Panthy's Garden

Take notice, S.T.E.V.E. is in the motherlovin’ house. I took one look at his barely flexible neck and terrifying gaze and immediately thought of Batman, Michael Keaton Batman, sitting high up on a Gotham perch, regulatin’.  See what I’m saying?!

I loaded him up with batteries, strapped him to the chimney and hit the switch: ON.

Head rotating slowly, with as much confidence as a fat plastic owl can muster, S.T.E.V.E. took his first defensive gaze around Panthy’s… and beyond. And never.stopped.hooting. No doubt, he’s eager to bring justice to Panthy’s Garden. But I had to slow his roll, his justice will kill those batteries in less than an hour. Might need some fine tuning on those motion sensors.

Here I was thinking I was a goddamn gardening genius. Aside from the occasional cat-faced tomato and diseased plant, I thought I was pretty damn clever. I took advice from my pops about a watering system he used to kill his garden with, and took it to the limit, creating my giant Great Wall of Chinese Water Torture which watered (and over-watered) the entire garden automatically. Amazing right?

I realize that I am clumsily bumping through my real first year as a gardener. I’m not perfect and honestly, much of what I tell you is probably really bad advice. I’d say roughly 49%. In my continual blabbing about my garden I have become the recipient of some good info from friends and family. And that’s just where Bob Hyland comes in. Cue solo trumpet with echo effect… dramatic pause and… the voice of Bob:

“I believe the ultimate locovore grows at home, be it a rooftop, balcony or paved surface. You will find here that turned earth is not necessary.”

This is the tone of not just an optimist but a Leader. Someone who can tell you with certainty that you.can.do.this. You heard the man: “tilled earth is not necessary.”  And by omission he’s basically saying don’t sweat the garbage birds, disease, excessive wind, sun and temperatures. It’s all good. Bob’s Center For Urban Greenscaping is spreading knowledge most of which has one underlying theme:

Cities are places for growing food.

There’s a lot of people down with this program, hell I’m one of them. But unlike my tiny plot, there are very ambitious, large-scale operations, I mean life-sized FARMS in the confines of our cities.

There’s the fine folks over at the Brooklyn Grange who are growing on an old factory rooftop, an entire ACRE of a rooftop. It’s bonkers. There’s this cat who’s using insane scientific equipment to grow massive, gorgeous veggies on his roof, for his restaurant down below. The scale and complexity of these projects is awe-inspiring and kinda daunting. But Bob has an answer for that too: something called the Sub-Irrigated Planter or SIP. (Not to be confused with the drink box Ssips).

The SIP exists in many forms and goes by a few different names. The fancy pants EarthBox, the humble DIY Global Bucket and the ever-popular Dick in a Box. But they’re all basically SIPs. Instead of the standard, water the dirt, let the water leak out the bottom, the SIP has a water chamber in the pot, below the dirt. You fill it through a lil tube and the plant only takes what it needs by wicking it up from the bottom. A little hole prevents dufusses like me from over-watering the thing. The plant waters itself. And you only need to fill it once a week. Basically it’s the goddman bee’s knees. 

It’s so simple and brilliant that Grant and Max Buster, the shaggy-haired teenagers behind the Global Bucket, made this diagram so that you stupids can understand what’s going on. And by “you stupids” I mean me. It looks like it was torn right from the pages of an 8th grade science notebook! And it’s genius. And get this, these fellas are basically trying to help people in third world countries grow good food. Which also makes me feel stupid. Who says our country’s going to shit? Get a load of these guys!

See what’s going here? The soil doesn’t lose nutrients from water constantly carrying it off through the bottom of the pot. According to some estimates, water is conserved by 80-90%!  And you cover the top so bugs stay out, moisture stays in. Kinda like how I store my cheese under the bed.

Here’s some made from totes, before the dirt is added:

Seriously, this idea has me feeling both completely amateur and completely inspired. Yo Buster boys, listen up. You too Bob, you’re gonna like this. Next season, I’m going to completely retrofit Panthy’s Garden to rock SIPs. Completely. Top to bottom, left to right, nothing but SIPs for days. Panthy’s face is gonna explode when he hears this.

Oh you know, the usual Saturday morning over here at Panthy’s Garden; sipping on a crappy iced coffee from the bagel joint, wearing yesterday’s clothes, making the morning rounds.

The assault of diseases and pestilence continues; found this little fucker tunneling his way through one of my Super Snow White tomatoes. He got bored (no pun intended) with the one hole, decided to start another. So I pulled him out and crushed his tiny head with a pine bark nugget. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce em. No tunneling through my tomatoes or I’ll crush your face. Period.

There’s some white powder on my pianese plant, a lovely flowering jammy in one of the big planters. It really has no place here, its planting was a total mistake. Under normal conditions it has big fluffy flowers that enchant the ladies. The decidedly abnormal conditions of Panthy’s Garden blew the flowers straight off it the day I planted it… and they never came back. So much for enchanting. And now it’s evenly covered with what I’m pretty sure is Powdery Mildew.

I was tempted to yank it out, but instead found this simple, non-toxic remedy online. I have everything I need except the hippie soap. So off to the hippie supply store I go. I keep repeating to myself over and over “I am not a hippie, I am not a hippie.” but let’s be honest, I’m the one whose chosen to become an urban garden enthusiast, Lord of the Vegetables and completely in-tune with nature… dude. So call me what you want. See if I care.

Despite the horn worms and mildew, there are some success stories. I’ve counted 18 heirloom tomatoes in the works. The first of which I picked, and drove 250 miles upstate to show off to my mother in-law. She was impressed, which is exactly how you want your mother in law to be. My only regret is not wearing my pink gardening gloves when I handed it to her. Here’s what it looked like:

Purple peppers are comin’ around, I’ve already eaten two which were probably less-than-ripe. But they were damn fresh and crisp (ahem… not ripe).

I have a near bottomless bowl of cherry tomatoes; these flowers are some indication of what might become the next crop. 

Occasionally I’ll lose one to the nameless animal that dines here in the small hours of the morning. Thanks to Amazon’s Super Saver shipping that animal might just have a week more of S.T.E.V.E.-free dining. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Last year me and Hal went to a Halloween party in Red Hook dressed like the twins from the Shining. During the party, my friend James fell asleep on the couch which prompted me to repeatedly jump on him. Allegedly, my jumping caused a wine spillage which most of the guests found distasteful. Pretty sure I didn’t do it.

Anyway… the host was nicer than he had to be. To distract me from jumping on James (again) he offered to take me on a tour of his garden. Which sounded kinda sketchy. But I was a few drinks into the night, dressed like a little girl and honestly, I’m kinda into gardening, so I took the tour. Sounds weird but nothing happened. Nothing happened.

His super-dope house was formerly a nun-run intake center for crack addicts. He completely gutted the place and transformed it into a finely appointed little urban compound. Despite how nice the place looks now, he’s still occasionally visited by a stray crack head who is mentally drifting around in 1983. You can change the bar, but you can’t change the patrons.

Hemmed in by a stockade fence, the long narrow front yard is planted with rows and clusters of gorgeous growing things. The entire right fence is home to what might be the East Coast’s Largest Grape Vine (not to be confused with the East Coast’s Largest Clematis Vine, which is in my mother’s yard).

His grape vine was prolific.

It was huge. It must have taken him years to grow. It was awe-inspiring. I decided right then and there, slightly drunk and wearing a dress, that I would grow some goddamn grapes of my own.

And so, this is my grape vine. It started as a sad little excuse for a plant in an equally sad plastic Home Depot pot. Chances are, it was grown in Vietnam, shipped for 60 days on a container ship and if we did the math, probably cost the world about $6400 in diesel fuel and third world wages. But because of our consumer culture it only cost me blah blah blah… zzzzz. Or maybe it’s from Pennsylvania.

There are no grapes, no promise of grapes even. But it looks like it’s really enjoying life. It’s entire feet longer than when I first bought it! It has big healthy green leaves, minus the few near the grill which have shriveled (under a near constant barrage of hot dog smoke). It’s looking good, but it might be a very long time before it can be described as truly prolific. I might be years deep into the next Panthy’s Garden way upstate in a little town called Roscoe before this baby can hold that title.

I can only hope that whoever lives here after me has a party some day far in the future. Maybe people are drunk and dressed like little girls. Hell, maybe there is a guy who is jumping on someone else because they are sleeping, and because the jumper finds it utterly hilarious. And then, the jumper is taken on a “tour” where he sees a prolific grape vine in a rooftop garden. This man is inspired… and he goes on to grow some grapes of his own. Some very prolific grapes of his own.

You may recall me talking about a chunk of sea grass I bought two years ago, reduced to a mere shadow of its former self by a windy rooftop winter. Safe to say, you probably have it burned in your memory, the tale so riveting you could barely think of anything else since. The long of the short is that it was one of my favorite plants, its soft to-and-fro motion transporting me to simpler times of my youth, taking nightly romps as a young man along the shores of Massachusetts. 

You may also recall all the tender care I put into getting it back on its feet; all the pruning, the food spikes, the fresh potting mix and of course the ever-present PINE BARK NUGGETS. 

I really wanted to be lulled again by its sweet whispering charm, its soft swoosh sending me off into a trance. Hell maybe Duran Duran would be playing, my mental soundtrack to a whirling mental slide show of fried clams, mirror sunglasses and seagull squawking.

Despite all my work, the most it’s done is look back at me with it’s ugly four or so blades of grass, mocking my efforts, ignoring my tender love and care. Soakin’ up water, chowing down of food spikes and still, the same four crappy blades of grass. Grass, you’re a goddamn TAKER.

Now, I’m not the heartless kinda dude that would just chop it down and throw it in the garbage like a diseased tomato plant. I’ll let it go for a bit longer. But let me be clear: if it doesn’t get its shit together soon, there will be something else looking sharp and green in that pot next season. Heads up Taker, I’m looking in your direction.

As I wait patiently for S.T.E.V.E. to come along and restore law and order to my garden, I gotta fight the good fight, 15 minutes a day, just before work, as I sip down some coffee. Doing this old man patrol, I cruise the garden, squinting at the sun through my glasses, scratching at my ridiculous bed head, wondering what hell went down since the previous morning. Sometimes I mutter the F word, which is fuck. Other times I smile groggily, holding a single ripe product of Panthy’s Garden. 50% of it goes directly in my mouth, right then and there.

The good news first. On my morning patrol I got these! One purple beauty bell pepper, some cherry tomatoes and the first of those Super Snow White tomatoes. They look good right? Thank you, I couldn’t agree more.

It’s not much but it almost makes the heartache of a demented, partly rotted tomato worth the trouble. These are damn fine. The cherries especially. Bout the size of a grape, these lil guys are super sweet and have a nice lil pop to em.

Now for the bad news. I noticed what looked like little tiny poops on the leaves of one of my tomato plants. I’ve never looked so closely, for so long at anything in my life. Not even when I got caught looking up the skirt of a mannequin at Filene’s when I was five.

On close inspection I noticed some little chewed holes in the leaves. Then… I saw a fat, disgusting green caterpillar, hanging out, taking a dump on leaves, having himself a leisurely meal. Must be nice… Not even S.T.E.V.E. could’ve stopped this! He looks like a branch! Nature, you goddamn little devil, you’ve done it again.

Here’s the part you don’t read to the kids. I took his little glow worm ass, yanked him from his meal and put him in a plastic water tray, because smashing him on the deck would make my deck gross. I looked around for the right murder weapon as he wiggled around stupidly, not knowing what was about to happen.

Garden shears? I’m no savage man, c’mon now. Greasy BBQ spatula I left up here over the weekend? Tempting. Eat him Bear Grylls style? (See 0:53 please) Not a good look, bro.

I killed him with the very PINE BARK NUGGET I scooped him out of the pot with. Like serving the detective the very frozen pork chop I killed the lady with! Nobody would ever find out!

Then, I plucked his friends, one by one, from their little snack perches. And they met the same sudden, gooey fate at the business end of a single PBN. It felt great and horrible. I stared around after I did the deed, my glasses having slid to the end of my sweaty nose. I felt a little like Michael Douglas in Falling Down. The F word was  muttered, lives had been snuffed out, and all before I’d even left for work. Honestly, I’m sorry you have to see this side of me.

I get my gardening knowledge any way I can. Sometimes its through the painful lessons taught to me by the city’s mangy garbage birds eating my unprotected tomatoes. Other times I find it buried in the snappy and condescending commentary of twerpy gardening forums. If this part of the internet had a smell it’d be mothballs.

BusyMomOf4: Why are my plants so sad looking and stunted? I planted them in fresh potting soil. Help!

GardenRalph: Oh you used potting soil and not potting mix?! Never had that problem. Maybe you should find another hobby. Maybe you’ll do better next year! ;)”

Soul crushing. Sad people bumping into each other on the internet, for all the world to see.

The best kind of info, is the unsolicited kind from visitors. 90% of it is good and helpful. The other 10% is bad and helpful. A good, apparently novice tip came from my pal James, who likes come to my house and tell me how to grill. He came by and started pulling the dead flowers off their stems while muttering:

“I always hated these things growing up, you gotta pull of the dead ones for the new ones to show up. If you fool them into thinking they’ve created and dropped their seeds, aka flowers, they’ll make more!”

Makes sense right? I finished what he started and boom bam bing, what do ya know, a week later… new flowers! It’s called deadheading and your mom has probably known about it longer than you’ve been alive. Tuck that lil sucker away and thank James when you see him, ya dufus. For your health!

So like I said, I planned to do some unnecessary fawning over my stupid garden this weekend and that’s just what I did. Around noon on Saturday the first beer was opened and I got started puttering as they might say if I had looser skin and more liver spots. I looked over each plant carefully, clipping off dead stuff and checking general well-being, making sure that all was well in Panthy’s Garden. And it was.

A fellow gardening pal of mine came by a few weeks back and remarked

“You could be doing so much more up here.” 

At first, I almost whispered the secret attack word for Panthy to chew a hole in her face, but then I realized I actually agreed with her.

Shit man, I would do more but I ran out of money! Planters! Pots! A hundred bags of dirt, a Great Wall of Chinese Water Torture? It set me back a few bucks. But she was right, there is a great deal more I could be doing up here. And what was I really doing now? Anything?

I am slightly ashamed to tell you I’ve already been scheming on what I’ll grow next year, and what I could possibly plant NOW to harvest in the fall and early winter even. But I’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll share with you one tiny Panthy enhancement, a Panthancement if you will. The garden is now more useful than before. Barely. I doubt you’ll be impressed.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

Exhibit D:

See where I’m going with this?

Clothesline!

And here we are. I’m writing a blog about putting up a clothesline. And you’re reading a blog about me putting up a clothesline. May as well hang it up, you and me both. And that was a pun! Oh man, seriously, you gotta get outta here. On three… close your browser and go do something more productive with your life. You’ve wasted enough time here, seriously, scram. One. Two…..

Still here? Great. Me too. These shorts (in the classic “kiss a rabbit between the ears” setup), dried in 20 minutes using nothing but the sweet-smelling winds of Brooklyn, and the sun of the uh… earth. Beyond impressed with myself, I tried to convince my wife that we should be drying all our laundry up there. Hell, we’ll save the entire planet! I made her smell my newly dried shorts, her response: “They smell sweaty.” 

While the rest of my sweaty laundry dried, I repotted my jalapeno plant in the pot that once belonged to the abducted tomato plant. I stirred some foul-smelling Zooooom fertilizer into some fresh potting mix and of course, added my signature PINE BARK NUGGETS to lock in the moisture. In the process, I knocked off this lil’ fella, and have yet to decide what to do with him.

And that was really it, a clothesline, some pruning, some repotting, no big whoop. It was kinda like pre-war Poland up there, all peaceful and happy, plants going about their business, growing, converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and such. But then Sunday morning came, and I discovered that there had been an animal blitzkreig. DO YOU SEE THIS???

This is a tiny, innocent, barely ripe cherry tomato. It’s half-eaten. Ripped off its branch and HALF-EATEN. And… here’s ANOTHER one. 

Whatever it was that did this tried digging in my jalapeno plant! Maybe it was lured by the delicious chicken shit smell of the Zooom in there. I was incensed. At least have the decency to eat the WHOLE tomato! And try a jalapeno while you’re at it, maybe it’ll burn your little animal face off with spice!

I stationed Panthy up on the railing near the victimized plant though I doubt he’ll do much. Is it a bird? A squirrel? No clue. What I do know is that something had to be done. And so… with a quick Google search and literally 15 seconds of consideration, I ordered my latest addition to Panthy’s:

In the world of garden accessories he’s known as the Easy Gardener 8021 Garden Defense Electronic Sensor Owl. He’s basically the precursor to the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101. Around Panthy’s he’s going to be called STEVE (Systematic Tracker of Evasive Vegetable Envaders).

Here’s the product description:

Designed to look exactly like a great horned owl, the Electronic Owl features large, yellow eyes, a tilted head, ear tufts, and intricate hand-painted details on the body. When the Electronic Owl senses movement, its head turns toward the motion and the Owl hoots, adding to the realistic effect.

The Electronic Owl is activated by four motion sensors that detect nearby pests or movement. The head turns in the direction of the motion and hoots, scaring away the pests. The head then moves back to the neutral position. Three AA batteries are required for operation.

You hear that pests? You want to eat my tomatoes?! Well… now you’re gonna have to do it under the threatening GAZE and HOOT of STEVE. Fuck, that sounds so lame. I need a shotgun.