Thievery

Every time there is a promising cucumber that will be perfect for the picking in another day, it's gone before it has a chance.  This was the case last year with my eggplants.

There's a plot next to mine that's also growing cukes but don't have theirs climbing sticks - theirs are just on the ground, growing in weird shapes.  They seem to be left alone.  All of mine that are the best and visible get snipped away.  Frustrated, I wrote a post on my gardening club's message board asking if anyone else experienced vegetable theft.  I said I hate to think it but it's either that or those squirrels are damn good with scissors.

The one reply I got was short and dismissive.  The writer said I'd be surprised how razor sharp claws are and how critters dug up someone else's bulbs so cleanly that it looked like a human did it with a trowel.  Oh really?  I didn't know critters could weed too.  Let me explain.

The weed situation is out of control in my corner of the garden.  We weeded diligently in the beginning but my mother realized she should leave it alone because the tall weeds on the side of the cucumbers worked as camouflage and hid the good cucumbers growing.  For a while it was working, until one day she noticed someone had cleared all the weeds on that side of the garden and also helped themselves to the best of my cucumbers.  The dismissive lady's suggestion: "I don't know what to tell you except look into wire netting?"  Yeah right.

In other news, I'm wondering if I should move this blog to Posterous.  It seems easier to maintain and I hate the fact that I am no longer able to post photos easily as I once had through flickr.  Now if I want to post a photo I have to use Picasa and it sucks.  Why did flickr get rid of its jpg link?  I don't know what the technical term for it is but it no longer lets me post photos here directly from it.  Since I'm on a different computer and don't have the photos on my hard drive, I have to download it from flickr then upload to Picasa then download it here.  Ugh.  It's so inconvenient.  Posterous, here I come.  Maybe.  I have to look into it more.

Perilla Recipe Experiment

For my 3'x3.5' plot (in a previous post I might have said it's less than 3 sq feet but I measured it today - I'm not so good with eyeballing measurements) I have an abundance of perilla.  When I started planting my mother brought over the cutest little seedlings and we kind of ignored the fact they'd grow to be about 4' tall and they really should be given 8" to 10" from each other.  I later gave some to a friend in Brooklyn with ample garden space, and some more to another friend in Jersey City also with a garden that gets plenty of sun.

Perilla leaves, depending on the variety, can get to be about the size of a medium sized hand.  Mine aren't there yet but I've been getting a lot of recipe ideas from creative food blogs and I came up with something I thought would be easy to make using ingredients I already have.

Here's the filling:

Stuffing each leaf:

Break two large eggs into bowl and season with salt and pepper:

Heat up a little oil in a skillet and dip each stuffed leaf into the egg before laying out in pan.  Here they are sizzling away, my kitchen smelling delicious:

Finished:

The result was golden half moons of deliciousness.  Use more soy sauce than you think to get perfectly seasoned meat.  Try to resist eating them right out of the pan, otherwise you might get squirted.

There are variations of this recipe I want to try next week when more leaves will be ready for picking.  Try replacing the beef for pork or chicken, and adding Thai curry spices and nam pla to the meat.  I'm also experimenting with home-infused perilla soju.

Did I mention it's tiny?

Love her or hate her (I'm meh), I admit I went to Martha Stewart's site to get some ideas on what to plant when I joined the gardening club.  (If there are hipper sources for this kind of thing I don't know them.)  I pictured myself surrounded by a cornucopia of heirloom tomatoes, rainbows of peppers, cukes and squash of all sizes, and couldn't decide from the dizzying selection of seeds from Martha's recommended list of purveyors.  Then when the garden was divided up and I saw the location and size of my plot, I was crestfallen.  It's not that I got the worst of the bunch - the plots were divided up pretty much equally.  Mine is in the middle, not getting the most amount of sun (those most east get the last bit before it disappears behind our building after noon), but not getting the least either (some don't get any).  I'd say, on a sunny day, I get about three or four hours, but once  11:00 rolls around my little guys sit in the shade.

So back to Martha.  This is what I wanted.  Instead, my plot is less than 3'x3', next to a chain fence which I fear, doesn't protect my little ones from getting peed on, by human or beast.  Although her vegetable garden guide is really informative, it put me off at first because it was clearly written for people who have more space and resources.  I wasn't going to buy hoes and buckets and test the soil for pH and drainage.  I certainly don't have a tool shed in which I could grow seedlings under lights and there's no room in my apartment for that setup.

Feeling a little dejected, I closed Martha's site and stared out my window at my plot below.  I pictured my neighbors with shiny gardening implements, expertly caring for their plots, knowing how to organically do this and that.  I noticed some people getting started in early March.  Flowers and greens started showing up little by little and I stared at my piece of dirt wondering how the hell I was going to grow anything.

Then my mother called me with a lot of enthusiasm in her voice, telling me how this market by her in Flushing was selling seedlings of the kind of vegs my grandmother used to grow.  I wasn't feeling it, but she came by carefully transporting the little ones on the 7 then dragging me out to get cheapo garden tools, only the bare necessities.  It didn't matter that I didn't have a trowel with a handle carved by an obscure aborigine tribe sold by an uber-upscale boutique in London.  Did my $2 trowel with the plastic handle suck?  Yeah.  But it got the job done.  My grandfather salvaged sticks and string to use in his garden from his walks around the neighborhood.  My grandmother cut her chives from the garden with the same pair of scissors I used to make school projects.  Maybe it's ghetto, but then, I live in one.  Sort of.

As I continued making my visits to the garden, I started meeting other gardeners.  Most confessed they didn't really know what they were doing either.  I saw someone with her kids using an old spoon to dig.  Another watered his plot with a 2-liter Coke bottle.  This made me feel better.  I hope this gardening community keeps its rustic ways.

It's rainy today so no need to make a trip down with the watering can.  I took this picture this morning, but it looks the same now, except not as much traffic on the Williamsburg:

This is my view looking down onto the garden.  the one in the middle is mine, close to the fence:

This is a wider view.  On the right is another section for composting.  I only just got involved in it this past weekend and helped build the second round of compost bins (the first one I missed out on), these being made of discarded pallets and chicken wire.

Five Weeks Later

These pictures were taken two weeks ago when we had a super hot weekend. I don't like hot weather and I usually cheer on clouds and rain when they're in the forecast, but like a baby (sort of), my little plot has changed me (sort of).

Anyone who knows me, not even well, knows that I love cloudy weather. I just don't like bright sunlight shining down on me causing me to squint, even through dark glasses. I especially don't like bright sunlight shining down on me when it's particularly hot. I can't understand how people like it, unless they enjoy turning their skin into brown leather. A few years ago, I even developed a bizarre sun allergy that creates horrible blotchy little red bumps that itch like crazy if I've been in the sun for more than five minutes.

But now that I have my little plot, I don't hate bright sun so much, because I want it to shine down on my seedlings and help them grow. These pictures were taken after I'd come home from a sailing lesson that hot weekend (another long story, but in a nutshell I'm trying to be more outdoorsy - it was uncomfortable as hell baking in the sun on that sailboat) and I was surprised to see everyone doing so well, especially the lettuce. So although I cursed the hot sun that burned my shoulders through my dark navy shirt (!) I also thanked it for helping my little ones grow.

The lettuce in particular were looking quite healthy:

Next to them are two strawberry plants. (I had some room after I'd given some perilla away.) When my mother brought them to me, they had tiny berries. Then the evil squirrels got to them and won't give a chance for more to grow. I have to get some sort of sticks and bit of wire mesh for protection.

The perilla grew nicely as well. Since my first planting in late March, I gave away six of them to my friend Christine who's got a lot more sun in her back yard. I'm curious to see how they do compared to mine.

And the eggplant are also nice and tall.

I didn't take any pictures this weekend while I was helping with the compost bins but I did notice that my cilantro and basil are doing quite well too. I was worried about the basil because he's not getting as much sun as he should, but the leaves are coming in nicely, if not as nice as the organic raised bed plot next to me. Even the sad little rosemary seedling I bought has grown noticeably.

Incidentally, I received an email from the person in charge of the gardening club saying that some of us had ignored the original plans, not making enough of a walkway between plots. I was careful to leave some room, but probably not enough so I'm going to have to replant this week. I don't like digging these guys up too much - that may stress out the roots but it has to be done so I'll take more pictures and post them here so you can see their progress.