Urban forager

My strawberry picking adventure has left me with a bug I can't shake. I'm a berry-pickin' maniac. Last week I spent about three hours harvesting mulberries and serviceberries (also called saskatoons or juneberries) in the city, from trees at Bartram's and street trees in my neighborhood. I also found a blog about urban foraging which has been an inspiration - First Ways.



I've been eye-ing these serviceberry trees that I pass on my way to work every morning and I noticed that they were getting quite ripe. So I did my research (made sure they weren't poisonous) and then grabbed some containers and headed over to them. Much to my surprise and delight there was already an urban forager over there and she had brought a ladder! I love this city.



In three hours I collected 6 pints of fruit! Absolutely free!



Serviceberries look and taste like blueberries without the intense tartness that I really love. Instead they are subtely sweet and their seeds taste like almonds. Mmmmmm. I read that they have lots of pectin, so I'm going to collect more soon and make jam, completely sans pectin.



I found lots of mulberry trees at Bartram's, including a white one. The white mulberries were really sweet, in that musky way that mulberries are. The black ones have some tartness to them. Mulberries supposedly fall off the tree when they are ripe, but I didn't collect any from the ground, the ones on the tree were ripe enough for me. They were kind of a pain to clean though, because I took off every single little stem by pinching it off between my finger nails. I might skip that part next time and just deal with a little extra texture.



I made two cobblers with these berries combined, using Joy's blueberry cobbler recipe (which of course references two other recipes so you have to keep flipping between pages). They were delicious! The serviceberry seeds added an almond taste to the whole thing and the pectin made the fruit gel up nicely.





I took one to work for my boss's birthday on Friday and one stays home with me and the boys. It's almost gone, mostly my doing.

Michaux State Forest

Here are some belated Memorial Day camping photos. We went to Michaux State Forest out near Harrisburg and camped with a bunch of friends. Our camp site was just up a hill from the Appalachian Trail so I got my first taste of hiking the AT. The forest was gorgeous, full of ferns, flowering azaleas, mushrooms and critters!













Cozy.

This is Huge

M put out a record. An actual vinyl record that he can hold in his hot little hands. We picked them up yesterday and I believe the quote went something like, "This is the most awesome feeling in the whole world."



Hmmm, I like that color scheme . . . .

Empty Nest Syndrome

Last week the robins finally flew the coop. I've been watching them develop in the nest outside the Education building at Bartram's for the past few weeks. I miss them.

Here's the tree where Mama was sitting on her nest. You can see it in the crotch of the branch that is third from the left.



The tree is a Redbud and the nest is only about 6 feet high. There's a rock underneath it that I could stand on and stick my camera up above the nest to take pictures (only when Mama was away, of course).

Here she is warily watching me about a month ago when the Redbud was flowering.



Her three tiny bright blue eggs:



The two chicks that hatched (who knows what happened to the third egg). They look like little aliens with clown mouths. Hahaha, cracks me up!



This is what they looked like about a week ago, they're almost too big for the nest!



All last week I stalked the poor robins because I was fascinated with them. Working with kids makes you appreciate the smaller miracles in nature. One day I took a class of third graders by the nest and we all got to see this little miracle:



And then at the end of the week I came in to work and one little robin had already flown away and the other one was testing her wings. She had somehow made it up to a branch above the nest and was sitting there still as a stone while I watched her. I had to go teach and when I returned, she was gone. Ah, life.



Look at how speckley she is!



Good luck little robins.

It's Ba-ack!

It's our first CSA box from Red Earth Farm!! The pickup location is only 6 blocks away so I can walk over there on Tuesday nights and walk back with my box o' goodies. It's kind of ironic that in Davis I usually had to drive to pick up my box, but now that I live in a huge city I can walk.

In the box: Pac choi, spinach, green and red leaf lettuce, green onions and one baby basil plant. We bought an egg share too so this week we got a dozen beautiful eggs (with small, dark yolks - I'm eating one now).

I'll add this to the CSA Flickr group and my own CSA set. Jaja has joined in the fun of posting pics of her CSA box ("CSYay!!"), and I'm really enjoying my friend Erin's postings about her CSA box on her blog and on the Farm to Philly blog.

The Perfect Sunday

The recipe is simple. Take four good friends, add 25 pounds of pick-your-own strawberries, one gorgeous summer day, and various jam-making supplies, and there you have it. The perfect Sunday.

Square by Square

The garden is coming along nicely.



The potatoes are getting huge (they are much bigger now than when I took this photo last week), but they haven't flowered yet. Should they have? I've never grown potatoes before.



On the south side of the plot we have:

• Ponca butternut squash and Casper pumpkin (from seed, in top left corner)
• Desiree potato
• Bush pickler cucumber (from seed in the three consecutive "empty" spaces, and transplant)
• Red and yellow bell pepper
• Mache aka corn salad (in bottom left square, above the snap peas)
• Dwarf grey snap pea - these are goners, I'm going to plant something else in there soon
• and Giant strawflower, Double pinwheel marigold, and Zinnia (in lower right corner)
  

***Mache - I probably won't bother planting this again because it's slow and not very tasty. But I got the seeds from Bartram's Garden so I had to try it out.***

On the north side of the plot we have:

• Golden beets and Watermelon radish (in succession in the top left)
• Oxheart carrot
• Emerald oak lettuce
• Fordhook giant swiss chard
• Santo cilantro, Bush basil, Dukat dill, Arugula (all seeds, not sprouting yet)
• Bush pickler cucumber
• Black Krim tomato
  
• Green Zebra tomato
• Sweet 100 cherry tomato
• and the remnants of the mesculun mix
  

So pretty!

Community Garden Projects - Reveal!

In February of this year a group of neighbors and I sat down at my kitchen table, drank tea and discussed the idea of creating a new community garden in our neighborhood. Now, almost four months later, we have two garden projects we are working on and a list of over 75 people interested in helping out and getting plots. It's more than a little overwhelming and exciting that this is actually happening and that I am in charge.

There is a core group of about 7 neighbors who come to the meetings and are instrumental in getting things done. One of those people is Sue, the director of a fabulous local non-profit called UC Green (they do urban greening projects in West Philly). As a result of her generous suggestion we are calling ourselves (yes it's clumsy and wordy, but it sounds official) The UC Green Community Garden Initiative. We have a name!

We have also attracted the attention of other community groups interested in vacant land reclamation, community gardens, and urban redevelopement. West Philly Digs is a group of young activists who are interested in turning vacant lots in West Philly into community gardens. Eric, the founder, has been one of our core garden committee members from the beginning.

We are also collaborating with The Enterprise Center Community Development Corporation, a small business incubator that serves Walnut Hill, the neighborhood immediately north of mine. Their mission is to help local minority entrepreuners start small businesses. In that spirit, they are starting a kitchen incubator called the Center for Culinary Enterprises (you think our name is wordy, check out this one: The Enterprise Center Community Development Corporation's Center for Culinary Enterprises, TEC-CDC CCE). They bought an abandoned supermarket and are building several industrial, Health Department-approved kitchens for people to rent out! I think this project is amazing because it provides a resource for local food enptrepreuners to legally sell their products. And we are collaborating with them to create a community garden where some of those people can grow their own food for processing - locally grown, locally processed food!

So, with the background info out of the way, onto the projects.

Project #1:
The hardest part about this project so far is finding available land. Duh. Our part of West Philly is the advancing front of gentirfication and land is expensive and in high demand. We struggled with this challenge for a while and then The Enterprise Center approached us with a peice of land. This land is behind the 46th Street elevated subway station and it is currently owned by SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority). In September of this year it will be deeded over to The Enterprise Center for $1 and our councilwoman has given TEC the job of making it into a park or other community space. Given that they have no budget for this project, we will be collaborating with TEC to make this into one of our community gardens!

Here is the space, it's roughly 60' by 100'. We're calling it The Blue Line Garden after the subway line that runs next to it.


***South side, looking north - you can see the El in the background. SEPTA put up a silly fence that's not attached to anything on the south side of the lot. You can see the front slope covered in weeds and a set of cement stairs that we plan to make into the main entrance to the garden.***


***South side, looking west.***


***South side, looking east - another set of rickety cement steps that we are currently using to access the site.***


***North side, looking south - the line of rocks shows where the site begins to slope down and turn into a parking lot/storage space for SEPTA. We are only dealing with the area between the rocks and the silly fence.***

We had a work day on May 9th and 25 people came out to help! We weeded, removed rocks, raked and graded the land, and did a little bit of planting along the front slope.





Here are some before and after shots from the southwest corner:


***before***


***after***

All of the amazing panoramic-style photos are by Adam, one of two local landscape architects who are working with us on this project. We have been so incredibly lucky in attracting people to this project who all have different talents. There's Joe, who knows everyone and is a tireless volunteer for all things urban greening in the neighborhood. There's Sue, our non-profit director who is lending us tools, a name, and countless other resources. There are Nancy and Vivianne (who I met at Garden Tenders in the winter) who manage other gardens in the area and were the impetus for this whole thing. There are Patty and Adam, our landscape architects. There's Imanni and other staff members from The Enterprise Center who were insturmental in getting this project off the ground. There's M, who has grant-writing and park-building experience. There's Nic, who has started community gardens elsewhere and is probably second only to me in his enthusiasm about our projects. This whole process of garden-building has been made so much easier by the passionate involvement of all of these wonderful people.

Project #2:
In April we approached the director of The Woodlands (a historic cemetery in West Philly that is a popular place for local runners and dog walkers) about the possibility of putting a community garden on the grounds. Much to our surprise, she said that she had already been thinkking about a projcet like that! So I wrote a proposal and the board is currently reviewing it. Our ace-in-the-hole is that Sue (thank God for Sue) is on the Horticulture Commitee for the Woodlands and she will be presenting our proposal and garden design to the board next weekend.

Here is the space, it's roughly 30' by 80'. We're calling it The Woodlands Community Garden:


***From the west side, looking east. The space is bounded by an historic carraige house on the south and several larger trees on the north.***


***From the east, looking west.***

Our two projects are completely different in many ways. Where the Blue Line Garden is a very visible urban redevelopment project that is equal parts community activism and urban greening, The Woodlands Community Garden is on a peice of land that is off the street, scenic, and has an almost exclusive feel to it. Other things that make The Woodlands project easier are: UC Green stores their tools in a shed on the other side of that low wall and we will have access to them as members of the garden; the water hookup is less than 100' from the entrance to the garden (the east side); and there are piles of free woods chips on the grounds that we can use to cover the paths of the garden.

So there you go, all the info you need to know about my comunity garden projects. Now that we've got that out of the way I will be updating you on our progress, including what happens at the next work day at the Blue Line Garden and how the board responds to our proposal for The Woodlands Community Garden.

Have a lovely long weekend!

Fuzzy buddies!

Eek! Look who's hatched!