Late season sunflowers

2016-10-15Karin Kiontke

Summer is over now and the asters are beginning to bloom.

The bees love asters

But there are still sunflowers!

sunflowers

Did you know that there are about 70 species of sunflowers? Almost all of them are native to North America. The common sunflower is Helianthus annuus looks normally like the flower on the upper middle picture above. But as you can see, there are many fancy varieties in different colors and shapes and in sizes from dwarf to giant.

The photo below shows a different species, probably Helianthus debilis, the beach sunflower. These sunflowers have smaller flower heads and more delicate stems. They are my favorites.

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Mushrooms!

2016-10-05Karin Kiontke

Today, I noticed lots of mushrooms under the pine tree in the “North Garden”. I don’t think that we had mushrooms in the garden before. Maybe mulching with wood chips a few years back created the right conditions for them to grow now.

Some of the young mushrooms

The cap of this mushroom has a diameter of about 4 inches.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what kind of mushrooms these are and whether they are edible. They look like they could be. Wouldn’t that be exciting?

The rooster mysteries

2016-10-03Karin Kiontke

On September 18th, we discovered yet another rooster in the garden. According to my records, this was the 16th chicken that mysteriously appeared among our plants.

The latest rooster

Almost every year since 2008, one or two roosters showed up over night. Some of these roosters were young and probably only started to behave “manly”. But others were fully grown and crowed loudly all day long. Some birds looked very healthy and well-fed, others were undernourished or even injured. Most of them were fancy chickens, often miniature breeds.

Some of the chickens that were found in the garden. In 2008, we got two hens, all others were roosters.

We have no idea where all of these roosters come from and who “donates” them to us. A rooster announces himself constantly as soon as the sun is up. There is no way to hide a rooster in Manhattan. Does someone from New Jersey or Long Island sneak into the city at night and dump chickens over our fence?

Keeping roosters in New York City is prohibited (one can have hens, though). So what to do?

Fortunately, there are organizations and people in our city who assist with this odd problem. The hens went to a private farm in upstate New York. The roosters were rescued by the Empty Cages Collective and New York City Pigeon Rescue Central with the help of dedicated volunteers. Larry the birdman from Washington Square Park helped, too. Last year he caught two roosters with an improvised trap made of a milk crate, a stick and a string, some bird food and a lot of patience. All roosters went to a new home outside of the city.

Let us hope that this was the last rooster for 2016, but I am not holding my breath.

LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival (part 2)

2016-10-01Karin Kiontke

The second day of the LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival on Sunday was a lot of fun, too.

The weather was perfect for making sun prints. Below, you can see how it works: some pretty leaves or flowers are placed onto a sheet of special photo-paper, covered with a glass plate and exposed to bright sunlight for a few minutes. A bath in water develops the print. Now, the paper turns a lovely indigo blue and the shadow of the leaves is white. sunprints_sm

♦

In the afternoon, the integrative nutritionist Vanessa Berenstein led the “Garden to Table” workshop. Vanessa used to be one of our gardeners. She works now at the Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine in Washington DC, where she helps people with chronic pain and illnesses.

Vanessa took us on a foraging tour around the garden. On the way, she told us about the many benefits of basil, which flowers and weeds are edible, why small organic farms are better than big ones (and much better than large conventional factory farms), and about her experience with teaching Harlem school kids to grow and enjoy vegetables. At the end of our tour, we had filled our basket with kale, swiss chard, cucumbers, tomatoes and some apples, and also fennel fronds, chickweed, purslane, some out-of-season asparagus, rose-, marigold- and nasturtium flowers, and lots of herbs.

Everybody helped to chop up this bounty and assemble it into a not just nutritious but also very pretty salad. Finally, Vanessa made a creamy dressing with pistachio butter, lemon juice and spices, which she found to be loved even by picky children. It was indeed delicious.

We are really grateful that Vanessa came all the way from Washington DC for this fantastic workshop.

vanessa

♦

With this, the fun was not yet over! Sara had promised to lead a session of laughter yoga. Laughter yoga means to laugh even if nothing is funny — at first. We started with some breathing exercises and then just started laughing: ha-ha-ha-ha. It is a bit awkward in the beginning but it soon becomes hilarious. And it feels good, just like real, spontaneous laughing.

This picture is blurry because the photographer laughed, too.

LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival (part 1)

2016-09-26Karin Kiontke

It has been a while since the last post on this website. During summer the garden needed a lot of attention and there was little time to sit at a computer (lame excuse, I know…). I will try to recap what has happened.

lungshaf2016_poster_2-643x1024 Let me begin with a fabulous event last weekend: We participated in the the 5th annual LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival.

The highlight on Saturday was the creation of a collaborative poem about our apple tree. 21 children and adults, visitors and gardeners contributed. The result is really fun:

♦
I’m watching little apples
in the big apple.
♦
So much room to grow,
yet cluster together tightly,
weighing down each other.
♦
If trees are a high form of consciousness,
apple trees are nirvana.
♦
These trees remind me
of my grandparents’ old house
when I was growing up.

♦
Deceiving but delicious,
the apples give the tree life
♦
The apple tree, stately, elegant, a palace,
too bad they had to name it “Malus”
♦
The fruit of this tree
is so enticing
that people cannot bear
to leave it on the branch to ripen
♦
Green apples
Tumbling in space
Ornaments
for Fall