You’ve made it to yet another gripping installment of What the Fuck is Happening Up in Panthy’s Garden! Here’s your trophy, send me your address, I’ll mail it to you. 

Whoa buddy, how come you so salty? Well I’ll tell you. Get a load of these guys. ALREADY. These little bastards usually don’t turn up until mid-summer, and yet here they are, tiny black aphids getting their start on the underside of my nasturtiums.

In time, their sugary excretions known as “honeydew” will coat these leaves and a train of ants will begin somewhere in Queens, marching all the way to Panthy’s Garden to harvest it. 

My crop of tomatoes and everything else will become a wilted embarrassment. Every two weeks I’ll pull off a horrible, disfigured tomato and fling it as far as I can onto the street below. Green Zebra my ass. 

Last year, I ordered up an insect cavalry of lady bugs to handle this problem. It was amazing watching lady bugs eat the faces of aphids. I literally sat for an hour, at night, with a headlamp, like a creep, watching ladybugs slowly massacre aphids. And I have noticed a few of these guys, who I suspect are aphid eaters…. 

But I’m feeling a bit more urgency, this cluster says to me “infestation.” This needed to be handled TODAY. 

Hose: on. I adjusted the nozzle adjusted to the fearsome FLAT setting typically used to hose vomit off sidewalks. Leaf by leaf, I blasted them into oblivion with a powerful jet of water.

The unlucky aphids that wound up on my hands got the finger smoosh. If I didn’t think I’d hose down my iPhone in the process I would’ve done a better job at capturing this but take my word for it, it was awesome. 

Apparently, this is a viable solution to the aphid problem, at least according some person on the internet. I’m not into pesticides, and my solution of soap and mineral oil was really only partially successful. And who doesn’t like blasting the enemy with brute force? The world is built on it.

Sure, I enjoy the carnage. Maybe too much. But it’s in service of a higher cause: FREEDOM. No, actually, it’s in service of eating of fine, homegrown, pretentious, heirloom, hipster-ass, Brooklyn, tomatoes. Like these little beauties…

A day late and a dollar short I got my seeds started for what I’m hoping will be an EPIC 2012 season in rooftop gardening shenanigans. My tomatoes are going to explode off the branches with flavor!

My peppers are going to get so big they’re going to crush curious guests… in their mouths! My Dwarf Siberian Kale is going to get… appropriately little! Panthy is practically jumping out of his skin.

Some people get extremely nerdy about their seeds. They fawn over the quaint packaging, rattle off the obscure names, and collect them in precious little files. I respect it to the fullest, it just ain’t for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some heirlooms and everything they stand for, I just hate planting them. I’m more of a dig a hole and dump a plant in it kind of guy. If I could somehow use a chainsaw to plant seeds, I just might.

Trying to get into the spirit, I pulled out an appropriately tiny notebook and a very fly Swiss pen and got down to the tedious business of planting and marking down exactly where each of the 144 seeds went.

Keeping a record is almost as important as planting the seed. Today I ate part of this mystery plant to see if it was a weed or the obscure Corn Dutch Salad I planted last summer. I think it was a weed. Hard to know, I don’t think anyone has ever eaten Corn Dutch Salad. Probably because it looks like a weed. Or tastes like one. Or is one?

After a quick soak, each tiny divot in these puffy little shit disks received a pair of precious seeds.

They’ll sit in the window until they start to sprout, after which my grow light will take over, combining its beaming light with the grooviness of this patterned cloth to make the magic happen.

Almost my entire flock of sweet veggies will emerge from these humble plastic trays; ground cherries, jalapeno peppers, tomatoes, cukes, eggplants and bunch of other exotic heirloom vegetables. Hard to believe actually. An entire season of obsession, dutiful watering, constant complaining, and occasional success; all from these little seeds. Maybe I better start showing them a little more respect.

Brooklyn continues to be an inspiring place to grow, filled with unique approaches to gardening, including mulching with trash.

The top priority for Panthy’s Garden is “re-charging” the potting mix in my containers. There’s absolutely no way in hell I’m hauling 25 of those massive bags of potting mix up five flights again and no need to really. I can just swap in a third of the mix with new mix and/or compost. Boom, all set.

In my case, I’ll do some of both. While potting mix is easy to find, compost is not, at least not in New York City. I’ve got my own stash of homemade compost made from Chinese food leftovers and sawdust, but I’m gonna need a whole lot more to get the garden up to speed before planting.

My search led me to Shannon Nursery and Florist located just across from Greenwood Cemetery out in Brooklyn. It’s possible that the compost is made from dead people but I’ve always been a fan of composting meat. (Sorry.)

Actually, it’s completely legit, high-quality organic compost. The service was great, unlike Home Depot where you have to be on the winning side of a knife fight to get one of those giant carts, get your goods, and get out in one piece. The guy at Shannon’s told me, “Relax! Looking around is free!”

Shannon also specializes in “Funeral Designs” being a florist across from a cemetery and all. I’m not sure which I found more depressing, the “I Miss You Mom” or the New York Yankees arrangement. To be fair, the stuff was nice, just a little uh, perspective enhancing.

Loaded up with my compost I got back to my crowded garden, still jammed on one end of the deck while the other end is being put back together by the roofers.

I used my junky clippers to chop down the remnants of last year’s crops and found a few little surprises. What’s this? Wanna guess?

It’s an eggplant, a tiny petrified eggplant. How bout this?

That’s also an eggplant. I know, it’s bonkers. How bout this?

Oh that’s a ceramic sheep my pal Matt stole from a nativity scene out in Los Angeles sometime in 1994, which subsequently made the trip cross country with us in the trunk of this car. In 1995. No big whoop. Please note my huge glasses and bold sense of optimism. I’m wearing flip flops for chrissakes!

With last year’s plants gone, the slate has been wiped clean. I’m this close (imagine my fingers making that “this close” gesture), to getting it all up and running again.

Sun shining, city shimmering, it was hard not to feel like my 1995 self up there.

It’s 68 degrees right now and I’m told that thanks to a solar flare I might be able to see the Northern Lights from my roof tonight. In a mystical confluence of events, my deck, ripped up for the last few months, is being put together as we speak. It’s not impossible that in a few hours I will be able to stand in a semi-funcional Panthy’s Garden, drinking in the weirdness of the season in all its glory. I may also drink in a beer.

Last year around this time, I dumped out a pot only to find it was a giant dirt popsicle. Thanks to our globally-warmed, non-winter, my garden is coming back to life, the garden equivalent of a cat nap. The soil is completely workable and lots of my plants never really died back, they just got ugly.

The beach rose that enchants guests with its flowers and stabs pigeons with its thorns has a single, promising bud on it. A tulip is coming up in a pot I didn’t realize had a tulip bulb in it. I’ve got kale! I planted it hoping to eat it last fall, but hell, I’ll take it. Kinda like when the delivery guy brings you a cold pizza after an hour. Keep calm, carry on, eat it anyway.

Appropriately, the Department of Agriculture has revised its zone map to confirm what we all know already: it’s warmer these days. They were careful not to say this was direct evidence of global warming, God-forbid. Rather, this map revision was based on “more information from a longer period of time.” Uh huh. The new map also takes into account how land features affect climate (proximity to water, pockets of air in valleys and hills, and relative location to Walmart).

The release of this map, now on the interwebs, comes at a good time for those of us in the Northeast. Consult it to be sure what you want to grow, actually grows in your zone. What I haven’t yet seen is a map that accounts for the amount of wind and heat on my roof; to say nothing of the garbage birds and squirrels. If indulging in bureaucratic language is your thing, peep the full gub-ment press release.

While bizarre, and a little disconcerting, today bodes well for Panthy’s Garden and really, gardens everywhere. May your season be early and fruitful.

Ever since I ordered my first “café con leche with milk” I’ve wanted to go to Cuba. I love me some Cuban food (I can eat the hell out of some maduros). From what I can tell, Cubans rip around town in amazing classic cars, blasting Cuban music which is basically a huge party for your ears. But perhaps most importantly, Cubans garden their asses off. In an attempt to be free of foreign food imports, they grow a lot of their own food and they generally grow it organically.

The ragged, lush plots in this BBC video kind of remind me of the one my grandfather carved out of his backyard just next to his Airstream trailer. They aren’t pretty in the English garden sense of the word. Their beauty lies in their simplicity and ability to produce amazing food.

During a groggy pre-work inspection of Panthy’s I accidentally photographed myself while trying to capture the nuances of my dumb salad tray.

Once I figured out how to operate my iPhone properly I turned its lens on plants that I didn’t intentionally plant but that I did intend to take pictures of.

A self-seeded ground cherry is making use of an empty pot of dirt and a tomato plant is getting started in another. Hey dummies, it’s October! Go back to where you came from!

In addition to funny-looking (but fully-ripe peppers) are new eggplant blossoms and the resulting tiny white eggplants. If I can get enough of these I can fulfill my dream to own and operate an eggplant parm slider truck. This town will have no idea what hit it.

I’m not kidding when I tell you I have better tomatoes now than I did all summer. This one is roughly the same height as the Williamsburg Savings Bank.

The intentional greens are moving along nicely. I thinned out the Tom Thumb lettuce to let the more promising candidates do their thing unencumbered.

After rinsing them quickly I jammed the entire handful into my mouth. This stuff is so fresh, it literally squeaked in my mouth. October in Panthy’s ain’t half bad.

You’ve decided to follow this dumb blog and now you’re gonna pay for it, starting with this brief tale: I grew this tomato, from seed, and ate it for breakfast this morning.

I’m no hero for doing it, just stating the facts. It’s bruised, looks like it may have lost a fight to a stray cat, but when I had Gordon Ramsay slice it and plate it up it looked pretty damn good, and it tasted pretty damn good too.

In a season of tomatoes mostly destroyed by blossom end rot and/or biblical rain, I was happy to have a single, halfway-decent, edible tomato. 

It was certainly not on the level with these monsters I found at my local pretentious food market. Though it’s hard to tell from the photo, these heirlooms were the size of two fused together man fists.

I have no idea how to grow tomatoes this amazing. I can’t remember what they were called but if I farmed these suckers, I’d name them Cat’s Ass tomatoes for two reasons. The first of which is that they’re awesome. 

Not long after my market trip, I ran across this tomato plant in a West Village parking lot catching supplementary rays from a street lamp. It was tiny, and I’m fairly sure no fruit will be coming off its branches. But like my tomato plants, it was undaunted by inevitable failure, straining to grow taller even if home was the top of a rusty gas pump in a parking lot. Maybe it will prove me wrong and surprise its owner with a single, man-fist sized beauty that will be ripe just in time for breakfast. I sure hope so, tomatoes for breakfast are good.

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!

I had a really healthy dinner yesterday. Partly because lunch came from this fella:

He looks surly here but is actually a really nice guy. He makes an exceptional burrito at the Calexico cart in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Feeling kinda gross for having eating a two-pound pork burrito in the middle of a heat advisory, I decided I would eat some jams straight from Panthy’s Garden for dinner to offset the Calexico heft. Here’s the haul:

Couple of heirloom tomatoes, one tiny piece of broccoli, one Japanese Long cuke, and of course, some Spotted Trout lettuce. And because I was feeling a little fancy, I threw a few nasturtium flowers up in there. All of it, minus those ground cherries, went into a pretty robust salad. Rarely do I describe salads as “robust” by the way.

I’ve also collected a huge stash of ground cherries. I have too many to eat so I brought them into work. One of my co-workers described them as “weird and delicious” which is exactly right. The tomatillos are also weird but I can’t yet confirm if they’re delicious; I’ve yet to figure out what to make with them.

The funny thing about growing your own goods is that you can’t really shop for a meal, the meal shops for you. Uh, I mean, you eat what’s available, not necessarily what you’re in the mood for. I would’ve liked a little more broccoli, but you know, that’s all there was. That little smidge of it.

The other funny thing about raising your own dinner is knowing its entire history. It’s less about being glad it didn’t come from a factory farm and more about being blown away by all the insanity and work it took to get to your plate; the seed starting, the obsession, the over-sharing on various social media platforms, and finally that little snip from the clippers. It’s a lot and it’s also pretty damn good. Almost as good as a burrito.