Back to the Wilderness

Gourd Growing

2010-10-31T09:45:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, we visited my parents in PA. While there I saw my father's efforts at the cultivation of the Calabash plant. The Calabash is one of the earliest domesticated plants in history. But surprisingly instead of being used for food, it's grown to create light weight, biological containers.

Amazingly, my father's gourd plant climbed up our backyard pine tree to the height of about 30 feet and produced 4 large green gourds. The container fruits themselves have to be allowed to dry until their outer surfaces harden into a thick layer of wood.

Each gourd can be trained with stones into the shape of drinking bottles, cups, serving bowls, pitchers, and large pots.

Canning Lessons....Part 2!!!

2010-08-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

So for the tomatoes, we cleaned each tomato thoroughly and then sliced them. The sliced tomatoes were then poured into a large kettle pot and set to a low fire for approximately 90 minutes. As the tomatoes were gradually converted into a sauce, we proceeded to add a cup of lemon juice and some fresh basil leaves. One thing to note is that I had to keep stirring the sauce to prevent the bottom of the pot from burning the sauce. At the end of the boiling stage scores of fresh tomatoes have been converted into this bright red sauce with a rich, tangy scent.

The next step is to prepare the canning components: mason jar, canning lid, and funnel. Each mason jar and canning lid needs to be thoroughly washed and then sterilized. To sterilize the components, first we had a small pot of water boiling. Then the mason jar and canning lid is placed into the boiling water for approximately 10 minutes to kill all possible contaminants. Finally the funnel is placed into the boiling water for 2 minutes before being placed onto of the mason jar. After that, the steaming tomato sauce was poured into the mason jar, the canning lid applied tightly, and the entire mason jar is transported into a basket covered by many blankets. The purpose of the blankets is to allow the Mason Jar to cool slowly and therefore avoid cracking the glass.

Canning the pears was pretty much the same process, except for the fact that each pear had to be cored before being sliced. This was an arduous task since we literally had a bushel of pears. So we all got busy and sliced up all the pears after 2 hours. Then the pears were dumped into the large pot with 5 cups of water and 1 cup of lemon juice and cooked under low heat for 3 hours straight.

In the 3 hour cooking period I gradually added about 4 cups of honey to ensure a sweet flavor for the final product. The concoction had to be stirred every 10-15 minutes to prevent burning. As the cooking proceeded, the pear slices gradually transformed into a rich brown sauce that smelled heavenly. Finally the sauce was poured via a ladle into many mason jars. The finished mason jars were covered in blankets to cool for 3 days.

After the 3 day hiatus, we unwrapped our gleaming jars of goodness. In total, we canned 3 quarts of Tomato Sauce and 9 quarts of Pear Butter!!!! :)

Canning Lessons....Part 1!!!

2010-08-01T18:37:00.001-07:00

This weekend has been a great adventure. With the tomato surplus that I've been getting from my garden, I decided to venture into the mysterious world of canning vegetables. My fiancee's mother has been canning veggies for years, so we went down to her house to learn the secret art. We brought with us a 30lb sack of ripe tomatoes, all hand picked from my raised bed garden. Now once we got there, my future mother-in-law mentioned that we were just in time to help her collect the pears from an old pear tree in her backyard.

So off I went with a long wooden pole to pick the pears. Now pear-picking is a tricky job, you have to basically catch a pear in a little metal net on top of a 20 ft long pole and somehow snap the fruit off it's branch. Marisa, her mother, and I took turns doing the deed. And it was real hard on the shoulders after awhile. The sun was blisteringly hot and the pears were in all of these hard to reach places.

After awhile, we had exhausted the pears on our side of the tree, however, our neighbor's side of the fence still held many of the dangling fruits. So off we went into the neighbor's backyard and picked and picked and PICKED some more for another hour. By the end of the pear picking session, we had exhausted all the low hanging fruits of the pear tree. There were still hundreds of pears left, but they were either too high up or buried too deeply within the canopy to be easily retrieved. Still we ended up harvesting a bushel of pears.

With the pears and tomatoes at hand, we began the canning process!!!!

Garden is overflowing with food

2010-08-01T18:01:00.000-07:00

This summer is progressing nicely and my Riverdale garden is overflowing with nature's abundance. The swiss chard and peppers are producing a few meals worth of tender greens every week. The herb garden is increasing my stockpile of oregano, cilantro, dill and chives. And most importantly, I'm being deluged with scores of tomatoes, scores of summer squash, and bag after bag of pole beans.

The 2 raised bed gardens represent a mere 70 square feet of cultivated soil, and yet their productivity has been absolutely astounding. Every square inch of soil is intensively cultivated, every crop is succeeded by other crops, the peas were succeeded by the beans, lettuce will success the swiss chard, sweet corn will succeed the summer squash and so on. In this manner, 2 small raised beds will produce several hundred pounds of nutritionally dense, organic produce.

Here we have straight necked, curve necked and green summer squash. The curved necked summer squash didn't grow as well as their cousins. I think I won't plant any next year.

We've gotten so many tomatoes that I don't know what to do with it all. We've been eating tomatoes every day for weeks! And the truth is, the fresh tomatoes from a garden is far superior to store bought one.

Snail Hunting!!!

2010-06-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of months, we have settled very comfortably in our new home here at the edge of the NYC metro area. In my backyard adventures, I have discovered a valuable source of wild protein....snails!

Snails are an extremely common pest here in this area, though I hardly ever saw them in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Catching Snails is real easy. First, I created a few areas of shade and dampness in the backyard. This can be done using cinder blocks, or piles of leafs/twigs and other organic debris. After a rainy night, turn over the pile and you'll find scores of snails hidden underneath. These animals are quite beautiful to look at. Their translucent shells spans the gamut of natural colors...from dull brown to spiral green and everything in between.

So I captured a score of these little critters and then I proceeded to fatten them up. This step is relatively easy. First you put the snails into a large glass jar, and put in some vegetable scraps. Then on a daily basis, the food is cleaned out and replaced. The snails themselves are taken out, washed, and put back into the jar. This is repeated every day for a week. At the end of the week, the snails will begin to produce clear to semi-translucent excrement, at that point they are ready to be eaten. I sauteed my "herd" with some garlic and butter before putting it into a pasta sauce. The snails are quite delicious, they taste like somewhat like shellfish.

Escape from NYC!!!!!!

2010-04-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

After 3 years in the bowels of the concrete jungle that is Manhattan, I have finally escaped with my fiance to the remote edge of the New York Metro region. Our new home is located in fair Riverdale, a quiet leafy, neighborhood perched along the Hudson river.

My new landlord was kind enough to give me 300 square feet of her backyard to do as I please. Sure I still have the backyard garden in Pennsylvania, but due to the distances involved, my father has been maintaining it to great effect over the last few years. So with such a generous amount of land just outside of my doorsteps, I set out at once to put it to productive use!

Firstly, I have 5 herb pots which I quickly planted with basil, cilantro, oregano, dill, and green onion chives. There were some chives from last year which was growing nicely in the fine spring weather. I collected my first handful in my new home just last night!

The soils of Riverdale seems to be very rocky. The entire area was cut out from the mountainous hillsides of the lower Hudson river. So that ruled out a conventional garden bed or even a semi-raised bed. For a bio-intensive garden capable of high yields, only rich, well-drained soil will suffice. So I set out at once to build a full raised bed garden.

I coughed up some hard currency and bought eight 6'x1' non-pressure treated oak planks. These planks were screwed together with 3 1/8' screws on each joint to form 2 large raised beds. The raised beds were then positioned on the 2 sunniest spots in my patch of land. Then the following layers of materials were placed within each raised bed:

1. 1'' of brown cardboard were placed at the bottom, this kills the grass and weeds growing on the ground beneath and attracts worms to the raised bed.

2. 1-2'' of Peat Moss were placed on top of the card board layer. The peat moss serves as a moisture retaining layer which dramatically increases the water usage efficiency of the raised bed.

3. 10'' of Top soil were placed on top of the peat moss. The top soil is medium in which the actual garden crops will be growing in.

With the two beds built, I quickly planted my stock pile of seeds and seedlings.

Raised Bed One with less such is planted with peas(Sugar Snap, Snow, Oregon Giant), onions(Walla Walla, and Georgia White), broccoli, and swiss chard.

Raised Bed Two with a few hours more worth of direct sunlight, is planted with Tomatoes(Early Girl, Beef Stead, Homestead), peppers (Yellow, Jalapeno), red onions, Summer Squash and sweet corn.

Asparagus Bushes and Fig Trees

2009-12-18T18:07:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-16T18:24:00.001-08:00

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!

2009-08-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-26T16:58:00.001-07:00

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!!!

2009-07-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-07-11T19:04:00.001-07:00

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!!!

2009-06-21T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

Picking lettuce and Peas!!!

2009-06-08T19:19:00.000-07:00

This week the Onion flowers have swelled in size, now they look quite a bit like dandelion flowers.

The rest of my little fire-escape garden is now beginning to yield a tiny bit of food. I've harvested several handfuls of lettuce from my biggest lettuce pot. Additionally, I have picked 5 WHOLE peas from the biggest pea plant. Food reclaimed from my garbage...imagine that!!!

The rest of the garden continues to grow. Two additional pots are now thriving with Lettuce and Basel plants.

Tiny yellow flowers adorn the hanging tomato plant.

The Onions are flowering!!!!

2009-05-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

Summer is fast approaching and my little urban fire-escape garden is growing like crazy. One of the onions has begun to flower. The diamond shaped onion bulb has blosommed into hundreds of delicate emerald tendrils. 3 more onion bulbs have yet to blossom, and I'm soooo looking forward to this! :)

My lettuce is growing wild at this point. I encountered some aphids several weeks back but apparently, with aphids came the sparrows. The little birds proved their worth by devouring many of the aphids which had been plaguing my greens. Now the lettuce is half a foot tall and will soon be ready for harvest!

After a stretch of warm weather, the hanging Tomato plant has almost doubled in size. While the pea plants has been climbing the metal fire-escape railings in search of more sunlight. The biggest pea plant is now 3 feet tall and has begun to flower. Even some of the basel seeds have sprouted, at last count I had 4 little basel plants growing.

The urban garden blooms!!!!

2009-05-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

More than a month has passed since I revamped my little fire-escape garden. Much has changed since then. For one thing, the little lettuce seedlings have blossomed into a forest of emerald leafs covering the top of the entire container. I should be able to harvest the first wave of lettuce leaves in a few weeks. I plan to grow another crop of the same container this season. One thing that I noticed about container gardening is the need for more water. Containers need more watering than raised beds. I've gotten into the habit of watering my containers every single day.

Both of my onion containers are getting ready to bolt. After a year of growth 3 of my green onions are at the cusp of flowering. Each onion plant has a single heart shaped bulb growing outwards. I plan on letting all three reach maturity and saving their seeds. The peas are doing quite well. 3 of the 6 peas that I planted have survived so far. All three are beginning to climb up the railings of the fire-escape.

My latest addition to the garden is a hanging basket. It costs plenty of hard currency to acquire, but after lusting over it for 10 minutes straight at Home Depot, I couldn't help myself and just had to buy it. The basket has a base of peat moss which absorbs water. I filled the basket with 2/3 potting soil and the other 1/3 with home brewed compost. Then I planted in a huge tomato seedling. After several days of growth the tomato plant has gotten noticeably bigger. My fire-escape garden is so small yet it brings me so much joy. To a certain extent, one realizes that life is so precious and should be allowed to continue on. :)

Suburban Garden Update 5/09

2009-05-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I journeyed back home to Pennsylvania for Mother's day. While there I had a chance to check on my suburban garden. My father had been doing an incredible job in expanding and maintaining the bio-intensive Garden based on the plans that I had drafted in March. Everything is in full bloom. In the picture, my father is standing proudly over the expanded garden! :D

The Cabbages are interplanted with rows of Green Onions and Garlic. Potoatoes were coming on strong in 2 of the Garden Beds. And 4 tomato plans were growing in one of the newly created garden beds. All appeared to be growing extremely well.

Garden Bed 5 had Summer Squash seedlings catch-cropped with fast growing Shanghainese Lettuce. The Lettuce will mature and be harvested prior to the maturing of the Summer Squash plants, thus allowing 2 harvests in one season!

2 Garden Beds used for growing potatoes last year are planted with Snow Peas and Sugar Snap Peas respectively. Both beds are doing very well with the pea seedlings starting to climb up the bamboo trellis. The Peas will absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix it into the soil, thus improving long term soil fertility.

Now on to the perennials! 7 of the 8 asparagus plants that I had put down last Spring have made it to their 2nd year! Now they are the size of small bushes and growing vigorously. We have to wait one more year before beginning to harvest the asparagus shoots. But even now, I can see fully grown asparagus shoots that are perfectly edible from each bush!

Both of the apple trees are flowering. The pruning of errant branches several months ago seemed to have done these trees much good. So far, I haven't seen any signs of fungus or pest upon the apple leaves. In anycase, to ensure maximum survivability this year, I coughed up some hard currency and bought a bottle of Organic Pest Spray. Basically it's a mixture of Garlic, Cottonseed, and Rosemary oils which drives the bugs crazy! :P

Finally, we come to the berries. Despite our failed attempts to transplant berries last year, my father has bravely tried again this spring, with great success! He transplanted another 3 blackberry bushes, 2 of them died, but 1 survived and appears to be thriving. My father lined the berry bush with a lithic mulch in the same fashion as the ones I had laid in around the apple trees. We need to keep our fingers crossed and pray to the Gardening Gods for success!

Fire Escape Garden Update

2009-04-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

Things have been humming along in my little urban fire-escape garden. The relative isolation of the container garden makes it seem like a little island onto itself sometimes. Perched on the 5th fire-escape of a Manhattan apartment building, there is little if any ecology to speak of. Unlike my sub-urban garden back in Pennsylvania, this little enclave doesn't have to contend with dozens of species of native insects and flora. However, there is one pest that I had to deal with, pigeons. These animals are the air-borne equivalent of rats. These birds have caused me much headache due to their eating of seeds and seedlings that I've planted in the past.

In any case, the Green onions are thriving in their little pots. The lettuce seeds have sprouted and are now growing vigorously. The peas have have been a temperamental lot. 1 of the Oregan Giant Peas have sprouted quickly. A

nother 2 of the sugar snap peas have also sprouted, but their growth has been rather anemic.

I've become rather attached to my little urban garden. These little containers of greenery seem to have an enormous, rejuvenative effect upon a person. Just looking at the little emerald clusters of growth early in the morning seem to make my entire workday feel much better!

Re-vamping the Fire-Escape Garden 3/15

2009-04-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Spring time has hit the city with full force this weekend, and of course I simply had to get my Urban fire-escape garden ready for action. I didnt' have to worry much about compost, I had an entire year's supply within my compost bin. The bigger challenge is to create a design which maximizes the tiny space allotted to me on that fire escape. The fire-escape railings offers a perfect opportunity to garden in 3 dimensions. So with this in mind, I coughed up some hard currency and bought 3 Container holders which could be hung from the Railings. This maximized the central area while at the same time allowed for the suspended containers and planter boxes to receive more sunlight.

Once the hanging fixtures were in place, I proceeded to recharge my containers with plentiful helpings of compost which I brewed throughout the last year. The compost didn't carry much of a smell, although one could clearly see fragments of newspaper and egg shells

mixed with the rich, dark, compost. After this step was complete I had 5 containers and 1 Planter box ready for planting.

To maximize space and sunlight, I planted peas in the planter box and one of the suspended containers. In another suspended container, I put in some lettuce seeds for an early harvest. Of the 3 remaining containers, 2 were already estabilished with green onions from last year. The 3rd one, I'm planning to use for growing Basil once the weather gets a bit warmer.

Apple Tree Pruning 3/07

2009-03-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

After an unusually long and bitter winter, the warm days of Spring had at last arrived! I realized, belatedly, that I had put off the pruning of my apple trees since late december!

Thus on the weekend of March 6th, I journeyed back to Pennsylvannia with my girlfriend Marisa. The weather was fair and the ride pleasant, and soon we were at my parents' house. After having lunch and visiting Lancaster with my folks and Marisa, I approached the task at hand.

To begin with, the Cleaver/Pruning knife must be sharpened to a razor edge to ensure as smooth a cut. Rough gashes takes longer to heal, and an open gash is an invitation for infection. Secondly, the edge of the Cleaver has to be washed with soapy water to ensure that the blade is as sterile as possible.

With my tools in hand, I began to assess the trees to see which branches had to be pruned. Both of the apple trees are just 2 years old.

At this early age, much of a fruit tree's energy must be devoted towards the growth of "leader" branches. These are main branches growing directly out off a trunk.

A young fruit tree should have no more than 2 to 4 such Leader Branches. If a tree has more than 4 branches, than no single branch would grow strong enough by the tree's 3rd year to bear the weight of apples. Both of the Apple trees had more than 7 such branches. So first, I cut off the leader branches. The cuttings were made along the length of the trunch, this minimizes the surface area of the wound and expedites the Tree's natural healing process.

Next, I proceeded to remove smaller branches growing at odd angles. Basically, the ideal tree would have branches extending outwards in the rough form of a cup. This allows maximum leaf exposure to sunlight, while also enabling air circulation in the middle of the tree's canopy. However, some branches grow inwards or in rather orthogonal directions. When fully leafed, these branches would block sunlight to other branches and increase the chance of fungus outbreaks.

With all the superfluous branches pruned, I then proceeded to apply a gum resin over the open cuts. The resin would quickly seal off the living sap wood from the external environment, this greatly speeds up the tree's recovery by reducing the risk of infection.

Garden Expansion work

2008-12-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

Over this Christmas break, we have been doing quite a bit of Garden Expansion work. We first filled in all the asparagus trenches that we dug out last Spring. Filling the trenches during the winter gives the asparagus roots more room to grow next year.

Next we increased the size of each of our 6 garden beds while putting in a barrier of concrete blocks. This creates a 3 sided border around each garden bed. The concrete border not only provides more thermal mass for the garden beds during cold spring/autumn nights but also serves as a mount for our future drip irrigation system. As we were setting in the blocks, a fog descended over neighborhood. I found it rather refreshing and more than a little bit mystical.

I'm thinking of holding off on pruning the apple trees. There are still some leaves on them, and pruning is generally not recommended until the absolute dead of winter. This is due to the risk of infecting the living sap wood of the tree's limbs when cutting them in warmer weather.

The harvest that won't end!!!

2008-11-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

The recent spate of mild weather has allowed my little garden to continue producing. The tomatoes haven't died yet. The beans, peppers, bitter melons and even onions are still going strong. This extended fall harvest may offset most of the losses due to the hail storm this summer. In any case, in the last 2 weeks, we harvested 80lbs of tomatoes, 11lbs of green peppers, 2 lbs of bitter melon, 1/2 lbs of onions, and 4 lbs of pole beans.

The end of the harvest

2008-10-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

The leaves are changing colors and our little garden is nearing it's productive end for this year. We are still getting a great deal of tomatoes. These plants are growing as if winter doesn't exist. The news is reporting a hard frost tonight, so it's likely that the tomato plants will expire tomorrow. The pole beans and bitter melons are still producing, though in reduced quantities now. They will yield a bit longer than the tomatoes, perhaps into early November. The peppers have just begun to yield, which meant that we need to plant them earlier next year.
The Kale failed again this year due to the depredations of rabbits. And the turnips are suffering a bit due to green worms. Still we should have some turnips this year. In total we harvested 70lbs of tomatoes, 15lbs of beans, 13lbs of bitter melon, and 4 lbs of peppers in the last 2 weeks.

Preserving Tomatoes!!!

2008-09-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

At this point, we have about 130 lbs of tomatoes in the refrigerator. When in a normal fridge, a ripe tomato will only last 2 to 3 weeks. After this period the entire tomato rots and becomes inedible. One easy way of preserving this food is to freeze it entirely. This is the method that we've choosen. First, we removed all the vines and stubs from each tomato. Then each tomato is thoroughly washed and dried with paper towels. The tomatoes are then sequestered into special zip lock vacuum seal bags, 5 lbs to a bag. The air is then pumped out of each bag, sealing the tomatoes tightly within it. The bags are then stored in the freezer. Using this method, the tomatoes can be stored for up to 6 months. We did this for 50 lbs of tomatoes tonight.

Cool Season Gardening

2008-09-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

This weekend has been a whirlwind of activity. The garden's denizens are now adapting to the cooler seasons. The tomatoe plants in Garden bed 5 are still growing as if summer will never end. My job is coax the most out of the plants before the first hard frost. The squash and cucumbers are largely gone due to the cooler weather. The bitter melon and pepper plants have taken their place in Garden Beds 2 and 3. The cool season beets are doing not so well in Garden bed 6, though the beans there are still producing abundantly. The beans this year has been badly damaged by both Hurricane Hannah and 2 species of pest beetles. Both the Japanese and Mexican beetles have ravaged my pole bean crop. Though unlike last year, the Mexican beetles proved to be the greater adversary. Still, the beans have somehow managed to survive and are producing abundantly. The onions and garlic in Garden bed 4 are now making a come back after the squash cover had died down. The asparagus plants are growing like crazy now, everyone of them is a small green bush. The sweet corn has done very badly. The beetles had stunted their growth already, and the hail basically destroyed half of the stalks.

My father and I spent hours harvesting from the garden. We picked 55 lbs of tomatoes, 34 lbs of beans, and 5 lbs of bitter mellon. This is a massive harvest by any standard. So now we have a couple of hundred pounds of vegetables in the refrigerator. We need to figure out a way to preserve all of it.

Last fishing trip of the year!

2008-09-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

America seems to be sliding into a second great depression. New York city was in a state of shock on Wednesday, so I decided to take 2 days off to go home to Pennsylvania. The garden in my parents' backyard will need a massive expansion if economic conditions continues to worsen. I also wanted to implement a few other preparations to weather this coming storm. So I got home and had a long chat with my father about what is happening in the markets and around the country. Afterwards, we decided to go fishing. The weather was getting cold and fishing will be nearly impossible in a couple of weeks. We drove to our favorite lake and begain casting the lines.

The first few hours were quite uneventful, nothing seemed to bite. Then, beginning around 5pm, we begain getting catch after catch. The volume was so high that we soon lost count of the all the fish that we were catching. White perch, northern crappies, yellow perch, there seemed to be an infinite supply of those. We caught so many that our container couldn't fit them all. Then, around 7pm, as the temperature sank with the sun, we caught our first giant carp fish. This invasive species had apparently migrated along the waterways down to southern PA. As you may recall, my last encounter with this fish(2 years ago) ended in dismal failure. The carp is a strange looking creature, it's face is so much more expressive than normal North American fish. Up close, it looks almost mammalian in origin. In anycase, after we got home, we spent hours gutting and cleaning the fish. We ended up with 48 pounds of cleaned fish, and another 25 lbs of fish offal. The guts we put directly into our compost bins. After checking the freezer, I noticed that we had at least 65 pounds of fish left at the end of the season. Not a bad haul at all!

Autumn Hurricanes!!!

2008-09-08T08:39:00.000-07:00

The fall came with a bang this weekend. It is very possible that our recent spate of storms and hurricanes is a part of the long term climate change affecting the planet. In any case, our little garden has suffered some structural damage from Hurricane Hannah on Saturday. Several of our bamboo trellis structures were knocked out by the high winds, this has effectively destroyed about 30% of our pole bean crop.

The bio-intensive garden bed has survived, but the tomato bushes have been badly battered with scores of green tomatoes rotting on the ground. I would say that at least 20% of the tomatoes have been lost. My poor calabash bush has been entirely destroyed by this storm, it's main trunk broken in two. The squash plants have fared better due to their larger, lower profile, though 2 large yellow squashes were lost due to Mildew rot. My onions are entirely gone, the earth underneath their shallow roots had given away due to the rains. The garlic with their larger, deeper roots seemed to have survived. The corn, turnips, and beets are all holding on.

All in all, the damage to my garden has been serious but not fatal. I would say that 15% to 20% of this garden's yield potential has been taken away by this storm. We still managed to harvest 13 lbs of beans, and 4 lbs of tomatoes last week.

The good earth!!!

2008-08-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

The garden continues to yield abundantly this week. The pole beans have begun to produce in bulk. We harvested 21 lbs of it. 38lbs of tomatoes were harvested as well. The summer squash plants are still going strong, with 23lbs of squash harvested. The summer is coming to an end and the squirrels are now back in force. Last summer they did quite a bit of damage to my tomatoes but this year, they seem to be focusing on the Calabash plant.

Home to PA this Weekend!

2008-08-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

In celebration of the Beijing Olympics, I have decided to go home to PA this weekend and watch the opening ceremony with my parents. On Friday, we ate a delicious dinner composing mostly of our own garden's produce along with abundant quantities of fish that we caught from nearby lakes and reservoirs. Right before dinner, I took a quick trip through the garden and picked up 12 lbs of tomatoes, 2 lbs of summer squash, 1 lb of beans, 1 green apple, and a green calabash!!! In the tour of my garden, I noticed a few things worth mentioning. The apple tree has sent out many new branches, these will need to be pruned off early next spring. We must do this so that the tree will put all of it's energy towards the development of 2 to 4 very strong leader branches. The single green apple that I harvested had been too much for it's young branch to take. The weak branch was broken by the heft of it's own fruit!

The bio-intensive tomato bed has reached it's period of peak production. The tiny 16 square feet bed is supporting a huge canopy of tomato vines 6 feet high and spread out far beyond the initial area of the garden bed. The bloom of plant mass hides hundreds of tomatoes in various stages of ripening. My father told me that the DAILY output of this system is around 10 lbs of tomatoes now. Of course, such productivity comes at a cost. That one bed now requires 3 gallons of water a day, triple the amount of water for any other bed.

The process of succession is well underway for the beans. Notice how the European pole beans are growing over the dried vines of the peas? I would expect the succession process to complete itself entirely around early september. I had wanted to plant the pole beans even earlier that we did, so that full succession would happen by mid August. But there were separate factors to consider here. The peas have vastly better biological resistence to Japanese beatles than pole beans. And the point was to allow for the main growth phase of the pole beans to occur AFTER the natural life cycle of the Japanese beatles(ending in early August). Thus, we were able to avoid the worst depredations of those pests at the cost of lower food production from the beans.

The summer squash vines has expanded well beyond it's original bed to take over the neighboring bed that had been reserved for the onions and garlic. The garlic still lives, but the red onions are entirely gone. Our peppers suffered the same fate. The squash plants have an extreme level of genetic diversity. The squashes harvested look vastly different from each other. Some of them are the elongated golden vegetables found in supermarkets. But quite a few of them are in various shades of green, yellow, or streaks of both. The shapes vary from common ellipsoids to round spheres to strangely contorted forms. The skin ranges from smooth to hairy to bumpy to downright spiky. Some squashes are so different from each other that they look like vegetables from different species than offspring from the same plant.

The calabash plants have done extremely well this year. I see 9 small calabash fruits growing on the vine in addition to the large one that I had harvested. This plant's flowers seems to be especially potent at attracting butterflies. The single calabash plant had 4 butterflies perching upon it. Of course I can't say enough good things about this vegetable. Eaten as small green fruits, the calabash is a wonderful source of vitamins and fiber. When allowed to fully mature, the fruit's pulp can be dried and used as a substitute for flour. When allowed to season under the sun, the calabash fruit hardens into a natural container that can be fashioned into bottles, cups, bowls, and plates ( and penis gourds for New Guinean Highlanders :P).

A Massive Harvest!!!

2008-08-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

My little suburban garden has exceeded all expectations of late. The Summer squash continues to produce in large quantities. We have been harvesting all sorts of tomatoes(cherry, brandywine, beefsteak, early girl) of late. It is absolutely incredible how many tomatoes we're harvesting given that we only cultivated 16 sq feet of soil with these plants. This week we have harvested 52lbs of summer squash, 58lbs of tomatoes, and 1 lb of pole beans.

Overflowing with tomatoes!!!!

2008-07-26T20:21:00.001-07:00

My suburban garden has been especially productive this past week. We harvested 15 lbs of cherry and early girl tomatoes.

The summer squash harvest has been equally abundant. We harvested 34 lbs of squash this week.

The old pea plants have almost ceased yielding. The pole beans that I planted in succession 5 weeks ago has just begun to yield. In all, about 3 lbs of peas and beans were harvested last week.

Squashes everywhere!

2008-07-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

The suburban garden continues to produce in abundant quantities. Lots of summer squash are being harvested. We took in 39 lbs of squash in the last week.

Pea production has gone down quite a bit. The weather is now getting too hot for peas. Still we managed to harvest 2 lbs of the stuff.

The tomatoes have finally begun to ripen. About 3 lbs of cherry and Early Girl tomatoes were pulled in last week.

Recycled Garbage!!!

2008-07-07T17:31:00.001-07:00

I harvested 1 lb of potatoes and beans today from my urban garden. The crops were growing in a soil medium composed largely of worm compost, shredded newspapers, and potting soil. The compost is created in from my worm compost bin. It seems like magic, food waste is converted into rich black compost which is then re-converted back into edible food!

Massive Suburban Harvest!

2008-07-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

I'm home in PA for this 4th of July weekend. This is summer at it's best. The cheer of sharing a massive garden harvest with family and close neighbors really makes a man feel at peace with the world. As such, an enormous garden harvest is indeed at hand. Most of my crops are bursting at the seams with produce. The squashes, peas, and onions have been yielding prodigious amounts of food. The corn and beans are coming up nicely. Though of course the Japanese beetles are in season again, they have been effectively contained by the design of the garden. Learning from last year's hard experience, I have selected 3 varieties of Eurasian peas, followed by later maturing Eurasian pole beans. Eurasian legumes(peas especially) seems to have an inhibitory effect on these pests. As such there are far fewer of these beetles than last year. The few who are invading this garden have switched to attacking my apple trees though.

The bio-intensive tomato bed seems to have gone crazy with growth. There are green tomatoes everywhere. I estimate that there are over 400 tomatoes growing in the 16 square feet bed. The bio-intensive approach is clearly working very well. Though nothing comes for free, the incredible yield is earned through higher inputs of human labour and water.

The plant polycutures in my garden has attracted a huge variety of insects and birds and reptiles. The incredible diversity of life stood in stark contrast with the monoculture of the lawn grass. I saw lady bugs, spiders, tiger beetle, dragon flies, glow worms, mayflies, gnats, fireflies, soldier beetles, japanese beetles, leafhoppers, preying mantis, ants, aphids, snails, cicadas, rollie pollies, worms, stinkbugs, centipedes. While working in the garden, I saw 2 different kinds of toads chilling in the shade. Blue jays, robins, sparrows, and finches flew around the garden, picking up insects for lunch.

But onto the harvest. Over the last 3 days, huge quantity of food was harvested:

52 lbs of potatoes
13 lbs of peas
4 lbs of onions/garlic
46 lbs of summer squash
3 lbs of Lettuce

On top of all that, we caught another 5 lbs of fish!

Suburban Garden Update!

2008-06-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

The summer is in full swing in our suburban garden in PA. I have been trying to post last week's garden picks but haven't gotten the opportunity until now. The apple trees have apparently been hit by the Cedar Apple Rust, I have had to apply some organic fungicides to get it under control. The rest of the garden is doing fairly well. The asparagus plants are thriving now, with 5 of the original 7 plants sending up fresh pine tree like shoots.

The peas are doing very well, now they have grown up to 6 feet tall. All the pea plants are yielding very heavily at this rate. I expect the rate of yield to sustain itself until early august. At any rate, the pole beans that I have sown in succession have begun to establish themselves at the base of the peas.

The Summer squash plants have gone crazy with growth. The entire bed is covered by their broad leaves. Underneath the canopy, there are scores of small baby golden squashes growing.
The peppers alongside the squash are also doing well, they have been flowering. I'm expecting to get squashes within a couple of weeks, and peppers within a month.

The tomatoes have been growing vigorously. I have seen over 100 small green tomatoes growing in the bio-intensive matrix that I've set up. One thing that I have noticed is that this style of gardening is very water intensive, even with heavy mulching.

The potatoes are thriving and will be ready for harvest within 2 weeks at the most. I can't wait!

So in any case, I harvested 6 lbs of peas and 4 lbs of onions and garlic shoots.

First Fishing Trip of the Year

2008-06-14T17:59:00.001-07:00

For Father's day Weekend, I took my parents out for lunch. Afterwards, I went fishing with my old man. Fishing is a great way to bond with one's father. It provides a great sense of continuity as well as free food. In any case, we went to Marsh Creek and went to our business with great vigor. The conditions were perfect for pan-fish, the weather was hot and humid forcing the fish closer to the water surface. We caught 46 panfish, yielding 27 lbs for the freezer and 10 lbs for the compost heap.

mile 200 Montauk Point and Journey's end

2008-06-11T13:56:00.001-07:00

I spent half a day on Tuesday riding around the shorelines of Montauk. Everything was so beautiful there, I didn't really want to leave. The effects of the sea air on a hot summer day was quite wonderful. Near the sea, the temperature was in the low 80s versus around 100 degrees inland. At the Montauk downs state park, I gathered some stones smoothed by the sea, they were very intricate looking. I think I shall give a few of them to my friends and turn the rest into amulets.

Near Montauk Point, I saw these strange looking sand dudes. The were basically hills of sand with ferns or perhaps dwarf trees growing all around them. It was like a scene from an alien planet, definitely very interesting. After awhile, I got a bit tired and the damages done to my body over the last 3 days had begun to catch up with me. I assessed the situation and came to the realization that I could not safely go on. My body has been thoroughly devastated. My stock of dried meat and fish were entirely gone and there were no sources of replenishment to be found in Montauk.

I knew that I had little chance of biking another 180 miles back to NYC, so I decided to call it a day and head home on the Long Island Rail. I arrived back home to the Upper East Side on Tuesday evening. And now, I'm still recovering. My legs were at first numb, and then under intense pain all of last night, and are now sore but flexible again.

While it's true that I didn't circumscribe all of long island, I had succeeded in crossing the entire length of it alone on a bicycle. One can only aim for the stars and do one's best. And I gave this journey everything that I had, and thus have no regrets. I had never gone so far on muscle power nor had I suffered so much for it. But I think this trip was entirely worth the pain and discomfort. I had pushed myself to the bleeding edge of my physical and mental endurance. I had learned a great deal about the practical side of bicycle travel and the scope of the fuel/food crisis. And finally, I have met many decent(and a few not so decent) people along the way. So I think I'll remember this trip for a long time. :)

mile 190 Downtown Montauk

2008-06-10T07:14:00.001-07:00

After playing at the beaches for an hour, I rode around down town Montauk and got some food. My bicycle felt a little bit weird, so I took it to the Montauk Bike Shop. I told them of the purpose of my quest. Raj from the shop asked for the store's motto to be posted, so here goes: ride the wave! :-D

In any case, they gave my bike a performance tune-up. And I accidentally forgot my helmet there. To the pretty girl in the left of the picture, I know that you have already checked out my blog. If you're out there reading this right now, can you please send my helmet back? Just private message me and I'll send you my mailing address.

mile 186 The shores of Montauk!!!!

2008-06-10T06:21:00.001-07:00

The last half mile to Montauk was a ride down a series of hills. At last, the cool blast of ocean air swept over my body, as the bicycle cruised into the other limits of the town of Montauk. The highway ran by the shore line, and I road onto the beaches of Montauk. My body was utterly broken. All of my food was gone. Yet nevertheless, words cannot do justice to the joy in my heart! Only when I asked someone to take my picture did I realize that I had been weeping uncontrollably. These were of course tears of happiness. Despite all the odds, all the pain, and all the warnings to go back, I had finally made it to the eastern shores of Montauk!!!!

mile 184 Hither Hills State Park

2008-06-10T05:45:00.001-07:00

The last 2 miles since leaving Napeague Park had been a continuous climb uphill. I had no feelings left in my legs, shoulders, or buttocks. My back was feeling like it's are being stabbed by hot white blades. I just kept saying to myself that the pain didn't matter, that I was going to make it to Montauk after all. The final two files to Montauk was a series of steep hills, it was a cruel, back-breaking experience.

mile 182 Napeague State Park

2008-06-10T05:05:00.001-07:00

As I sped through Napeague, I couldn't help but notice the interesting flora. There were forests of these dwarf trees everywhere. The land was real sandy, so I guess deciduous trees of greater size simply couldn't establish themselves there. I saw no sight of the ocean in that part, but the sound of distant waves and the smell of sea salt permeated this world. I only had 4 or 5 miles to go until Montauk!

mile 178 Amagansett

2008-06-10T04:39:00.001-07:00

I left East Hampton early on Tuesday morning. I was trying to reach Montauk before the day's heat got to me. After 8 miles of riding, I had reached the Historic village of Amagansett. The village had a "pseudo-historic" touristy feel to it. As I biked through the settlement, I noticed a van ahead of me that was dropping of Hispanic people. It made at least a dozen stops before it drove away on a side road. I suppose this is a local form of concentrated car pooling? In any case, it was only 10 miles to down town Montauk. So I kept on riding.

mile 170 East Hampton

2008-06-10T04:22:00.001-07:00

I arrived in East Hampton at around 8:30pm on Monday night. The last 5 miles were very tough on me. I had to stop 3 times to recover my breath and rub down my legs to get the blood circulation going. Once in East Hampton, I got a room in the Hampton Inn, and proceeded to get dinner. I walked over to the TownLine BBQ and ordered an entire rack of Ribs. I ate outside that evening. The ribs were awesome! But the real show-stealer was the scenery. Someone had planted a large field of oats right behind the restaurant. Being so close to the sea, there was the distant sound of waves, and a cool breeze that smelled refreshingly of sea spray. As the breeze swept pass the oat fields, the plants rippled and waved almost like the waves of the ocean. The diffuse, pink glow of twilight, the salty breeze, and the grain field "ocean" made everything seem surreal and magical. I felt as if I was no longer in this reality any more, but some kind of parallel universe found in Monet paintings.

mile 165 Bridgehampton

2008-06-10T03:39:00.001-07:00

I arrived in Bridgehampton in very poor shape on Monday evening. A few miles outside of town, a blond teenager in a BMW convertible had chucked a half filled bottle of soda at me as he drove by. There were two girls in the car with him, and they all laughed as the car zoomed past me. I was too tired to make a fuss over it. I could barely keep riding due to saddle fatigue. As I rode into town, I saw a Carvel's Ice Cream shop on a small hill. So I did what any delirious cyclist would've done under the circumstances. I went and got me some ice cream! As I was eating my treat, I had the good opportunity of meeting up with Ruth, her daughter Patty, and Patty's son Matt. Ruth mentioned that she's afraid of going to NYC because of the summer blackouts. I thought it was a real good point, since the summer blackout of 2003 taught me just how quickly things could unravel in a large city without power.

mile 160

2008-06-09T14:31:00.000-07:00

arrived in south hampton. mcmansions and nice cars everywhere. temp cooler now, im getting a 2nd wind! :-)

mile 155 Hampton Bays

2008-06-09T14:01:00.001-07:00

There were a whole lot of yachts in Hampton Bays. Everything was so very posh in that town. Gleaming cars, huge houses by the shore, private yachts. There were mansions by the sea side where the owners hand artificially converted the nearby shoreline into a beach of their own choosing. One house had only round stones for a beach. Another had only white sands. Yet another had only shells. It was a feat of incredible opulence. I absorbed all of these images into my brain. I think the pain that was afflicting my body made me remember these things with more clarity. In any case, my body was near it's breaking point. I could no longer feel my legs or buttocks as I pedalled down the roads. My back was this giant mass of throbbing agony, and my arms and neck were on fire. My father called and asked me to quit. I got real angry and told him to stop bothering me. I regretted saying that almost as soon as I disconnected the phone. But I had to keep going, the day was near it's end and I had to make it.

mile 145 Don't grow up to be that bum!

2008-06-09T12:43:00.001-07:00

As I was bicycling between East Quoque and Hampton Bay, I marveled at the surroundings. There was stretches of beautiful coastlines everywhere. The roads were magnificent, there was even a bicycle lane for me to ride on. As I road on the bike path, a huge Mercedes SUV came behind me. It honked like 3 or 4 times behind me for some reason. I was wondering why the car couldn't simply pass around me, since we were on a 2 lane road, and I was on the designated bike path. As I coasted to a halt by a stop light, the SUV came up right next to me and it's windows rolled down. Inside there sat a middle aged Asian woman with her son. She was actually pretty good looking as I recall. "Get off the road and let normal people drive" she yelled. I was very tired and in a lot of physical discomfort to argue, so I simply shrugged. Then the woman said something to her son in the Shanghainese dialect. Little did she know that I too was born in Shanghai. She told her son, "see him, don't you grow up to be like that bum." And with that, she drove the SUV past me.

mile 140 Westhampton

2008-06-09T12:17:00.001-07:00

As I rode into Westhampton, my shoulders were feeling numb, as were my legs and buttocks. They felt numb because the nerves there were overstimulated by the pain and have by then ceased to relay additional information to my brain. Otoh, both my arms and my neck were badly sun-burnt and the skin was breaking own. I felt as if someone was stabbing knife into my spine every time I pedalled. There were lots of gated houses in Westhampton. The roads, the lawns, and municipal facilities, everything was exquisitely maintained. The cars were real nice looking too, lots of Mercedes and BMWs on the road.

mile 130 East Moriches

2008-06-09T11:02:00.001-07:00

As I biked into the Hamlet of East Moriches, my back was hurting like hell. I must have twisted a muscle along my spine right before getting into Shirley. I was also running really low on food. I had consumed 4 muffins, all the beef jerky, and half of my dried fish. I still had 2 muffins and 6 Oatmeal bars left though. So with that in mind, I stopped at Cathy's Kitchen in East Moriches for some lunch. Her Eggplant Parm was really good. Cathy mentioned that she had to close the store early today due to the heat, that it was causing power outages in NYC. I had been pretty much out of communication contact with the city, and was real surprised to hear that. She told me to consider taking a break from biking today since the heat could cause more accidents for me. I thanked her for the kind words and kept going.

mile 122 "Homeless" in downtown Shirley

2008-06-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

I rode for a few miles through the town and stopped by a 7/11. I really needed to get more water, I couldn't go on in this heat for much longer without it. As I entered, the store's Indian shop keeper looked at my bicycle and then at me and said "please, you have to leave the store now." I told him that I just needed to buy some water. He then told me to beat it, saying that homeless people are not allowed in his store. I left without another word. I understood how I must have looked. Sun burnt, dis-shelved, soaked in sweat with white rings of dried salt around my face and arms. In Eastern Long Island, I guess I really could've passed myself off as a homeless person! :P In any case, I stopped half a mile down the road and got 3 Liters of water from a hot dog stand.

mile 120 Shirley

2008-06-09T09:33:00.001-07:00

I had barely limped into the town of Shirley. I was dehydrated and in great pain. I saw a woman mowing the lawn of a storage complex. I stopped right there and then and asked her for some water. Maddy was her name, and she came back with Jim and a bottle of ice cold spring water. Jim and Maddy gave me the spring water for free and warned me of possible heat stroke, they were really decent :). My scraped hand was festering under the heat. And after gulping down the cold water , I quickly applied alcohol patches and a band aid to the wound. Jim was telling me that he biked to work every day. He mentioned that people around here looked at cyclists as either crazy or as homeless people. I thanked them for the water and advice and was on my way once again.

mile 115 Caught in the heat

2008-06-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

The 15 miles between Sayville and the town of Shirley was very hard on me. A combination of poor roads, 100 degree temp. had multiple muscle cramps forced me to stop often for breaks. During these breaks I drank prodigious amounts of water and took potassium tablets to reduce the intense pain of the cramps. I could no longer feel my calves. Even when I pinched my calve muscles, I felt nothing. The upper reaches of my legs, buttocks, and shoulders felt lanced through with pain. As I closed into Shirley, I had run out of water again. And near the outer limits of the town, a delivery truck passed very closely by such that I had to jerk away from the edge of the road. A piece of skin on my right hand was torn off by that abrupt move. I heard a small popping sound in my back, and my entire spine was suddenly arching in agony. It was so painful that I couldn't breath for a minute. But I kept on going.

mile 106 Sayville

2008-06-09T07:54:00.001-07:00

I came to Sayville to refill my water empty water bottles. The sun was so hot that I had barely made it on the water that had on hand. While there, I met Carl, a fellow biker from Sayville. Carl had been bicycling for fun for the last 20 years. He said that we have plenty of resources, the government is just bullshitting us as usual. After getting water at a gas station, I was on my way again.

mile 105 West Sayville

2008-06-09T07:38:00.001-07:00

I made it West Sayville as the sun really started to beat down on everything. This town had a lot of golf resorts and country clubs. I saw stretches of nice houses and cars. Not surprisingly, I was the only person out on the road. The weather was in truth too hot to safely travel in, but I still kept going.

mile 98 Oakdale

2008-06-09T07:15:00.001-07:00

The town of Oakdale seem to be quite shabby. I didn't see much of anything besides residential houses there. The weather had heated up to 100 degrees and I was gulping down water like mad. I had started the day with 3 litters of water, by the time I reached this town, I had less than a liter left.

mile 87 Starting out on Day 2

2008-06-09T06:15:00.001-07:00

On day 2, I left the inn at 8:30am. I had eaten 2 waffles for breakfast, and took 6 huge blueberry muffins along with me. The sky was pure blue...like sapphire. Within a few miles of riding, my calves started to hurt again. My buttocks felt really painful from the get go. I was initially able to ignore the discomfort.

mile 86 Bay Shore

2008-06-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

I had made it to the Bay Shore inn for the night. My body was hurting so much that every step I took made me wince, but I was happy that I was still breathing. In any case, I had dinner that night at Happy Buffet, a near-by Chinese restaurant. The food there was in truth very plain, but in my euphoric state of mind, every morsel there tasted like ambrosia! I wolfed down 4 platters of food and like 7 ice cream cones. One waitress, Jin, came over and asked me if everything was ok? I told her of the purpose of my journey, and inquired about her experiences. Jin, like many Chinese immigrants, was working as a waitress and commuting to NYC every weekend. I asked her if she would consider just living up in Bay Shore someday on a permanent basis. She told me that the boredom of the town would drive her insane.

So later that night I looked over my bike. The earlier accident had damaged my frontal reflector and bell beyond all hopes of repair. The bike's rear gear-driller had been skewed out of alignment, that I was able to fix. Then I proceeded to check my own body for damages. The nether regions of my buttocks were bruised to the point of being blue and purple. My left butt-cheek had sustained a 2 inch wide scraping. Basically, when my bike crashed in the forest road, the friction of the seat mount had torn off a couple of inches of the skin on my behind. I applied antibiotic cream and band aid from my first aid kit, and went promptly to sleep.

mile 80 Battle with the God of Thunder

2008-06-08T16:42:00.001-07:00

I was just several miles from bay shore as the thunderstorm descended with full fury. Riding alone through forested lands by the sea, I was hit by everything at once. The heavy rains caused a sudden drop in temperature from 100 degrees to around 60 degrees. I had been riding for 10 hours straight, and the sudden temperature drop caused my leg muscles to spasm uncontrollably. The darkened heavens sent bolts of lightening down all around me. It was a vision of fierce and untamed beauty. The winds of the thunderstorm were quite strong, and they somehow transformed the sound of the nearby sea waves. The sound of the wind and sea in concert was haunting, like the agonized wailing of hundreds of people.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightening struck a massive oak tree 30 yards to my right. At the edge of my vision, I saw the darkened silhouette of the tree's canopy as it was sheared off by the bolt from the heavens. The flash of lightening blinded me, the thunder was like a thousand rifles going off at once. An earth-shattering crack followed by the ringing deafness of my own ear drums. Something came a split second after the thunder, it was a blast of air. The air pressure was very strong and hot to the point of being painful. The air bubble enveloped the right side of my body and knocked me off balance. I fought for control as my bicycle skidded to a crash landing in a clearing by the side of the road. I took the picture then.

I admit now that I was probably hallucinating from fatigue, pain, and shock. But what transpired in my mind then seemed just as real to me as anything. I thought that I was fated to die just then. I thought that Thor, the god of thunder had wanted me dead. I imagined that the howling winds were the souls of countless Massapequa Indians calling me into the underworld. I got onto my bicycle and began pedalling hard. Pretty soon, both of my legs began cramping. The pain was savage and unrelenting, but I kept pushing onwards. In my disoriented state, I felt strangely disconnected from the pain, almost as if I was a spectator on my own plight.

A man should not be forced to contemplate his own mortality. Death, if it comes , should be swift and hopefully sudden. But there I was, on my bike, in the middle of nowhere, contemplating my own death. For one thing, life certainly did not flash before my eyes, that must be a Hollywood gimmick. But I did feel quite a bit of regret then, regret at not being able to keep some of the promises that I had made to myself and others. I would not be able to teach my kid cousin how to make arrows out of ash wood, obsidian, and turkey feathers. I promised him that two winters ago, when we crafted his first red-oak longbow together, but other things always took priority. I thought that I would not be able to give my mother a grandson as she wanted. I had promised her that last year when she was (falsely) diagnosed with cancer. I was greatly saddened by that thought. But most of all, I regretted never finding a woman who could love me in return. It was something that I had always wanted but apparently never had. The sadness soon turned into anger and anger became rage. I didn't want to die just then, and I pedalled even harder. Harder than I have ever pedalled in my life. I wanted life. I remember cursing aloud at Thor and Odin in the pouring rain, daring them to strike me down, promising revenge if they did.

It seemed like an eternity, but the worst of the storm passed as I came out of the woods in sight of the town of Bay Shore. To the Western Horizon, I can see the last rays of sunlight coming out of the edge of the storm clouds. I felt as if I had defied the will of the gods and wrested back my own life. It felt awesome!!!!!

mile 70 Babylon

2008-06-08T16:17:00.001-07:00

As I rode through the place, I understood why most Montauk Century bike competitions began in the Town of Babylon. This place looked extremely prosperous! The buildings were as beautifully decorated as they were architecturally ornate. The roads were in superb condition, far better than what I had seen so far. Alongside of the town center, there were parks with a series of small ponds and walking paths through the pond. By this point, my leg muscles felt like pistons of blistering pain as I kept pedalling along. Storm clouds were converging overhead, and I saw a Free Mason's lodge by the roadside. I thought about just staying there for the night or to at least ride out the storm. But then I remembered that I had not yet passed the 2nd of 3 mysterious of the Masonic Guild. In any case, I rode on, ever mindful of the time and the approaching storm.

mile 65 Lindenhurst

2008-06-08T15:56:00.001-07:00

There seems to be very little to the village of Lindenhurst. Basically just 2 rolls of houses on the sides of Montauk Highway. The roads were very poorly maintained, and my body was becoming unstable. Every pot hole in the road sent jolts of pain through my buttocks and up my back. I was riding in the forward control position. This position increases pedalling efficiency at the cost of back muscle fatigue. I knew I only had 15 miles to go before I reach my 1st night's resting place at Bay shore. So I really put my heart into it, I wanted to reach bay shore before night fall.

mile 60 Massapequa

2008-06-08T15:36:00.001-07:00

My legs and buttocks were hurting intensely as I glided through down town Massapequa. Moreover, I REALLY needed to relieve myself at that moment. So I did what any reasonable person would've done in the situation. I went to the Massapequa Chamber of Commerce building and proceeded to find a restroom. While there, I grabbed a few brochures with local maps on them. Once in the restroom, I took much longer than usual to get the job done. I had been eating non stop for the entire day and thus had a lot of waste materials to purge. So I was quite bored sitting there and started flipping through the brochures. One caught my eye, it was something from the bureau of Indian affairs. Basically, the native American Massapequa tribe used to control a large portion of the Southern long island coast. At some point in the 1690s, European colonists basically passed on small pox to the natives and largely wiped that tribe off the map. The modern town was built on top of the old Massapequa main village. The brochure goes on to mention that the surrounding areas used to be Massapequa corn fields and settlements. The colonists basically just took over the Indian villages and fields that were cleared of Indians through the power of epidemic diseases. In any case, I was much intrigued with the story, but had to be on my way.

mile 50 Wantagh

2008-06-08T15:06:00.001-07:00

When I made it to the village of Wantagh, my buttocks was hurting like a can of smashed assholes. Furthermore, my legs were getting a bit sore from a day of peddling. It started raining lightly, and I asked a nearby cyclist if there was a place to stop and eat. Greg, the cyclist asked me where I was going, and I said Montauk. At that, he told me that I was insane and that I was going to get myself killed. He said that the best thing I should do is peddle my way to the Massapequa train station and go home or to Montauk on the LIRR. I politely thanked him for his opinion and was on my way. A few miles of riding brought me to Marinelli's, a small family owned pizzashop. The owner Lou was working there along with his two sons and daughter. I got two bottles of spring water and a slice of pizza(which was fantastic by the way :D). As I sat out the rain, we talked about what I was doing on the trip and the pizza business in general. With Marinelli's the situation is much the same, Lou mentioned that the prices of everything seems to be inflating. With that, Lou asked his son Charlie to stop wasting electricity and gas, in the normal way that a father communicates to his son.

So I finished the pizza and was about to go on my way. I asked for the bill, and was surprised to find that the pizza was on the house. It was really good pizza made by a very decent bunch of people. As I was leaving, Charlie asked me to post this on my blog so here goes: "Buy more pizza less gas!" So seriously...if you guys are ever in Wantagh, give Merinelli's pizza a try!

mile 40 Merrick

2008-06-08T14:33:00.001-07:00

I couldn't help but notice that the town of Merrick had a lot of shiny office parks filled with shiny cars as I rode through there. As I biked along the road, I noticed that a woman from the post office was staring at me from alongside the road. So I stopped and said "hi!" Now Karen who worked at the post office asked me where I was going and why I was riding a bicycle in a road filled with cars. I mentioned to her that I was riding to Montauk. She said that I was out of my mind, that I was going to be killed. I just smiled, told her why I was doing this, and mentioned that I had already ridden 40 miles and received not a scratch(not entirely true as my buttocks was scratched a bit then). At that Karen smiled and mentioned that she thought about biking to work sometimes but was too afraid of the car traffic. I told her that the greatest danger of riding in car traffic was the bicyclist's FEAR of being hit by a car. A person's fear of auto accidents creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. That made her laugh. She mentioned that I was crazy for doing this, but it was a good cause, and she thinks I can make it to Montauk alive! I thanked her for the compliment and was on my way!

mile 35 Between Oceanside and Baldwin

2008-06-08T13:55:00.001-07:00

Riding into the sea side resort town of Baldwin was a hassle. The roads were not of high quality, and my buttocks were itchy and sore as hell in the heat. In the town center, I met Kevin and Marybeth. They were hardcore amateur bikers who had already done 47 miles that day. They mentioned that the weather was too hot and that I needed to take salt and potassium tablets to keep my muscles from cramping. I went with them into this nearby Italian restaurant called Seven Brothers to get some food. The people there were super nice and allowed me to keep my bike inside their store. Additionally, they let me recharge my smart phone in their kitchens. I talked with the restaurant owner about food prices, and he mentioned that his business was taking a beating from the cost of meats, pasta, and gas. More expensive food and gas means less tourists to the resort town. I told the store owner about my blog and thanked him for letting me use his kitchen's power outlet. He asked me to mention his restaurant on my blog. So here goes: Seven Brothers Italian Restaurant makes an absolutely awesome Clam Rigatoni, it was so good that it literally melted in my mouth as I downed the entire plate!!!

mile 30 Rockville Center

2008-06-08T11:49:00.001-07:00

After several miles, I was literally burning up in the high temperatures of the noon day, and I was a bit lost. So I did what any self-respecting person would do in such circumstances, I went to a 7/11 by the road. There, I met Charlie. Now Charlie had just bought a new bike to commute to work with. He was really decent and gave me a detailed map of long island to follow. I was finally able to ditch my outdated bikely route instructions. After studying the map a bit, I decided to follow Merrick Road on to Merrick and then switch to the Montauk Highway all the way to the Eastern tip of Long Island.

mile 28 Valley Stream

2008-06-08T11:47:00.001-07:00

The sun was heating up my black bike helmet to dangerous temperatures as I biked through Valley Stream. The traffic on Grand Ave was quite heavy and as I biked I noticed a trend. If you bike closer to the edge of the road(to feel safer), the car drivers will almost instinctively come closer to you, forcing you even further to the edge. This is a potentially very dangerous trend, so I biked far from the right hand edge of Grand, forcing the cars to go around me a bit. While this seems more dangerous in theory, it worked out real well for me.

In any case, the blazing sunlight was killing me and I was forced to stop at a watermelon stand. There I met Ezra. He's a produce farmer from Georgia trying to offload some of his watermelons near NYC. The man gave me a gallon of ice water for free. After I drank my fill and loaded my water bottles, I paid him 2 dollars for a quarter of a melon, which we then shared. Ezra told me about how the high gas prices were killing small farmers across the land. He mentioned that it now costs him 1300 dollars to ship a single truckload of produce to NYC as compared to under 1000 dollars just 4 months ago. He was wondering when the government will start rationing gas...since small truck suppliers like him can't take much more of this high fuel cost. I had no answer for him. In any case, I thanked Ezra for the ice water and went on my way.

mile 25 Parson Center

2008-06-08T09:40:00.001-07:00

I arrived at Parson's center, on the edge of Queens. The sun was terribly bright and hot, and I scrambled to find a place of shade. I reached a shady bus stop and started guzzling water. There, I met Joe, a social worker. Joe had a car in queens but had to sell it since gas prices made it difficult for him to keep the vehicle. Now he is relying on buses and his feet to get around the area. Joe, in the picture, was asking me why we are sending troops and food to other countries when there are people without enough food and gas in queens? That is a damned good question, since I have seen quite a few of what appears to be homeless people in this area already.

mile 20 Near Jamaica Queens

2008-06-08T08:19:00.001-07:00

I was lost in queens! I was trying to get to Jamaica ave, but apparently my pre-planned route had streets from 2006! In any case, I decided to ask for directions. The first person I asked was Simon, a fellow biker. Simon had biked to here from Staten Island(taking the ferry to Manhattan) his directions got me to the Interborough parkway, which is now named something else. And then I bumped into Rich and Flora. Rich was showing me his new bicycle seat in the picture. Rich is trying to switch to bicycling as his main mode of urban transport. That couple was really nice and pointed me along to Jamaica avenue!

mile 15 Central Queens

2008-06-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

As I rode through Queens, I noticed that the landscape became successively more degraded the further east one rides. Williamsburg was replete with hipsters. But as I rode onwards, I noticed that entire districts seems to be in a semi-abandoned state with broken windows, collapsing roofs, and of course graffiti. Furthermore, the quality of the roads were going down. The roads here had way more pot holes and cracked pavement sections than in Manhattan.

mile 9 Williamsburg Bridge

2008-06-08T07:12:00.001-07:00

Riding on the Williamsburg bridge was not as impressive in person. For one thing, you're constantly surrounded by these huge metal screen walls. The screens constricted the views of both Manhattan and Queens. At the apex of the bridge, I stopped for some water and beef jerky. On the down slope, the bridge was an absolute thrill to glide cross. I was able to glide to a speed of 25 mph or so before leaving the bridge and entering queens.

mile 2 Midtown Manhattan

2008-06-08T06:36:00.001-07:00

It was 8:30 am on Sunday Morning, I had overslept the 7am starting time. Before heading out, I had slapped on some sunblock. Riding the bicycle through mid-town was quite pleasant. There weren't too many cars on Sunday morning, and the view of the city scape was magnificent to behold.

Long Island Bicycle Quest....Supply Gathering

2008-06-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

It has been a long day. I have been running across the city gathering supplies for the trip tomorrow. I have mounted 2 side saddles to the hybrid bike to carry the supplies. After searching several farmer's markets and the local Chinatown, the following set of food supplies have been gathered.

1. 1 lb of concord grape raisins
2. 1 lb of beef jerky
3. 1 lb of smoked fish
4. 10 oatmeal bars
5. 10 vitamin supplement tablets
6. 10 potassium supplement tablets

As for equipment I'm bringing the following:

1. 1 Multi-purpose Swiss army knife
2. 1 Compact bike tire repair kit
3. 1 Compact First aid kit
4. 1 Bottle of Sun block
3. 1 Compact bike pump
4. 1 Liter rail mounted plastic water bottle
5. 2 Liter back mounted plastic water bottle
6. 1 LED flashlight
7. 1 miniature compass
8. 1 rain poncho
9. 1 Kryptonite U-Lock
10. 1 Smartphone+charger
11. 1 box of matches
12. Maps of Long Island

Fully loaded, I'll be hauling 25 lbs of gear on this journey. If truth be told, I'm a little bit nervous. This could be a dangerous journey. Still, it's something that I have committed myself to doing.

Long Island Bicycle Quest....Initial Planning

2008-06-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while the spirit of adventure and wander-lust invades the heart of man. I'm no exception to that rule. A hunger in the soul demands a journey that will test the limits of my physical and mental endurance. This quest will not be one of ease and luxury. But rather a tough journey to explore the physical, social, and spiritual world around me. While the desire to go off the beaten path burns strongly within me, I will not be pitting myself against large tusked animals as in my earlier quests.

For this trip, I will embark upon a solo bicycle journey to circumscribe the entirety of long island. Through the trip, I am going to explore the feasibility of long range personal transport without the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. It is my belief that such sustainable transport systems will be critical to us in this age of depleting fossil fuels and natural resources. And as such, understanding the nature of sustainable transport paradigms is a core goal of Grown UP Permaculture. Thus, relying on muscle power, fueled by locally grown organic foodstuffs, I will be attempting a 300 mile journey from the heart of New York City to the Eastern shores of Montauk and back in 4 days. I will be riding through urban boroughs, suburban districts, farms, gated communities, shoreline towns, forested state parks, and rugged hillsides. My hope is to stop at the small towns and communities dotting long island and gain an understanding of people's grassroots responses to the global food, energy, and environmental crisis that is hitting our society.

A solitary bike journey of such distance requires a meticulous degree of planning and preparation. Going by muscle power alone, even a minor accident could have very serious consequences. Thus I'm leaving little to chance by factoring in a high margin of safety. Firstly, I have replaced my used mountain bike with a new hybrid road/mountain bike. The old bike has served me well, however, I fear that it's braking system and gear train will not survive such a long distance journey without a major failure. Furthermore, the bicycle's sub-optimal height and off-road wheels served as a huge drag on performance. The less than ideal height causes user fatigue, while the wheels reduced the cruising speed. The new bike will enable a comfortable cruising speed of 20 miles per hour.

I'm integrating the idea of redundancy into every level of my preparations. I have enhanced the vehicle's reflector plates with mounted back-up LED lights for night time riding. If those lights fail, there is a portable LED flashlight that I can mount onto the bike. For the bicycle itself, I have assembled a compact repair kit in case of minor failures. For navigation, I'm relying on GPS feeds and streaming Google Earth Satellite maps from my smartphone. But in case this fails, I have backup paper road maps and a compass. In case of minor accidents, a compact first aid kit will suffice. In case of serious accidents, I have cached pre-recorded voice and text distress messages and added them to a list of emergency phone numbers and email addresses in my smartphone. If worse comes to worse, I can notify half a dozen emergency contacts of my situation with the touch of a button or a single voice command. Lastly, I'm taking along a multi-purpose swiss-army knife. It has been by my side on a every major adventure that I have gone on.

I have planned my bike route in such a way that at no point would I ever be more than 7 miles away from a town and it's train station. I will be hugging the coast of Long Island for the entire journey. The terrain will be relatively flat along the coast lines. Nevertheless, I have acquired a bicycle train pass from the Long Island Rail System, just in case my body fails due to fatigue at some point. In any case, tomorrow, I will be gathering local food stuffs and additional supplies for the trip. So stay tuned!!! :D

Suburban Garden Update

2008-06-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

My father has been kind enough to send over some photos of our garden in PA. Things seem to be going rather well there. The peas are now having sending forth beautiful white blossoms as they climb up the bamboo poles that I set up a couple of months back. This is the essence of vertical farming as every cubic inch of a space is utilized by the food producing plants.

The summer squash plants are doing very well, they are at the stage where they can cover much of the ground area of the garden bed. The pole beans have so far been unmolested by beetles, the lord be praised for that!!! The peppers have not been growing as fast as the squash, but hopefully it'll get enough height to tower over the ground cover that the squash plants will eventually create. The lone European eggplant seems to still be hanging on to life, though clearly the mould from last year seems to be striking the plant's leaves yet again. It appears that 2 of the 3 transplanted Bok Choi greens have survived so far.

The onions and garlic are doing much the same as before. They have been continuously producing lush green stalks that can be periodically harvested for the kitchen. It'll be a couple more months before we can dig up the delicious onion bulbs and garlic cloves that are as yet still growing under ground.

The bio-intensive garden bed looks like it's going crazy! The 4 tomatoes have matured very quickly and 2 of them are already bearing small green tomatoes. The cucumber plant has been growing rapidly as well but has so far fallen short of providing full ground cover. If the bio-intensive methodology espoused by Jeavons prove to be effective, this single bed could produce hundreds of pounds of tomatoes and cucumber this year. But we'll just have to wait and see!

The potatoes in both the garden bed and the containers have grown to their peak size. They have as of yet not flowered, but we're expecting it within the next couple of weeks. The container potatoes have grown especially vibrant. The plants tower over the containers, straining to absorb every last photon of sunlight around them. Life in the garden is such a beautiful thing.

Circumscribing the Island

2008-05-31T19:10:00.000-07:00

Ever since I shelled out 50 dollars of hard currency for my used mountain bicycle, I had wanted to use the vehicle to circumscribe the isle of Manhattan. The bicycle is an incredibly energy efficient transportation device. For every mile traversed, the rider uses only about 25 calories of food energy. Riding the bicycle is literally a hundred times as fuel efficient as driving a car, mile for mile. In light of recent spikes in Gasoline prices, I believe that we need to entertain the possibility of a long term reduction in gas and diesel fuel supply. Thus cities should really make an attempt to drive it's citizens towards incorporating petroleum independent transport technologies such as bicycles.

In any case, I rode my little Trek Omega used bike 34 miles today, I circumscribed the entire island of Manhattan. Transporting yourself on muscle power alone is certainly tiring, but the efficiency of this machine was astounding. I was able to travel at roughly 15 mph. Going by bicycle in NYC is 5 times faster than walking, and nearly comparable in speed to auto transport. The Metro subway will be a bit faster, but no more than 2 or 3 times faster than the bike. My vehicle was essentially running on a bottle of water and my lunch(and giving the performance of a car!). Both of these resources(food and water) are renewable and can be locally produced. Instead of relying on imported oil from oppressive regimes half a world away, we can(and should) travel by the strength of our own legs. Besides, it was a hell of a fun ride! :D

Urban Garden Update

2008-05-31T18:35:00.000-07:00

My little fire-escape Urban Garden has been doing rather well of late. The potatoes are growing profusely. I have tried some rudimentary catch cropping by growing chives around each of the potato plants. The same was done with the bean plants, which now seems to be flourishing. The Summer Squash seeds have not yet germinated, I'm going to wait for another week to see what happens there. The Tomato plant has survived multiple clippings by the birds and are growing again. I'm not sure how many tomatoes I'll be getting from this plant for the summer, but I'm holding out hope. The red onion is not doing so well, it has budded, but not growing that quickly.

Urban Gardening Continued...

2008-05-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

With the City of New York fully immersed in warm spring weather, I thought it proper to shift our attention to my "other" garden. The little urban container garden that I started last winter. I took the 2 herb pots and planted them with potatoes and chives. I also acquired several additional pots and a planter box from various sources. I filled in these containers with roughly 1/4 compost(from my worm compost bin) and 3/4 gardening soil. In totality, I have planted pole beans, potatoes, chives, red onions, and snap peas in in 6 containers on my fire-escape. I also moved my worm compost bin outside now that the night-time temperature is warm enough for the little creatures.

Mother's Day Gardening!!!!

2008-05-10T22:15:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, I got my mom flowers and took both of my parents to a fancy restaurant. I have a deep bond with my folks, and I often miss them terribly when in the city. Life can be quite hard sometimes, and the difficulties only makes me appreciate the love that my parents have shown me time and time again. And with so few chances to see them, one must seize every opportunity to do so. In any case, on Saturday afternoon, I got a chance to work in my garden. Much has transpired since the last time I was around here. The apple trees are in full bloom. The Red Delicious tree had beautiful white blossoms, while the Wine Sap tree was adorned with delicate pink flowers. These two trees are destined to be partners with each other in the coming years. The 2 blackberry brambles have met with a sad fate. One of the bushes had been pulled out by hooligans awhile back. The remaining bush, being planted closer to the rain water drainage pipe had suffered an unacceptable degree of root damage due to flooding. It's a regretable loss, but one learns more from failure than success in the garden.

The asparagus plants are growing fairly well, though with an acceptable degree of loss. Of the 7 crowns planted, 5 have survived and are growing woody green shoots skywards. After they get a little taller and put in some more leaves, I'll be filling in the trenches to encourage more root development. One of the crowns didn't survive the transplant, the dead crown was being devoured by worms. I removed the dead crown from that trench, and filled it with garden soil mixed with compost. In this cleared trench, I planted some corn and pole beans. Another crown appeared to still be alive, but isn't growing any shoots. This could be due to the trench being surrounded by vigorous sun-hogging clover or it could be due to the inferior genetics of the crown itself. In any case, I'll check on the crown the next time I'm home. If it still hasn't developed properly, it'll have to be culled.

The 4 container potatoes are doing extremely well. Container grown potatoes usually grow faster and yield a bit more than those grown in a garden bed for me. The Rotten and Yukon Gold varieties have expanded like crazy over the last two weeks, shooting a foot and a half higher than the last time I saw them. Thus, I had to fill more garden soil and compost around the grown plants, until the soil had reached the rim of each container. I'm seeing little sign of pest damage so far, which is pretty awesome!

Garden bed 1 is doing fairly well. The snow peas have largely developed, and are now climbing up the bamboo poles that I have set down there earlier. But it was pretty apparent to me that a significant portion of snow pea seeds have not germinated. This could be due to predation from birds or inferior seed stock. In anycase, I planted some pole beans(European and Kentucky varieties) to succeed the peas. The snow pea plants will end their life cycle sometime in august from the heat, and right then the next wave of pole bean plants would be just about ready to yield. Thus ensuring a continous stream of lingumes.

In garden bed 2, the situation was significantly better. Most of the sugar snap peas have germinated and are growing vigorously. So vigorously in fact, that I had trouble finding sites to plant my pole beans. For some reason the sugar snap peas grow and flower much faster than snow peas, yet the two varities can(and will) interbreed with each other at some point. After sowing some succession beans, I set down a roll of sweet corn along the edge of the bed. The sweet corn will develop in time to catch some of the pole beans, thus providing a living scaffold.

Garden bed 3 had a plethora of crops growing. There were 3 varieties of peppers(Afghan Red, Acapulco, Jalapeno ), 1 european eggplant(Plantagenet), 3 native-amerian squash varieties(acorn, butternut, summer). The peppers are growing furiously, taking advantage of the full sunlight. The lone eggplant is looking pretty sad with tiny bite marks on the leaves. I assume that it's due to aphids or some kind of mites. The eggplants have always performed poorly in my garden. I sometimes wonder if the Eurasian vegetable is hardy enough to survive here.

Garden bed 4 was the land of the onions. It's populated by Begian red onions and French yellow onions, their tubuler green stalks waving in the air. The 3 California garlic plants are doing just as well, with their flat stalks forming small bushes. There were several Wally Pea plants along my neighbor's fence. The wally peas are quite different from the snow and sugar snap peas, it's leaves are smaller and squat looking. The entire plant seems to be covered with very small and light hairs for some reason. Surveying the site, I found 3 spots for my Bok Choi seedlings. I had started 10 seedlings indoors a month back. The Bok Choi, being an East Asian lettuce variety, may not be adequately adapted to this climate. Of the 10 seeds started, 7 germinated indoors, and only 3 survived the seedling transition to the outdoor weather of early May. I'm not sure how many of the 3 will live through the shock of transplanting. I would be happy if just one of the Bok Choi seedlings made it to bolting stage. In anycase, I planted in some pole beans along my neighbor Peter's fence for good measure. The entire garden bed smells a bit like a kitchen to me. After the new plantings, I cut away some of the onion chives(1 lb) for my mom's kitchen. Both onions and garlic are cut and come again crops which will provide many more cuttings before the end of the season. The bulbs that are finally harvested are merely icing on the cake so to speak! Besides being tasty, onions and garlic are also packed with natural anti-biotics which keeps us humans safe from certain bacteria and parasites.

Garden bed 5 has 4 tomatoes(brandywine, beefsteak, early girl, cherry) and 1 cucumber plant growing in it. The plants in this bed are very heavy feeders of both nutrients and water. I planned this bed as a sort of experiment into the bio-intensive method of gardening. This approach will yield significantly more food than before, but will also require more effort in terms of maintenance. In anycase, the growing tomatoes are planted so closely together that they'll need to be trained to fill in a 3-dimensional cube of space directly above the bed. For this purpose, I shelled out some hard currency to purchase 2 sets of foldable trellises. These 2 trellises, were set down in a zig zag pattern, neatly supporting and partioning each of the 4 tomatoes. Basically, each tomato will be trained to occupy a separate cubic space created by the trellis, while the cucumber will be trained to fill a rectangular wedge of cubic space directly beneath the tomato canopy. This will create a single 3 dimensional block of densely intertwined plant vegetation, roughly 4x4x5 cubic feet in volume. Now so much vegetation will require a great deal of water. So I implemented a kind of green mulch, I cut the tall grass on the edge of my garden and layered them uniformly around each of the plants. The mulch serves the triple functions of supressing weeds, retaining water, and releasing nutrients into the soil, thus reducing some of the human effort required to maintain this structure.

Garden bed 6 has 6 potato plants. They are all doing well, though not as well as their container counterparts. I created small hills of soil around each developing plant and checked everyone of them for signs of disease and pests. Everything checked out fine so far. I then planted pole beans around the edge of the bed and along the fence. The potato/bean/turnip triad is a tried and true pattern for my garden.

Good times with my family and fun in the garden made it a great mother's day weekend. Though I must say, if that special person was there with me, it would've been perfection itself! :D

Solar flood light repair

2008-05-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

In honor of Mother's day, I decided to visit my parents in PA this weekend. So on Friday evening, I took the train out of NYC to home. Now when I got to my parents' house, I heard the unexpected news that our solar flood-light had been out of operation for a week. That sturdy light had been working for the last 2 years, though with a gradual decline in performance. Over the last 4 months, only 2 of the 4 LED lights on the lamp had been working. A solar powered light is an incredibly efficient(and relatively expensive) piece of technology. Thus before we throw it out, it's worth at least one attempt at repair. So I put on the engineer hat and dis-assembled the flood light. The internal workings of the light are remarkably simple. The device is composed of basically 5 modules:

1 Photo-voltaic panel

1 Circuit board

1 Power pack holding 2 Nickel-Cadmium AA batteries

1 Plastic mount holding 4 LED lights

1 Light sensor

The PV panel collected solar energy and converted it into DC electricity. The energy is channeled through the circuit board to recharge the batteries during the day. The light sensor mounted at the exterior of the device would send a signal to the circuit board when the amount of light hitting it falls below a certain level(like during night time). The signal from the sensor basically tells the LED lights to begin drawing energy from the battery pack and converting that energy back into light. So what had gone wrong?Well, it appeared that the PV panel itself was protected by a thin slice of hard plastic. The ultraviolet rays from natural sunlight had basically broken down the top layer of that plastic, making the panel a bit opaque. This had the effect of significantly reducing the amount of solar energy the panel could capture. Additionally, some dust and mud had gotten onto the light sensor. This had the effect of making the solar light turn on earlier than necessary. Thus, the device was forced into collecting less energy during the day and using more of it at night. Now batteries tend to heat up when stressed for power, and at higher temperatures, the alkaloids within them become much more corrosive. After a period of time, the chemicals had eaten through the metal walls of one of the batteries, thus rendering that battery useless and knocking out 2 of the LED lights. Apparently, in the last week, the remaining battery had failed as well, making the light completely inoperative.

The solution was fairly simple. I replaced the dead batteries with a new set of rechargeable ones. That brought all 4 LEDs back online. Then I cleaned up the exterior of the floodlight, paying extra attention to the light sensor. After cleaning it, I tested the sensor under an indoor lamp to make sure that it was properly turning on/off the LEDs. The PV panel took some work. I used fine grade sand paper to clear off the top most layer of the hard plastic cover, until the PV cells were fairly transparent. I then took a very thin sheet of cell phone screen protector, and pasted it onto the hard plastic. Now instead of the plastic cover, the sheet will take the full brunt of the Solar UV damage. And when that sheet breaks down, we can just replace it with another one. After that, everything was working like a charm. I set the floodlight into it's proper place in our front yard, and it was shining gloriously again!

Garden Update

2008-05-04T19:41:00.001-07:00

My suburban garden is coming along at a fair pace. Both apple trees have bloomed and are now growing a green foliage of leaves. It will be 3 more years before any apples can be picked from these young trees. My parents have recently put in a back fence to prevent local youngsters from damaging the garden and our plantings.

The snow peas and the sugar-snap peas are both coming along very nicely. We need to put in some more trellis next week to accommodate the new seedlings. Peas are very useful as a cool season crop. If all goes well, they should provide us with a source of fresh legumes until late July.

The tomato seedlings are growing at a modest pace. We have put down three varieties this year: Beefsteak, Brandywine, and Early Girl. I think the growing plants will need additional stakes for supports within a few weeks. But everything looks good for now.

The red onions and garlic have both come up out of the earth. Their chives are almost ready to harvest. I think within the next 2 weeks, we should be able to begin cutting some of the green chives. Once each onion plant has reached a certain height, a portion of the plant can be cut back once a week until harvest time.

The container potatoes have done better this year then the ones planted within the bed. For some reason the 6 potatoes set down within the garden bed is growing slower than normal. It is possible that not enough compost have been fed to the soil, but I suspect the real reason could be either a soil pH imbalance or inferior quality potato buds.

No Tillage Agriculture!

2008-04-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

While doing some research online on do nothing farming, I had the good fortune of meeting Steve Groff at Cedar Meadow Farms. Basically Steve is practicing a form of agriculture that seeks to mitigate plowing the land. In effect, it conserves top soil while simultaneously saving gas and human effort. After a few emails, I decided to visit his farm and see how large scale no-till agriculture worked first hand. So last weekend, I took the train home to PA and got into my Honda Civic for a field trip of sorts. I drove some 40 miles Westwards into the agricultural areas of Lancaster County. There were many Amish families inhabiting those parts. Their 19th century horse and carriage lifestyle presented a rather odd contrast with the rapid expansion of suburbia into Lancaster.

After finding the farm, I had the pleasure of chatting with the man. Apparently, Steve's method of farming uses only around 30% of the fuel, and 70% of the fertilizer as conventional agriculture, while still allowing for a single family to cultivate over vast acreages(250). Of great interest to me was the savings in time. According to Steve, he was able to cut down his work hours by 75% due to not tilling the soil while farming. Of course by that time, I was bouncing off the walls to see the actual process in action. So out we went to tour the farm.

Steve is using a form of seeding and cover-cropping that is very similar to those practices described within One Straw Revolution. However, his own interpretation is highly mechanized and thus much more scalable. For example, in OSR, seeds were encapsulated within "earth balls" and scatered into the fields by hand. While Steve's tractor simply carves a very narrow slit about an inch deep into the earth, disperses the seed,and then these two bevel seals the ground up afterwards, thus accomplishing the same purpose with machinery. Steve actually demonstrated his tractor for me, and it was amazing to watch. The process of tilling the soil is highly tedious on both man and machine, I have had the good fortune to experience both. But the act of simply scratching the soil and depositing the seeds seemed much easier and faster to me.

The farm itself uses the principals of natural fertility and continous cover described in One Straw Revolution. Steve has been using a combination of corn and wheat as harvest crops along with vetch/rye and turnips to provide the cover crops and green manure. While touring the farm, I have noticed examples of such continuous coverage. In one field, I could see the remains of corn stalks after the ears had been harvested, and underneath these brown stocks there grew a green carpet of vetch and rye. Along with the crops, Steve also keeps a small herd of buffalos on his farm. It seems to me that this way of agriculture is much more efficient and sustainable to the mainstream method currently in place. Steve mentioned that the difficulties of No-till agriculture was in the transition process. During the first years of transitioning, more fertilizer must be used and harvests could be smaller, thus farmers risk possible ruin in making the switch. After seeing the results of this method, I personally think the government should subsidize this transition process and convert as much of our farmland to no-till as possible.

Green Drinks Social

2008-04-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

We attended the monthly NYC Green Drinks event on tuesday. It's a great gathering of NYC entrepreneurs within the emergent Green Industry. This gathering offers us a global sense of what is happening in the sector along with the chance to pitch our own permaculture business. This month's session had quite a collection of demonstration technologies. The current environment of inflated food and energy prices seems to have brought forth a wave of innovative inventions.

We saw a foward mounted bike trailer that is supposed to be 25% more efficient than it's conventional, rear-mounted counterpart.

There was one exhibit of tadpoles which were selectively bred to feed on sewage waste, and thus serve as living waste water scrubbers.

Yet another nifty innovation we saw was a google mash-up. It basically layered semi-realtime fuel consumption data-feeds onto locational markers within Google Maps. Thus, city planners would be able to graphically gauge efficiency spending priorities within different sectors of a metropolis based on need.

Huge Showing at the Gardening Class

2008-04-04T21:28:00.001-07:00

As part of our little business, http://grown-up-permaculture.com/, we have been giving a series of free Gardening/Permaculture classes to the NYC community. Our last class on thursday generated a huge showing, close to 40 people attended! We taught the basics of gardening design, permacultural tips, and of course some detailed instructions on container and watering systems design. My hope is to teach as many people as possible the knowledge of producing their own food in small urban spaces. With massive increases in food and gas prices, the economic conditions of this city may get a bit worse before it gets better. Everyone who are feeling the pinch at the grocery store should be thinking of starting their own garden. By regaining a small measure of food self-sufficiency, we can go a long way towards saving some money and bettering our health!

Spring Planting Underway!!!

2008-04-03T22:46:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, we began planting the annuals in earnest. I had acquired a stock of seed potatoes of the Rotten, Golden Wonder, and Kennewick varieties. These spuds, I quickly planted about 3 inches deep within garden bed 6(the newest) and both containers. Potatoes, being asexual clones, are highly susceptible to diseases. Thus they should either be planted within clean soil or have at least a 3 year rotation before being replanted within the same ground. Using this model, the first 4 garden beds, being planted with potatoes within the last 2 years, are unsuitable for further potato production this year. Another matter of importance is that of having multiple breeds of the same crop. Many breeds of the same species ensures genetic diversity. And genetic diversity is possibly nature's greatest defense against diseases and pests, because quite simply, no disease can completely wipe out a highly multifarious plant population.

The onion family was next, these I mostly planted in bed number 4. First, I planted a sub-breed of the common California garlic, known for it's large white cloves. Next, I choose French Yellow onions and Belgian Red Onions. These two varieties are known for their disease resistance, and of course their multiple functions. The leaves and stems of the plant are edible as cut and come again scallions, while the root bulbs are the actual onions harvested in the fall. Finally, I planted additional Asiatic green onion chives along the edges of garden beds 1 and 2. I already have more than enough green onions growing in the wild, but this planting isn't just for food. The point is to inject more new genes into the wild onions' gene pool, thus strengthening the plant's hold on my backyard environment.

Garden beds 1 and 2 were planted with 2 continues crops of heavy feeders(potatoes and corn). Thus, the soil would be quite depleted of vital resources such as nitrogen and phosphate. Because of this, I decided to plant both beds with peas to rebuild the richness of the soil. Legumes fixes nitrogen through their roots, making the soil more fertile over time. Yet another reason is a potential defense against the dreaded Japanese Beatles. We know that the bugs reach a reproductive apex in July before quickly expiring in early August. While at the same time, the peas would be naturally dying out in July(due to heat) as a second set of pole beans grow over the pea plants. Thus, it may be possible for the bugs to feed upon the heat damaged peas after the plant has lived past it's lifecycle. This would create a permanent niche for both the beetle and the peas, while saving the rest of my garden from devastation.

I chose 3 varieties: snow peas, sugar-snap peas, and wally peas. Each of the sub-breeds is slightly different, the sugar snap has a higher concentration of sugar, the snow peas tolerate lower temperatures better, while the wally peas have a hard protective shell. These minute genetic differences should suffice for some of these peas to survive a hard onslaught of pests. I planted these seeds and set down bamboo stakes as a support trellis.

Suburban Garden Expansion Part Three!

2008-03-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

I came home to Pennsylvania this weekend to resume work on the garden. Spring is such a wonderful time to be alive! Many trees were budding (including both of my apple trees), and some were even flowering. On Saturday morning, birds are chirping everywhere, a falcon circled the turquoise sky. Our neighbor's dog, Biscuits, was lounging around, and my backyard was awash with the verdant colors of new growth.

Before even starting my work, I noticed strange tufts of green grass growing all around the back of our property and extending a bit into our neighbor’s yard. There were dozens of such plants. Upon closer examination, I realized that these little plants were the descendants of the 4 heirloom green onions that I grew last year. The green onions are cut and come again annual vegetables whose seeds are propagated by the wind. Apparently, the 4 original onion plants had cross-pollinated each other. Their children must have colonized the marginal lands adjacent to the two properties.

And the land is surely marginal, stuck between my garden and my neighbor's flower beds, it's rocky as hell and laced with pine needles. The only plants growing there are some weeds, lichen, and of course my onions!!! This fortunate colonization will provide our family with several times the amount of edible green onions as compared to last year, and without any additional effort on our part. What we are seeing is in effect, permaculture in action. Our plant has created a niche for itself in a previously barren habitat.

After examining the green onions, I went straight to work. Seven new V-shaped troughs were created with the trusty shovel and pick-ax. Three of them were along my neighbor’s fence to the east, another four were dug along the land bordering our neighbor to the south. These troughs were about a foot long, six inches wide, and ten inches deep. The bottom of each trough was lined with rich compost and buffered with three inches of organic garden soil. The four troughs along the southern edge of the backyard had to be fortified with extra garden soil, since the natural soil base there is so poor and rocky to begin with. Each trough is then given a single asparagus crown buried under another 3 inches of garden soil and then watered thoroughly. In time(hopefully) the asparagus will become a hedge like border that produces food and acts as a windbreak.

The asparagus is a perennial plant that once established, will produce nutritious green spears for decades. While the reproductive strategies of plants are varied and interesting in general, the strategy taken by the asparagus is highly unconventional in my opinion. Basically, a parent Asparagus’ root system is composed of crowns of individual root shoots. Now depending on environmental conditions or just plain chance, some of these crowns will bud off or get broken off from the main root structure. Each crown has the potential of becoming an independent Asparagus plant. Yet unlike other budding root plants, each crown isn’t a clone of the parent, it’s actually a bundle of genetically distinct child asparagus cells surrounded by the parent’s root tissue. As a newly broken crown grows, the child cells will replace the parent tissue, cell by cell. Thus, prior to budding, it is as if a parent plant and all of it’s children are part of the same functioning organism!

Suburban Garden Expansion Part Two!

2008-03-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I decided to add some much needed perennials into the garden. The trouble with annual crops such as corn and tomatoes is just that...these plants only live for a year. The act of breaking ground and sowing new seeds every year is a relatively uncommon and highly destabilizing event in nature. Firstly, fine tillage of even small plots require substantial amounts of energy. Industrial agriculture makes this look easy through the extensive use of non-renewable fossil fuels. And as we have seen firsthand yesterday, doing the job with muscle power alone is incredibly exhausting. More importantly though, the act of plowing destroy soil systems. Huge amounts of nutrients are leached out of plowed soil through erosion, thus requiring the tedious application of fertilizer and compost every year. Beneficial insects and micro-organisms are killed wholesale through the breaking of ground, paving the way for later epidemics of pests and weeds. Interestingly enough, weeds are nothing more than hardier, low-yielding relatives of the common grains that we consume. Without broken earth, weeds would have no place to establish themselves. Thus when we plow our fields, we are literally sowing the seeds of our own future misfortune!

These is where perennials come in. These long-lived crops require but a single planting and can yield food for decades or even centuries. But of course, nothing comes for free in life. Planting perennial crops takes a ton of effort. We started early Sunday morning by planting two apple trees of different breeds, golden delicious and red winesap. Apple trees require a significant degree of genetic variety to ensure successful cross-pollination. My father and I started by digging two giant holes in the ground spaced 15 feet apart. These holes were 3 feet across and 1.5 feet in depth. We attacked the ground with the trusty shovel and pick-ax. The work was brutally hard. Below 6 inches the ground turns into hard clay, below a foot, the clay earth is packed with boulders the size of bowling balls. We literally removed hundreds of fist sized stones and a score of boulders with the pick ax and our bare hands during the excavation. The soil that was dug up had to then be siphoned for larger stones, this was back-breaking work which yielded hundreds of additional egg-sized stones.

After the deed was done, we began to manually rototill large amounts of sand and rich garden soil into the 2 hills of unearthed clay soil. I wanted to use compost initially but after some research, it appears that compost would burn the roots of the young trees. In any case, some of the soil mixture was carefully spread into the base of the hole until the top of the young tree's root bundle stood at exactly ground level. At that point we transplanted the young trees and began shoveling in the rest of the soil mixture around the tree. We packed the soil down hard with our feet to ensure that the tree was firmly anchored. The next step was to hammer down some of our unearthed stones around the edge of the now filled pits, thus forming a lithic mulch. The stones basically absorbs solar energy during the day, and releases that energy as heat at night, thus warming the delicate young roots of the trees. Additionally, rainwater leaches essential minerals out of the circle of stones into the soil whenever it rains, thus serving as a long lasting fertilizer for the tree.

The last stages of the tree planting were pretty straightforward and not too exhausting. We dumped gallons of fresh water into the soil and then topped the entire soil bed off with 2 inches of mulch. The mulch helps the soil retain moisture.

After a short break, we started on the blackberry plantings. The process itself is pretty straightforward, dig a small, 9-inch deep hole, add some compost, and drop in the sapling. But the difficulty was in determining a location. The berry performs best under conditions of moist, acidic soil, and good sunlight. But we had no such place to put this plant, at least no place that wouldn't be threatened by the lawnmower. After arguing for a bit, the decision was made for us. My mother began berating us from the second floor of the house about messing up her backyard. The complaints were largely ignored, however, she did point out a hitherto unnoticed fact. Our yard's old satellite dish was unused, since the TV satellite had long ago fallen out of orbit. Yet the dish was sitting on moist ground right next to the rainwater drainage pipe connected to our roof. Moreover, the land was in full sun and close to our pine tree, so the ground was laced with pine needles, making it acidic. Thus, we removed the huge old satellite dish and planted in our blackberries.

After the day's exertions, my body ached all over. I couldn't even hold onto my laptop very tightly as I left the land of my childhood back towards the island of glass and steel that is Manhattan.

Suburban Garden Expansion Part One!

2008-03-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

The delightful weather of spring has lured me back home to Pennsylvania this weekend. I had some major improvements in mind for the suburban garden. So bright and early Saturday morning my father and I got to work. I chipped away at the hard clay soil of the lawn with the trusty shovel. The goal of the effort was to create 2 additional semi-raised beds for the garden. Reclaiming agricultural land from the standard suburban lawn has always been a tedious task, and before long my arms and back were straining due to the sheer human effort. The lawn soil was of course devastated by the repetitive use of the same type of grass along with harsh chemical fertilizers/pesticides. It was hard and yellow, almost like clay. To add to the difficulties, we live in a region of rocky soils. So the clay soil was filled with egg sized stones which had to be removed by hand! After a while, the old rhythms of garden bed creation took over. I shoveled out pieces of lawn grass in a row and removed the underlying earth to form a foot deep trough. After which I stamped down the pieces of turf upside down along the spine of the trough. Finally, the entire row was filled with the removed dirt. The upside down turf serves as an initial nutrient layer to improve the hard yellow soil. For each row of cleared turf, I also added in several pounds of composted leaf molds to further increase the soil's organic content. Some 3 hours of hard manual labor transpired, but eventually I was finished, and exhausted by the effort.

Meanwhile, my father was busy spreading out the compost upon the 4 existing garden beds. Each bed recieved roughly 20 lbs of rich black compost. Since we have deposited at least 40 lbs of fish guts into our piles over the last year, the resultant compost was especially rich. It had a thick, semi-sticky consistency, quite like some sort of petroleum product in fact. Fertilizing the fields required him to manually roto-till the compost into each of the existing beds. Every last bit of the compost was worked into the soil, nothing is wasted around our little garden. Along with the compost, some leaf molds and a small amount of pine needles were also worked into the earth. The leaf mold serves as a good source of carbon to aerate the soil, while the pine needle gave the soil PH a slight kick towards the acidic spectrum. I figure we needed to put some more natural acidic fertlizer into our beds due to harvesting over 200 lbs of tomatos out those same beds.

As we worked, I could not help but feel that we are but following in the foot steps of a hundred generations of farmers before us. A food-producing tradition that has spanned a journey across continents and millennia. What is surprising to me is not that we are personally farming the land as our ancestors have done before us. Rather the surprise comes from the fact that most of my(and my father's) generation would be the first people in all of human history to NOT produce our own food. We are the first broken link within this continuous chain of tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Thus it may be the case that producing one's own sustenance locally is a norm in human history, while our current long-distance consumerist way of life is merely a brief exception. A single broken link in an otherwise flawless chain.

Inspired by a Symposium!!!

2008-03-08T19:38:00.000-08:00

My winter-time drudgery of work, sleep, rinse, and repeat has been delightfully lifted by the soft showers of spring. Much has transpired in the last 3 months. Our green business, Grown-Up-Permaculture, is off to a great start. Work is already underway on multiple rooftop garden projects with several major clients. Needless to say, I have been in work fanatic mode for quite a while now. It's not easy keeping the day job and a hobby-turned business at the same time!

So to scout out the landscape of the green movement here in NYC, I decided to take a field trip today to the 27th Making Brooklyn Bloom Symposium held at the famous Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. So in the soft rains of march, I made my way to Prospect Park and entered the main Botanical building. The conference hall was packed with Green businesses, non-profits, and community groups of all sorts. There were companies and organizations representing almost every aspect of the Green movement as it relates to food production. There were CSA(community supported agriculture) provider groups, urban farmers, educators, forest gardeners, human-powered produce delivery firms, poultry raisers, seed distributors, resource recycling outfits, and a host of other green niche groups. So many people attended today that the conference hall and every single workshop for the entire day was packed and overflowing with New York urbanites.

I found much useful information( and amusement ) while attending a series of highly detailed workshops ranging from urban soil lead mitigation to raising chickens in the city to the fine arts of indoor seed sprouting and dwarf tree pruning! I felt energized by the sheer level of dedication, enthusiasm, and hope that so many people at the conference seemed to genuinely have. Prior to today, my notions of the purpose of a garden spans the vague concepts of natural self-sufficiency to that of an interesting stress-relieving hobby.

But this gathering has expanded upon those initial ideas. Using organic agriculture and perma-culture, we can actually change this city, and the world, for the better. The conference's themes of teaching the needy to gain nourishing sustenance for themselves, providing honest work for those without opportunities, and achieving a degree of equality(even if only dietary :P ) for everyone, these messages simply strikes a solid cord within me.

I know that the foundations of our world cannot and will not change. Politicians will always be corrupt, big corporations will always try to suck people dry, and the elites will continue to do anything to maintain the status quo. No matter what we do, we'll still face the challenges of resource depletion, weather changes, and economic dislocations caused by our own foolishness. But despite these looming issues...we still have within our hands the means of making our world so much better. This gift of knowledge, just the knowledge of growing food for one's self and family, it shouldn't be denied to anyone. And if people with the means simply had the heart and will to spread this knowledge to their friends and neighbors, just think of how awesome our world would be. I saw a glimmer of such heart in a bunch of ordinary people today, and it really inspired me. Perhaps I'm still too young, but I can't help admiring these people who try so hard to make a better world despite the odds stacked against them. And come to think of it, it would be my greatest fortune if our own little quest can end up making a positive difference in the lives of others.

Herbal Harvest

2008-01-27T14:59:00.000-08:00

My thyme plant had blossomed 2 weeks earlier with dozens of tiny white flowers. After the brief flowering, the plant quickly dried out, it's life cycle thus completed. It always amazes me how quickly a plant can expire after reproduction. One moment it's filled to the brim and within a week, it's transformed into a dried out husk. Harvesting the thyme was a simple affair. I slipped the base of the thyme branches between my fingers and gently sweeped upwards, towards the branch tips. The dried herbs came off crisply and fell into a bowl I had placed under the herb pot. In any case, some 3 ounces of dried thyme were thus collected, enough for several months of consumption.

Muscle powered transportation

2008-01-01T20:30:00.000-08:00

Ever since moving to NYC, I have been searching for a good transportation paradigm. Now the subway is a generic solution for getting around the urban landscape. But there are a plethora of annoyances with this method.

1. The fare is too pricey as is and the MTA is still increasing it.
2. Long wait times between trains during off-peak hours
3. Flooding in the subterranean tunnels after a bad thunderstorm.
4. Incredible levels of overcrowding during rush hour.

One really has to wonder if the subway is the best choice. For ~1000 USD ( MTA fare) a year, there has to be a more elegant solution to the problem of urban transportation. In comes the bicycle. This incredibly simple piece of 19th century technology suits the urban environment admirably. The bicycle is amazingly efficient, it takes roughly 30 calories to propel a person 1 mile on an average bicycle. If calories are converted into gasoline, the fuel efficiency of a bicycle(at 20 mi/hr) is around 900 miles per gallon! So a month ago, I decide to upgrade (or downgrade?) my transportation. I bought a used bike off Craigslist. This purchase turned into a major lesson for me. I locked the bike outside my apartment for a single night and it was promptly stolen! Undeterred, I went back to Craigslist the next day and bought another used mountain bike for 50 dollars. This time I locked the bike up inside of my apartment building, thus preventing any local hooligans from further attempts at theft.

The standard mountain bicycle is in many ways more suitable for an urban environment than "road" or performance level bicycles. There are a myriad of reasons. Primarily, because most cities are not very bike friendly, the machine must be robust enough to handle all kinds of terrain(pavement, brick, asphalt, lawn, sand..etc). Furthermore, NYC in particular doesn't really offer a very continuous bicycle path within and around the city. So when transitioning between bike paths, roads, and sidewalks, it gets rather bumpy. That is where a mountain bike's suspension system comes in.

I had to make a few additions to the used bike however. Frontal and rear LED lights had to be installed for night time journeys in traffic. A bell is also a must to alert pedestrians. When all was said and done, I had spent 80 dollars for the entire package, bike and accessories. A fully outfitted mountain bike is an enormously efficient machine to ride. Imagine a person running at full gallop, an experienced cyclist can comfortably ride at four times that speed, and keep it up for hours on end. On top of my souped up Quest Omega, the entire city opened up to me. Journeys that would've taken half a day on foot can now be accomplished within an hour. At a comfortable speed of 20-25 mph, I biked across the length of Manhattan island in just under 40 minutes. There were many points where my bike was going faster than cars. It is truly a wonder(perhaps an irony), that a muscle powered bike can exceed the performance of gas-guzzling cars in this city.

There are drawbacks however. When in bike lanes that share the same roads as cars, cycling can be a very dangerous activity. The issue stems from the fact that drivers of automobiles don't seem to give a damn about cyclists. Cars would park on long stretches of bike lanes, forcing the cyclists onto lanes reserved for other cars(thus increasing the chances of accidents). So while the bicycle pretty drastically reduces my dependency on the subway, it also increases my risk of a traffic accident. I think I'll need to practice some more before ditching my monthly subway pass! :P

Worm Compost Bin update

2008-01-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

Our worm friends have been busy over the last several weeks. I have put in at least 20 lbs of combined paper and food waste within the last 3 weeks. The worms have clearly devoured much of the food. The lower layers of the compost bin has now been transformed into dark, rich compost. This biological process of converting garbage into soil is staggeringly efficient compared to the conventional method. The garbage goes through the "guts" of a series of organisms. The worms eats the waste, the waste of the worms is then eaten by tiny microscopic mites. The mites' waste is then consumed by eukaryote soil micro-organisms. It's waste is then consumed by even simpler bacterial lifeforms. The final "waste" product is the rich compost that serves as food for my herb plants.

I am now getting ready to harvest the bulk of the compost. It involves not feeding the worms for two weeks straight, and then separating the single compost pile into 2 piles(compost and remaining paper). If all goes well, about 5 lbs of rich compost could be expected.

The urban biosphere is thriving!!!!

2007-12-20T17:51:00.000-08:00

My tiny urban herb pots are doing rather well of late. As closed systems, the limited ecologies of these pocket sized biospheres has been unfolding with astonishing speed. In one pot, the English variety thyme has grown significantly larger. It's thin green tendrils reach towards the "sunlight" of my CF lamps. At the sub-surface layer, the worms are making a fine living tilling the soil. Every time I water the pot, some worms inevitable get flooded out of their subterranean dens. To my surprise, a least one other form of animal life has developed a niche in this pot. A population of tiny gnats seems to have colonized the canopy tops of the thymes. Under the lamp light, one can see dozens of them hovering above the thyme "forest". These animals are truly small, a fruit-fly would easily be 20 times larger.

The other pot seems to have developed a more diverse ecology. For one thing, the Arugula is almost entirely gone, edged out by the faster growing Oregano plants. The mint plants seems to be holding out against the Oregano. One notices an interesting dynamic between these two plants which are now sharing the entire pot biosphere. The Oregano plants are comparatively fast growing, but needs higher amounts of light input to maintain itself. Whenever the Oregano leaves encounter shade, the leaves will turn yellow after awhile. And then a kind of fungus will begin growing on the leaves. Shortly thereafter the leaves would wither up and die. Interesting enough, the Mint leaves can endure partial shade without any problems. However the Mint grows much slower than the Oregano. So after a few weeks, the Oregano had expanded to partially surround the Mints. All along the Mint/Oregano border, one can see the browned edges of the Oregano leaves. Strangely enough, if one looks very closely at the fungus on the leaf edges, you sees tiny mite-like insects eating the fungus. At the ground layer, one can see tiny sow bugs going to and fro. The worms are of course doing well here, they seem to survive adequately anywhere.

More urban gardening and trendy conservation

2007-12-02T18:29:00.000-08:00

My urban gardening system has been expanded this week. Now it includes an additional pot for growing English Thyme. The worms have multiplied significantly within their condo due to my generous garbage scraps. So to thin out the surplus population a bit, I have transplanted roughly 20 worms into each of the two herb pots. These little herb pots are in a sense like small islands or worlds unto themselves. Each pot has a relatively simple ecology with the herbs(as trees), the worms(as animals), and an assortment of soil borne micro-organisms. Aside from inputs of light and water, these tiny ecosystems are effectively cut off from the rest of the biosphere. The worm colonists themselves were fairly quick to scramble into the loamy potting soil. With such low numbers per pot, there simply isn't enough genetic diversity within the worm population to be self-sustaining. Thus new worms will have to brought in from the worm condo to periodically "freshen up" the gene pools of the Herb islands.

On another front, I have realized that a little known campaign in NYC to reduce the waste of plastic shopping bags have been wildly successful. Basically, a company took disposable plastic bags which were thrown away as garbage and recycled them into durable, re-usable "designer" shopping bags. These bags are then sold for between 1 to 2 dollars to trendy shoppers. I shelled out a dollar in hard currency and bought one of them. The bag was quite trendy-looking to be sure. But more importantly, they were very well made and held-up to heavy loads of groceries without any problems. Each designer tote has the carrying capacity of a large brown paper grocery bag. When in a hurry, an empty tote bag can be folded up into a pack smaller in area than a piece of printer paper folded in half. When shopping and looking around, I have noticed that there has been a recent surge in the usage of these bags. People apparently seem to be switching to trendy and re-usable shopping bags in very large numbers here in NYC. The average U.S consumer throws away about 30lbs of plastic bags per year, plastics, being a derivative product of oil, is a limited resource that should be re-used as much as possible. The trend of plastics conservation, if continued would be a very positive thing for the city and the country. To get your own "designer", re-usable grocery bag, go to EcoBags.

Urban Gardening!!!

2007-11-25T18:38:00.000-08:00

After many delays I have finally gotten on track with efforts in urban food production. Most "modern" cities aren't well known for being centers of food production. However, highly self-sufficient cities existed in numerous pre-industrial societies. The Ancient Mayans were well known for having garden cities where corn and beans were grown on temples and roof tops. The cities of pre-industrial China and Japan had a curious system where all "waste" in the form of effluence was collected and sold a valuable fertilizer to farmers within 20 miles of the city. Thus, cities with millions of people were literally eating their own recycled waste and eating well at that!

In this sense, modern cities such as NYC have been extremely wasteful. Hundreds of thousands of tons of organic biomass are thrown away each and every year to be buried in landfills. New York can just as easily recycle such valuable resources and convert them into food for it's citizen's to enjoy. To that end, my efforts have been two-pronged. On the one hand, most of my organic garbage in the forms of food waste/kitchen scraps and paper-based materials are being composted by an in-door Worm Condo. The condo produces valuable compost which are then fed to indoor(and hopefully outdoor) food bearing plants. Starting the planting process, I created a simple guild/poly-culture consisting of Oregano, Mint, and Arugula. 3 plants which supplies a food seasoning, a tea blend , and salad greens respectively. The 3 seedlings were transplanted firmly into a container which is roughly a foot in diameter and height. I filled the container with common potting soil and a small pinch of the freshly generated worm-compost.

And speaking of worms...these little critters have been getting quite comfortable in their new homes. They have been eating generous portions of kitchen scraps and paper wastes and producing large amounts of fine dark compost. It appears that some of them have decide to settle down and make babies. Worms are hermaphrodytes with very curious mating habits. 2 worms would begin the ritual by coiling with each other into a complex knot. Then more worms would join in until there is an enormous coil of a dozen or more worms. This worm orgy would writhe together for hours on end before splitting up. After the act, most of the worms would become pregnant with eggs since they have both fertilized and received fertilization from other worms.

The Worm Colonization

2007-11-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I finally picked up the "worm condo" offered by the NYC Compost project. Basically, as part of the City's green effort, the municipal council made the decision to subsidize the distribution of home composting devices. After attending a 2 hour instructional session, a worm composting bin and a worm "founder" population can be had for $10 instead of the usual $50 price. The "condo" itself is a rather simple design. It's a large, rectangular bin made out of clear plastic, with a flat top lid and 4 aluminum-mesh, lateral, ventilation ports. An 8-inch deep layer of shredded newspapers are set down onto the bottom of the bin, this becomes the bed of the worm condo.

Under the light of 2 CF bulbs, I move the worms out of their tiny cardboard container along with a handful of their home soil. The little red worms were deposited onto the middle of the shredded newspaper bed. The worms began wriggling frantically under the light. They were palpably burrowing away from the light. They were heading in all directions into the shredded paper, creating a circular colonization wavefront of sorts. I can't help but associate this act of disembarking to a scene from some science fiction novel. A group of brave colonists, heading out of their generational spaceship onto an wholly alien planet, underneath the light of two suns.

My little colonists are of the red worm breed. The original stock of these creatures once inhabited the forest floors of central Europe. Their natural environment being a semi-damp carpet of dead leaves and twigs with scattered deposits of edible berries, nuts, and fungus. The ancestors of these worms developed the ability to metabolize both human-edible foods as well as cellulose. Due to the harsh demands of their Eurasian homeland, these hardy worms developed high disease resistance and quick breeding cycles.

In any case, after 3 hours, all of the worms have burrowed into the paper layer. The lights are then turned off, and the worm condo is deemed operational. The worm condo can compost a variety of wastes. Most biodegradable paper and cardboard scraps can be fed to the worms. Almost all food scraps can be deposited there as well. This particular condo has a capacity for processing 3 lbs of food wastes and another 5 lbs paper waste per week. Effectively, that is over 50% of my total weekly garbage output.

For all of you in NYC wanting to compost your own garbage, check out the NYC Compost Project

The first frost

2007-11-18T16:03:00.000-08:00

The first hard frost of the year had hit PA this weekend. The complex ecosystem of the garden was shocked into disarray, as I anticipated. Over the course of Saturday night, countless ice crystals pierced the unprotected cellular walls of non-cold adapted plants. After the frost, those crystals thawed out and the life fluids of the plant cells literally drained out of their bodies. The beans, tomatoes and eggplants collapsed into messy heaps by Sunday. My father collected the still developing eggplants, last of the beans and a basket full of green tomatoes. The remains of the plants were fed to the compost heap.

At it's closing 24 lbs of tomatoes, 3 lbs of white eggplants, and 13 lbs of beans were harvested. The garden life cycle as completed itself.

Cold fish!!!

2007-11-12T12:24:00.001-08:00

This is turning into a very strange year. The above normal temperatures have extended the fishing season by a month or more. 56 pan-fish were captured over the last 3 weeks, yielding 38 lbs of cleaned meat and another 15 lbs of offal for the compost piles.

Garden Update

2007-11-08T18:31:00.000-08:00

The days have gotten much colder now.
Enclosed within the hemp mesh, my lovely little garden still produces!!!! The eggplants have finally grown up. The tomatoes and bean plants continue to bear fruit. 7 lbs of beans and 1 pound of tomatoes were harvested within the last 2 weeks.

Massive Fishing Haul!!!!

2007-10-20T23:07:00.000-07:00

It has been a glorious weekend for the reel. Under cold weather conditions, 64 pan fish were harvested. As an aside, 1 small mouth bass(8 lbs) and 1 carp(14 lbs) were also captured. After cleaning, 54 lbs of fish meat were put into the freezer, another 20 lbs of fish guts were applied to the composting piles.