I've started an experiment this year: how easy is it, really, to grow vegetables and herbs in a windowsill?
When I moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan three years ago, I was rather taken with the idea of urban agriculture, romanticizing the rustic life of the small producer who grows his own vegetables, raises his own livestock, and scavenges the seas for the rest. (This fantasy was fueled rat...
I've long been drawn to the idea of urban farming. When I lived in Brooklyn, I had two plots in two community gardens , in addition to three massive tomato plants on the back deck. Planting seeds and growing vegetables was an unlikely pleasure. For me it was connected to good eating: I loved to cook and eat the freshest vegetables I could find. Getting to the source is something we often e...
One of the things we've talked about on this site from time to time is a British fellow named Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, mostly in spurts of unmitigated, gushing exaltation: this man is some kind of food messiah. When we live-blogged last year's James Beard Awards --which is the most fun we've had in ages, standing ten feet from Jacques Pepin (who was surrounded by young women), watching...
A couple days ago Elin and I went to our community garden plots to asses things after a two and a half week absence from New York. When we left, our garden was thriving with tomatoes, kale, collard greens, beets, carrots, corn, and peppers. Despite our best efforts to screw things up, the Brooklyn soil continues to sprout edibles.
We returned to find out tomato plants brown, drooping,...
It was the most fantastic feeling in the world--especially for someone who has no idea how to grow food, like me. A bunch of seeds Elin and I planted months ago in a nearby community garden--tomatoes, kale, peppers, cucumbers, snap peas, beets, radishes, onions, lettuce, and corn--had been growing into large green bushy things that we hoped weren't weeds. Were they healthy and sated with water...
Photo from Flickr user Flatbush Gardener
I didn't see this coming. I didn't imagine that suddenly, aged 25, living in a city, I'd want to be a gardener. Gardening does not seem cool. Nobody thinks gardeners are trendy. It's as old and musty a hobby as any. Yet there I found myself this past Saturday, spending seven hours of my weekend at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden , where a larg...
A couple weeks ago, I left work promptly at 5pm to head to the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library near 10th St. in Greenwich Village. There, along with over 40 other people, I learned how a person in New York can buy worms, keep them in a container in their apartment, and feed them food scraps . The morning of the class, which I'd stumbled upon at the web site of the...