Mid-summer Gardening work!

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

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

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

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

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

Miniature Ecology on Fire Island

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

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

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

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