Panthy's Garden

So… an 86 year-old man fell on his gardening shears, which then lodged into his eye socket. I know, I know… I’m sorry you had to see this.

Quoted in the Tuscon Sentinel, the doctor used a poor choice of phrasing to describe the injury: 

“You wouldn’t believe your eyes. Half of the pruning shears was sticking out and the other half was in his head.” 

It all turned out fine, the gardener got the shears removed from his face and he was able to keep his sight, his life, and presumably the shears. The lesson here? Keep an eye on those shears! Wuh wah. Read the full article.

I shouldn’t be bummed, I should be glad. Glad that my garden isn’t destroyed, glad that my neighborhood isn’t flooded, and glad that nobody got hurt. My house is fine, everyone I know is upright and healthy, I went to work as scheduled and only had a slightly more congested bike lane to contend with as a result of Hurricane Irene.

My prep work paid off. Check out this brilliant aerodynamic gathering of the garden, cleverly hemming in my grill. It was ready for anything! It was also ready for nothing!

I was a little bummed. I kinda wanted a real storm, which I realize is stupid, especially after seeing my upstate brethren underwater, without roads and power, and in some cases, homeless.

The storm in NYC, like the weathermen, huffed and puffed and made some noise but really didn’t do much else. This is how it looked during its most “powerful”. There’s still tomatoes on those branches!

The highlight of the storm was eating an early harvest of onions, peppers, and eggplant in this lil hodgepodge pasta dish. We stir-fried those babies and mixed in a little chicken sausage, sauce, fresh motz and tiny homegrown garlic.

Walking home pre-storm with a rack of water bottles and an 18 pack of Bud, a guy smoking on the sidewalk nodded in approval. He looked at my stash, and said “Priorities…” as he exhaled. But apparently my priority was sleep. I had one beer and went to sleep at 2am after watching three consecutive movies ON STREAMING INTERNET. I figured I’d be boiling water and reading everything in the house by candlelight, finally resorting to the shampoo bottles and the Testaments, both New and Old.

In retrospect, the storm, real or fake, was a good thing. Like I said, I had a home, my friends and family were safe. Thanks to the storm, neighbors got closer, food tasted sweeter and that first walk after being stuck inside felt damn fine. Those right there are the real priorities. A-men.

That streaming, emergency-red, all-caps ticker at the bottom of the TV takes me back to my care-free Massachusetts childhood where hurricanes and noreasters seemed to arrive at least once a year. 

Those were the days… looting plush coastal homes while dodging wave-borne boulders and the National Guard, basically getting way ahead of the game on holiday shopping. Or just hanging with the fam, eating omlettes cooked on a camp stove watching massive falling trees nearly destroy Mr. O’Malley’s house. Great times.

While I wait for the New York City Hurricane Evacuation Zone Finder to load (now on its 25th minute) I thought I might share with you my own storm preparations. As we all know, the gubment can really only do so much when it comes to saving us during some heavy weather. Forget Katrina for a second, this is the city that came apart at the seams during a snow storm and a subsequent garbage apocalypse that lasted for weeks. It brings to mind an old camping axiom: “The best way to get rescued is to know how to rescue yourself.” And the less catchy: “Don’t be an idiot.”

I was kind of kidding when I told people yesterday that I’d be sniping from the roof with a cooler full of deer meat and Budweiser. I do have deer meat, but really no weapons to speak of, and only three Red Stripes. At the time of this article’s publication, 20% of my emergency plan was in the form of my mom’s awesome fudge sauce.

I’ve cancelled the plans I never had to go see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. I’ll have the household “go bag” ready, I’ve got my beard grown and I’ve got camping gear for days. I ain’t skeered. Overreaction seems to be the theme in New York concerning the weather, with dummies using umbrellas during snow showers. But don’t get cocky, overreact with caution. I promise not to let my disproportionate bravery get in the way of making smart choices.

As far as the garden goes, I’ll be doing a little early harvest, plucking off a few slightly premature veggies and then closing it down and hoping for the best. I wish I could take all my plants inside and I’m sure there are some serious garden nerds who are doing exactly that. But there’s no indoors in nature!

The best shot I got is my “wind barrier” fence (seen above) which is most certainly not hurricane grade. I’m hoping that it’s porous nature will allow gale force winds to pass through it without sending it into my neighbor’s yard. Reminds me of last summer’s tornado. Ayayai.

Panthy himself is coming indoors, along with other miscellaneous crap. The table is getting flipped on its top and secured, and potted plants will be arranged in the most aerodynamic way possible, probably some variation on the “spear tip” formation. I debated taking my stash of sweet homemade compost inside but figured that crossed a line between garden enthusiast and weirdo.

It’s sunny out now, the city’s Hurricane Evacuation Zone Finder is still loading and I gutta get to work. If it’s awesome and the internet is running, maybe I’ll do some live blogging. But there’s a good chance that either the internet will be out, or that I’ll be too drunk to record what’s happening in any sort of helpful way. So let’s just leave it there. Stay safe, be smart and keep your powder dry, it’s storm time.

I used to live on this block in Carroll Gardens, the one penned in by the Italian men’s club on one end and the elevated F train on the other. I can’t say for sure that this neighborhood was still mobbed up, but it was unusually safe and my landlord kept pretty strange hours and dress for being a “highly successful mortgage broker.” You could usually find him in sweatpants and a leather Jets jacket, coming in from his workday at 4am. We paid the rent on time.

My next door neighbor said hi to me, but only after seven months of ignoring my twice-daily hellos. He was part of the crew of old guys at the men’s club who did a few things really well: siting in lawn chairs, smoking cigars and gardening like champions. Old men, smoking cigars, gardening.

Their small courtyard is built around a pavilion honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary, naturally. Surrounding her are super brilliant flowers and plantings that compliment her bedazzled robe and crown.

There just isn’t another garden in the neighborhood that can top it. Even if there was, you’d keep your mouth shut about it, because this here garden is respectable. Highly respectable. Understand?

I went away for a week. And by “away” I mean I went as far as possible from New York City as I could without leaving North America; a story for another day. Some close pals helped keep Panthy’s watered and plucked and I came back to a living garden, a really nice change from previous vacations.

In addition to the week I was away, there was another week where my garden never heard my footsteps or quietly muttered F words. The clippers sat untouched, my sweet trowel chilled in the bin, waiting to shovel to no avail. It rained and rained and I stayed away, my guilt growing daily.

My original plan was to continue to ignore the garden, hiding my shame like an old dumpling in the composter. I was literally going to sail around Manhattan with my pal and his Albanian buddy. Seriously. But as sailing trips with Albanians often do, it fell through and I had no choice but to face my out-of-control garden. Thanks to the combined savory power of bacon, eggs, and cheese I finally found the strength to deal with it.

It looked pretty bad. My late-season, heat-abused tomatoes had grown super tall and scraggly, losing their lower branches and foliage. I picked what might be the shittiest tomato ever grown. It’s actually remarkable how bad this thing looks, “Money Maker” my ass.

A couple of peppers were buried so deep in the tangle of leaves and branches they’d ripened from green to red and then literally began rotting on the branches. I’m a terrible person and a horrible gardener.

Everywhere I stepped I crushed uneaten ground cherries which I swept into to two giant piles that looked like this:

I moved to each container clipping, cleaning, harvesting; doing the work I should have done daily for the past two weeks. In the end it wasn’t as bad as I thought. As my burly rooftop gardening teacher at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden once said, “Gardens, like children, thrive in a little bit of neglect.” I can’t claim the garden thrived but I did pull off all of these goodies:

Once my wife put them in nice bowls, they actually looked pretty damn good, good enough to eat. So that’s just what I did.

Blowing in off the sweet urine smelling air of the Brooklyn summer came this really awesome website: Smart Gardener. What does the internet have to do with gardening? REALLY? You’re really asking me that while you’re reading a gardening blog?! It has everything to do with gardening…. (dramatic pause) now, more than ever.

Smart Gardener allows you to plan, document and care for your garden. It has hookups to help you order seeds, instructions on how to prepare your soil, and guides for how much space you should give your plants; something I completely screwed up this year. You can also lay out your garden on a grid!

It’s pretty dope. I sorta wish I had this two years ago, or… at the beginning of this season. Check the tour and then get your act together, we have winter gardens to start thinking about!

Few things move me like the words “Lush Urban Farm” except maybe, “large grandma style pizza with mushrooms.” Anyway, if you haven’t heard, there’s a construction site in limbo that’s been taken over by growers for the restaurant Riverpark here in the fine city of New York.

It’s sorta funny that nobody’s covered this until now, I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the construction fence blocking it from view. But now that its cover has been blown, I saw Roger Clark of New York 1 hamming it up in there, talking about how they’re growing BLTs on a BLT bush. And he had mayonnaise all over his face while he did. Love that guy.

Anyway… I can’t imagine you’d want to eat anywhere else, it don’t get no fresher! How’s my grammar ma? Read all about the garden over on the Gothamist or watch the non-mayonaise version of the report on NY1.com.

Yes, there was a huge tomato, half-eaten and rotting in the sun. But there was also this:

In what might be the ultimate move of disrespect to Panthy’s Garden, a squirrel tore open a BAGGO BAG and ate… per usual… only a small portion of its contents. Looks like I’ll be putting corn in the squirrel trap.

As the sun fell I could here the call to prayer down on Atlantic Ave blasting, and the howling imitation of my 12-year-old neighbor a few rooftops over. It was kinda beautiful in a weird way, you know sunset… loudspeaker Arabic prayers, weird howling.

The veggie garden is not quite as beautiful; it’s looking kinda tall and lanky, having been a victim of the recent heat wave and my conspicuous weekend absence. (I feel terrible.)

As the plants thin out, producing tasty but small fruits, I realized I probably over-planted a few of my SIPs. If there were any quality goods to be had, some of these lanky bastards had to go. One SIP in particular had a tomatillo and tomato plant in it, both kinda suffering. Two plants enter, one plant leaves.

I chopped the tomatillo plant into little pieces (Brooklyn-style) and stacked it neatly in a less frequented corner of the garden. Bummer. Hope those tomatoes back there know how close they came to meeting the same fate. They better hup to it.

With a heap of healthy, dense, white eggplants I had to do something. But truthfully, the only eggplant dish I can remember eating, or wanting to eat, was eggplant parm. Anthony Bourdain would be appalled.

Lucky for me, my neighbor recommended a dish, the old Pasta Alla Norma, which sounds Italian for “the normal pasta.” I don’t speak Italian but this dish is not Norma, it’s actually the bomb.

I promise this won’t become a food blog. I may or may not have told you about some Panthy’s Fire Juice I whipped up once, or maybe even some wasabi pickles I purchased from a handsome weirdo at the farmer’s market. And now, here I am telling you about my dinner. I promise you, this will not become a habit. It’s about the growing son! But you gotta eat what you grow. And I have a blog that makes me write about all this stuff so… just shut up and read, k?

Before I got started I needed some items from the supermarket, you know the one with the bullet hole in the front window.

I was happy to see that at least the bullet entered the store sometime before the poster went up for thick cut steaks. Phew.

Note to mom: this is still a safe neighborhood! The coffee place just across the street was in the Times!

I needed some canned tomatoes, fresh basil and ricotta salata (a dried permutation of ricotta cheese). I got those and also found some other stuff.

You pile up little peeled coins of salted eggplant and then squeeze the water out of them before throwing them under the broiler. The sauce is super simple and a wee bit spicy; I used my very own home-grown, semi-successful garlic! The garlic was tiny but delicious.

Think spicy, homemade red sauce with rich, yummy eggplant slices and some fresh cheese mixed in. Sounds good right? Peep the recipe.