the speed of sound across hundreds of miles, yet there we were flying to Chicago. Of course any reasonable man would think it all rather sordid that we would burn a hundred million years worth of collected fossil fuels for just a mere century of near-magical capabilities such as intra-continental flight, but whoever said humanity was at all reasonable? :P

So in any case, we flew across a long stretch of Lake Michigan to land in the Fair city of Chicago. The waters were shimmering shades of turquoise phasing here and there into patches of emerald due to the presence of water-borne algae. Of course, we were unable to see any carp from inside the airplane. Once in Chicago, we were stunned by the scale of this city. Clearly this metropolis was not designed to be walkable. The streets were broad and straight, the neighborhoods were spread out to achieve minimal urban density.

At once we got to our investigations. It appeared that Carp was first introduced to the midwest by fish farmers as a cheap source of protein feed for other animals. Carp is an incredibly hardy and prolific species, selectively bred by Asians to survive in highly variable watery environments. They eat pretty much any kind of aquatic vegetation. They can survive water temperatures as low as 10 degrees Celsius. Their flesh is tough and very unpleasant tasting(I know from past experiences). This type of fish is so effective, that they were selected by the early pioneers of Aquaponics systems such as Growing Power for disposing of plant waste.

During the 80s, a serious of floods allowed some of the carp to escape into the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. And since then these invasive fish have been making their way up the river to reach the Great Lakes region. The situation has gotten so bad that the government has put a huge electric fence to block the migration of these fish into the Great Lakes. However, due to the high pain tolerance threshhold of these fish, some of the Carp have been making their way through these screens. We saw several of the carp swimming the waters of Lake Michigan on our trip.

The take-away of this weekend investigation is that using Carp is risky way of cleaning scrap vegetation from an aquaponics operation. However, it is the single most efficient species of the task at hand. Thus if one's aquaponics facility is located relatively far away from any flowing body of water(Lake, Rivers, Streams) the chance of Carp escaping can be brought down to very manageable levels.

Shangri-la on the Hudson!!!

Last weekend, Marisa and I journeyed to the town of Cold Springs. This small settlement, snuggled along the hillsides of the Hudson river, made a huge impression during my previous visit last summer. The town had seemed quiet, a little spritual, and the perfect place for a sustainable homestead. As many of you are probably aware, I've been actively looking for a small piece of wilderness for the last couple of years. My plan of building a self-sufficient Permaculture farmlet burns stronger than ever.

So last Saturday, we headed by car to Cold Springs to visit Bascobel, a preserved historical settlement from the early 1800s. The site was impressive to be sure. The main house was surrounded by acres of Apple and Pear trees, well pruned for generations if not longer. Besides the main house, there was a large herb garden, with a medieval-style beehive. A couple of centuries ago, even rich people had to grow most of their own medicine on the spot due to the difficulties of transportation. Situated at the center of the Herb Garden was the Lemon House. This stone and brick structure is basically a green house built with 19th century technology. The main house itself was equally impressive in it's construction and furnishings. It struck me then that the wealthy echelons of society had a standard of living that varied little between the centuries. The only difference between pre-industrial Bascobel and a modern McMansion is that most of the functions were done by Human beings at Bascobel rather than fossil fuel powered Machines today. Everything from cooking and delivering food to removing waste to keeping the lights and heat on required dozens of servants and workers.

After the tour, we had lunch in town and took in the view. And what a Breath-taking view it was!!!! Cold Springs sits alongside the Hudson river at it's deepest point. From that vantage, the entire river is surrounded by rolling green hills and broadens into a vast network of marsh reeds and estuaries. There were people canoeing all across those marshes, mostly tourists and local fishermen. To us, the entire area looked like a North American version of Shangri-la, an isolated tract of heaven on earth! :)

At that point, I felt certain that I would find my little piece of land here. But unfortunately, the rest of the afternoon proved that all was not well in Paradise. After lunch, we strolled down Main Street to look at the antique shops. Quite abruptly, I realized that many stores along main street had been shuttered since last Summer. And the antique shops that were still open were all basically selling pawned junk. Even more disturbingly, we passed a vast yardsale with hundreds of people. Something like a quarter of the entire town was outside of their elementary school, selling off their possessions to each other and to the handful of tourists. The Economic recession has hit this little town harder than most it seems. With no industry and little farming, Cold Springs is dependent upon Tourism. And with the flow of NYC Tourists much diminished, the town is in a very bad shape.

After much contemplation, I realized that I simply could not build my Farmlet in Cold Springs. The area is certainly very beautiful and was at one point highly self-sufficient. By now however, it is dangeriously reliant upon NYC tourism dollars and has lost almost all off of it's independence in terms of local agriculture and cottage industries. Nevertheless, my search will continue onwards. One day I'll find my very own Shangri-la! :D