Panthy's Garden

We all know that being organized just means buying a bin and hiding your crap in it. Crap +  bin = organized. I don’t have a shed in Panthy’s Garden because I don’t live in the suburbs and I don’t have a lawnmower to put in it. But I do have lots of gardening crap which needs uh… organization. 

There’s nothing quite like seeing your future on the side of a box to convince you that you should buy something. Pictured here, 10 years into my future and clad head to toe in Tommy Bahama gear, I’m serving my daughter Magicia a hot dog that’s actually way too hot to eat. I’m all about letting kids learn their own lessons.

Seated to the right on the bin I purchased and built 10 years ago, is my son Teddington-McDaniels. As you can see, the bin can be used as a bench. I don’t know who the woman is, she’s not my wife. Frankly I’m not sure what she’s doing at my damn family cookout. I’d like her to leave.

Having pa-lenty of Ikea experience under my belt I’m not easily intimidated by these construction projects. It said I needed these tools:

But it’s done, and looky here all my crap is in it!! Organized. The future is looking bright.

My downstairs neighbor brought me this from his garden:

It’s a cucuzza squash. It’s roughly the length of a dinner table. Or shown here, more than the width of a dinner table. It’s massive. His garden, fueled by careful planning, manure and the constant application of knowledge and experience was so successful I didn’t even mention it until now. The vine for this squash stretched over 15 feet beyond his fence right into the alleyway/playground of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, actually reaching out and chocking a squealing child as he tried to belt out a snappy hymnal last weekend.

The squash was probably beyond the point of being good to eat but what it was perfect for (other than inducing deep envy) was its seeds. My logic being, if it was successful once growing literally in our building’s backyard, it will likely do well again, assuming I don’t screw it up.

I had to break out the saw blade of my Leatherman tool to cut through the skin but once inside I pulled out loads of seeds. I’ll probably plant these guys in SIPs in the relative shade of my fire escape, mimicking the rough conditions of my neighbor below, minus the manure, contact with the ground and careful attention of his.

And because hacking things open is fun, I also took some of the last of my marvel stripe heirloom tomatoes and did the same with them, scooping out the gooey seeds and straining off the gelatinous mass that surrounds them. 

They’re now fermenting in a glass of water.  According to the rules, after a few days they will produce a gross white mold that I will scoop off, and then I will collect the seeds that have settled to the bottom. These are the “good seeds”. These instructions sounds suspiciously like those of a crazy person, but I’m gonna stick to the rules and see what happens. And hide this filthy mess from my wife.

This part of town used to be a big piece of garbage. It was a port and by nature, kinda crappy, industrial and off-limits to the public. It was also probably filled to the brim with junky stray cats and floating plastic shopping bags. The night I met KRS-One he was down here at his book party and said, “DUMBO wasn’t a place you went. It was a place that you got left.”

Did I tell you I met KRS-One? I did. He was cool.

DUMBO is now very much a place you go to. I go to work here so I kinda have to. But lots of folks come here just for the famous pizza. And now they come for the park too, because some geniuses working for the city have somehow pulled off nothing short of a park wonder; a motherlovin’ dope, futuristic, environmentally-smart conversion of a throw away parcel of land. 

At first it reminded me of those parks that they stick on top of landfills, an odd patch of green conspicuously placed on a man-made hill. But this here is totally different. It actually sits on fill left over from the east side subway tunnel project (to be completed in the spring of 2478). And within that is a 110,000 gallon rain collection system which stores up water to irrigate the place with.

It’s not unlike my own rain collection system:

That is except that this water collection system has a built-in swamp that helps to  clean the water while generating local, sustainable, organic mosquitoes.

They call it habitat creation; which it kind of is. Aside from the mosquitoes there’s some seriously beautiful things doing business here. This photo almost exploded my camera with the amount of enchanting wildlife in it. Check it:

Not one, but TWO bees and one butterfly. Say it with me: “TWO BEES. ONE BUTTERFLY.”  What does it mean?

During my experience building the planters of my dreams, I did some research and picked out wood that would be weather, decay and insect resistant. Cedar. Ya heard?

But get this: the park benches, cladding for the buildings and other bits and pieces in this park use Long Leaf Yellow Pine, which is so bomb-proof that a boat builder quoted on the park blog, said it was more like granite than wood. It has a tensile strength greater than steel and is so loaded with resin and amber that it’s completely impervious to decay and insects, or anything else for that matter.

Sad thing is, it’s 99% extinct because it was so awesome that our forefathers cut it all down to make pine tar, boats, and the beams for giant shipping warehouses that lined this very shore. When the old warehouses came down to make room for the park, the beams were salvaged to make benches and other things that will likely outlast you, me and Panthy combined. 

There’s even more salvage material in use here, enough to fill 4 episodes of This Old House with. Granite for the “prospect” (not to be confused with the Grand Prospect Hall), was salvaged from a bridge that was being dismantled elsewhere in the city. The light poles were re-used from the lot that pre-dated the park. And weekly I re-use the Calexico taco stand there. They’re always happy to see me.

This place is the jam. The “gatehouse” has a green roof on top, and last week, had Ditch Plains hot dogs inside! 

This park is a great example of how parks might look in the future: native plantings that thrive with little care, irrigation from harvested rainwater and features made mostly from salvaged materials. It looks incredible. Don’t be a dufus and go spend an afternoon there.

Peep the video from the Park’s Designer Michael Van Valkenburgh.

One thing I did right this year was grow jalapeno peppers. My pal Hal gave me a little seedling last spring and the bright sunshine and relentless heat did the rest. I picked literally 58 jalapenos and had a few left on the bush that weren’t quite full size yet.

What in the shit do you do with 58 jalapeno peppers?! Well, you make hot sauce ya dufus! I found this simple recipe on the World Wide Internet, the only thing I was missing was an onion and some distilled white vinegar. I had about a thousand other varieties of vinegar: cider, red wine, white wine, poo pants, but no distilled white. So with a quick jaunt to my LSM (Local Super Market) I was ready.

This is painfully easy. The painful part being the tingly burny feeling you get on your hands scraping out the pepper seeds. To keep some street cred in this hot sauce, I left about half the seeds in but doubled the recipe and only used 40 jalapenos.  Hahahha, “only used 40 jalapenos” he says! This man is effin crazy!

The stove fan wasn’t quite enough to vent the joint and literally the steam coming off the mixture had a chemical warmth I could feel with my hands.

I filled this pot with water and boiled this jar to sterilize it, worrying the whole time that an air bubble inside would somehow explode and shoot hot chunks of glass into my face. Luckily, that didn’t happen.

Once the sautéing was done and the simmering was complete, I added the precious, very specifically not other kinds of vinegar, and pureed everything producing this frothy radioactive sweet stuff.

Once cool I poured it in the jar, ending up with this very respectably hot but smooth, spicy sauce to be known henceforth as Panthy’s Fire Juice.

Ingredients

    •    1 teaspoon vegetable oil
    •    20 fresh jalapeno peppers, sliced
    •    3 cloves garlic, minced
    •    1/2 cup minced onion
    •    3/4 teaspoon salt
    •    2 cups water
    •    1 cup distilled white vinegar

Directions

1. In a medium glass or enamel lined sauce pan over high heat, combine oil, peppers, garlic, onion and salt; saute for 4 minutes. Add the water and cook for 20 minutes, stirring often. Remove from heat and allow mixture to cool to room temperature.
2. Transfer the mixture to a food processor and puree until smooth. With the processor running, slowly add the vinegar.
3. Pour into a sterilized jar with a tight lid. This sauce will keep for 6 months when stored in the refrigerator.

Here’s an idea: Grow only food you like to eat.

Sounds smart right? Nothing worse than growing 60 pounds of canned mushrooms only to realize you hate canned mushrooms. Pretty soon you’re banging on the door of every pizzeria from here to Gravesend beggin’ someone, anyone, to take your damn crappy canned mushrooms! Would be a shame to let them go to waste…

With an eye toward next year, I added garlic to the list of things I’d like to both grow and eat. And as it turns out, now is exactly the best time to plant it.

For whatever reason, good garlic likes a punch of cold before it gives up its smelly deliciousness. You can sow it in the fall, cover it with some mulch and give it time to establish some roots before the cold hits. Then come spring time its initial sprouts, or scapes, will bust forth, providing you with the ingredients for some very obscure and snooty recipes. Around mid-July, when some of the leaves have gone yellow, you can dig em out and have yourself some fresh homegrown garlic. That’s the idea anyway.

In the spirit of trying to go native, I bought my garlic at the farmer’s market hoping that if it grew well around here once, it’ll probably grow well around here again. That is unless I was secretly sold some supermarket variety not meant to be re-grown. And by “secretly sold,” I mean I forgot to ask the guy and instead wandered out into the sunshine to go buy an ice cream.

Each clove is a seed that will form a bulb of roughly 15 cloves. Sow next year’s cloves, and uh.. (TI-82 tapping) the year after that you’ve got 225 cloves in your smelly little hands and then… the world is yours. Basically the entire American immigrant culture was founded on mountains of garlic. One clove eventually yielding a fortune in garlic large enough to build homes, corrupt police forces and a multitude of awesome pizza shops overflowing with amazing garlic knots.

But Panthy’s Garden is not about getting rich. It’s about spending lots of money to grow your own food and then ruin it accidentally. So I’m planting 10 cloves in two containers, formerly the homes of my burpless tendergreen cucumbers which, as advertised, did not make me belch once this year.

I set out my tools and ingredients and because all vegetables thrive on hip hop music I made sure that was also in abundant supply. This is Brooklyn you know.

One pot, I’ll call the Golden Boy. It’s a new container, the potting mix in it is fresh, and I’ve added some Zoom! chicken shit fertilizer in there for good measure. I stuffed it full of 5 cloves, in the soon-to-be-famous Panthy Face Configuration. I gave it something to drink and set it in the sun.

The other pot I’m calling the Underdog, a crappy nursery container with no added chickenshit. No fresh mulch in the bottom for drainage, just the same yesterday’s dirt I grew the cukes in. Rumors on the internet seem to indicate garlic actually prefers semi-used soil. Naturally, I’m rooting for the Underdog. Screw you Golden Boy!

If all goes according to plan, in early spring I’ll be making something snooty followed by something deliciously smelly. And flavorful. And then I’ll have to resist the temptation to get extremely rich on mountains of garlic.

Despite the crisp air and scent of fancy fireplace smoke, I’ve still got a handful of unmolested tomatoes that aren’t quite done yet. My purple peppers are showing some respectable hustle with what will likely be their last little peppers.

And sadly, the cukes are all rolled up, first battered by Tornado Bruce, then finished off by some tiny bug infestation. They are now those sad pots of dirt we all know and love.

And me? Well I’m kind of feeling like a sad pot of dirt too. I’m clearly suffering from symptoms of seasonal affective gardening disorder. On Friday night I sat up in Panthy’s in total darkness, sipping on a beer… for two hours, just looking, sauntering, scheming. Which might sound sorta sad until I did it again on Saturday evening with a glass of Jameson. Which made me downright pathetic. And then Sunday, my pal Isaac came by and we literally watched the sun set on Panthy’s Garden, and sang Tiny Dancer in unison while it did.

Aside from mourning this weekend, there was actually a great deal of mental note taking, vague sketching and poorly measured approximations made. Basically the seeds of gardening genius. Remember those planters I built? Same dif.

A few things are certain. There will be plastic owls. Maybe 5. God-willing, S.T.E.V.E. will have his glorious head back and I will repaint it in gold leaf. Man-made nature triumphing over nature.

There will be squirrel traps. I will buy a basket for my bike to then transport said squirrels along with whatever vegetable they’ve molested straight down to their new waterfront home on the Gowanus Canal. I’ll repeat this ritual with great delight as many times as necessary. 

Animal specifics aside, there is actually an overall strategy that focuses on the actual growing of plants. And like all brilliant plans, it has lots of prongs.

Prong One: Mars Soil
The soil will be so jam-packed with nutrients, the vegetables will be shitting themselves with more vegetables. Hell, a pepper might even shit itself a strawberry! Through careful use of compost, compost tea and organic fertilizer, I will make Panthy’s soil capable of hatching life on Mars. Word up.

Sidenote: There’s a chance this compost will come from a high-tech yuppy indoor composter. The idea of powering my plants with leftover General Tso’s chicken way too hard to resist.

Prong Two: Scrooge McDuck this Motherfucker
Part of me dies thinking I’ll be giving a single CELL of a tomato to the garbage birds and squirrels, that is until I start thinking like Scrooge McDuck. I’m going to grow enough vegetables that if one goes missing or molested, I won’t even miss it.Every morning before work, I’m going to climb a step ladder, put on a top hat and take a dive into a giant pool of homegrown vegetables. A POOL. Of vegetables.

I took the lid off of a storage tote, exactly like the ones I’m going use to build my multitude of Sub-Irrigated Planters with, and walked it around the entire garden. Using my toe as a visual marker I figured out roughly how many of these I could put in the garden. Specific numbers may alarm my wife and jeopardize this entire project so lets keep that on the low-low. What I can tell you is that I’m pretty much going to double the number of tomato plants to say nothing of everything else I’m going to grow. I’m going to have enough tomatoes to create a special batch of gazpacho for the birds and squirrels laced with ex-lax and mothballs. They’re gonna love it. 

Prong Four: Going Native
Remember playing Ice Hockey on Nintendo where there was like two skinny guys, one medium guy and one big fat guy? They all had a role on the 8-bit ice and together they could send the video game Russians packing. What were we just talking about?

Companion planting, right. This is about using plants natural properties to protect and enhance one another. The most famous example of this is the Native American Three Sisters of corn, beans and squash. All planted in one mound, the corn served as the bean pole, the beans fixed nitrogen needed by the corn and the ugliness of the squash scared away the predators. Most importantly, these were all things that grew naturally in the local area, making them sturdy, productive and happy. Genius.

So there you have the prongs. All the damn prongs. How am I going to wait all winter to do this? Seriously, I’m asking. Maybe this winter resting period, dolled out to every grower since the dawn of creation is an important time to reflect, learn and make better plans, like the 24 hour waiting period required before purchasing a hand gun.

I’m sure that the native Lenape tribes of Brooklyn once stewed all winter in their wigwams, scheming on how they were going to add a fourth sister to the mound. And after them there was the Dutch, who stewed all winter on how they were going to get better yields from their Pantaloon shrubs. And now it’s jerks like me trying to get the hang of growing a tomato.

So, while I impatiently wait, I’ll be hitting the books. And by books, I mean the internet. I’m going to learn a thing or two and then bore you with it, in the hopes, you’ll in turn, bore someone else with it. It’ll be a goddamn boring virus. And then, come springtime, we’ll all be getting down to business growing ourselves Scrooge McDuck quantities of food.