Weekend in the 'burbs

Friday night I saw Joss Whedon’s newly released film version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (black and white, modern dress, modern sensibilities…except....) at Lincoln Center.  Saturday I watched the DVD of Kenneth Branagh’s film version from 1993. Branagh also directed Thor (2011), which led me to my DVD of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers from last year.  While I contemplate what to tell you about Whedon’s new film, I thought I’d bring you up to date on the garden.  And the cats.  And the squirrels.

I don’t expect any “squirrel-proof” bird feeder to be proof against New York City squirrels.  Their ways with bird feeders are imaginative as well as intrusive.  The birdfeeder hangs from a tree branch and even has a lid.  Which is no obstacle to a New York squirrel, who just lifts the lid and digs in.

 

 

The “small or medium-sized rodent of the family Sciuridae” are tough, fearless, and smarter than I’d thought.  You know those big tins that are given at holidays, usually full of pop corn, sometimes divided into three types?  Well, I like tins and save them.  For cookies, for popcorn, for anything.  My winter scarves and shawls and gloves go in this one.

And for some reason, I decided to use this one outside to hold plastic bags of birdseed.  Guess who’s smart enough to open it.  Greedy little thieves.

Watchful Wilbur and Millie

 The cats have been intent on the visiting birds as well as the resident squirrels who’ve ventured onto the garden shed to stare through the window.  No, of course I don’t let them go out to run off the rodents.  So they wait and they watch, they twitch their hind quarters, and then they nap.

Wilbur is trapped

Chick is rapt

This weekend in the garden:  The hydrangea I planted last summer near my front window is taking well and blossoming.

The crookneck squash plant and the zucchini plant are both doing nicely out back,

Alas, the cucumber is not taking.

Finally, inside, my experiment with organic celery seems to be going well.  I bought the organic celery at Whole Foods a few weeks ago, and then followed the instructions here: http://www.17apart.com/2012/02/growing-celery-indoors-never-buy-celery.html.  Five days after “planting” the base in water and setting the bowl in the kitchen window, this is what I’ve got.  It seems to be working.  How cool is that!

~ Molly Matera, signing off to enjoy the Sunday papers in my little hideaway.

7th day:  I transferred the celery base into a pot with some nice potting soil.  Watered.  Will water every day and see what happens next.  Tee hee!

 

Spring Planting

I gave myself a 3-day weekend to ensure I had time enough to do my usual weekend collapse as well as planting flowers and/or herbs/veggies in the front and back gardens. The front is along the Grand Central Parkway, so although it has lots of sun, I wouldn’t want to plant edibles there what with all the soot and exhaust fumes. Of course, planting the front garden was not necessary in years past, but since Metro Management vandalized my tree, I’ve had to cover what was formerly covered by the blue spruce’s branches with flowers. The blue spruce’s roots are far reaching and shallow, so digging in the soil is precarious. Therefore I decided to create a “moat” of sorts, not dug in but built up with fencing and topsoil mixed with peat moss.


Leave it to Lowe’s — I found a couple different fencing choices. None of them would do what I envisioned. Actually, I am much too lazy to do what I envisioned, which was to have a higher “wall” on the side of the tree farther from the building where the land sloped down, and a lower one close to the building. I did this:

OK, I can not only not draw straight lines, I can’t make a border (or whatever) that is consistently 8 inches across. The result may be a bit lopsided, but it has ... character. I then planted some pretty red and pink flowers, some white pansies, something resembling 8 inches apart. Hopefully they’ll fill in. Water water water.

Now what did I forget?

Out back I planted some veggies, which are always an experiment: a zucchini plant, a cucumber plant, and a crookneck squash.

Then I piled a bunch of pink petunias into a couple pots, and watered all. Not bad.

What did I forget?
 

Mulch. The front and back new plantings in the new topsoil should be protected with mulch. By this time the aching from carrying seven bags of top soil around was already setting in, so I decided the rest would wait until tomorrow. So on the third day of my weekend, I set off in the morning to the local hardware store, with a little wheely thing in tow. There were workmen digging away near the laundry room, so I determined not to do laundry only to have it covered with dirt on the way back. I assumed they were Verizon employees, who had marked the locations of Time Warner’s underground cabling some weeks earlier, I suppose so they don’t cut them while digging new trenches to lay Verizon Fios cable inside pipes.  The pipes didn’t look awfully sturdy to lay i’ the cold ground.

Out here in the boondocks, we don’t have “city blocks” to make judging distances easy, but the hardware store is about a block past my morning bus stop, which is approximately five city blocks from my front door. Winters I’ve carried home my Christmas trees from the same block, and it’s easy. But a big bag of mulch? Probably not. Alas, they didn’t carry mulch at all, so I’d have to drive somewhere. The closest supplier I was sure would carry mulch was the Home Depot on Metropolitan Avenue, “around the corner” (a very large corner) from the supermarket, so away I went, combining chores, and praying to get the same parking spot on my return. 

With a large bag of mulch in the trunk, two flats of red and pink impatiens on the back seat (must vacuum back there!) plus several bags of groceries later, I got an even closer parking spot to my front door. Frabjous day.

But what’s this? A bunch of guys sitting on my front stoop and the step of the apartment opposite me, having their lunch. Equipment, shovels, stuff. These must be the Verizon guys, but now they’re digging between my building and the next. It seems unlikely that I’m going to work in my front yard with these guys there, so I leave the mulch in the trunk, and lug in the groceries. Returned for the two flats later, so now they’re sitting out back.

Out back: a guy with a machine that digs trenches. It’s odd to have a motor turning over in my back garden, a disconcerting sound. The machine driver and I cleared my pots and plant tables and birdbaths from the path of the machine (most of which are technically not in my territory, which is the width of my apartment – the no man’s land where he wanted to dig a trench to the cater-corner building is covered in weeds and vines. Maybe they’ll get rid of some of those.). He said he’d put them all back, but I doubted it.

Note: Tuesday, he has not moved it all back.

Over the last several days as I worked in the garden with the wonderful soil, I started deepening an annoying cold and cough I’d picked up somewhere. My aches became less muscular and more flu-like. Sigh. Now my head is too heavy to do anything but photograph the long mound in between my building and the next. Too long for a grave. There are young men in the back again today, digging and covering the trench to the cater-corner building. Now I have lumpy graves.

If I feel better later, maybe I’ll break out the mulch.

~ Molly Matera, signing off. Unfortunately not cleaning up the back garden until the weekend comes.

My Big Blue Spruce

One recent Sunday, I sat in my back garden enjoying the peace of the sheltering trees and bushes and the view of birds and flowers.  Trucks on the highway can still be heard, but there’s a buffer zone, and a swooshy sound from the speeding vehicles passes between the buildings, keeping it far away.

Two squirrels sit calmly on one branch, while another goes up the juniper trunk.  It chases a fourth.  A red-breasted robin flaps in the birdbath and sings.  A bee lights on the pansies in the pot then swings by the multi-colored hydrangea.  Salmon-colored flowers bloom with the nasturtium leaves and zucchini flowers burst from beneath the broad leaves.

When I first moved here 20-odd years ago, it was February, cold and snowy.  The front door was reached by four steps, and the patchy lawn between it and the street was empty.  That first Christmas, I decided I’d have a live Christmas tree and plant it near the stoop.  I prepared ahead – Aunt Lois told me a trick my grandfather had taught her.  Dig the hole before frost, big enough to fit a rootball and more.  Add a little water to the bottom of the hole, then cover it with black plastic (since my grandfather was born in the 19^th century, I’m guessing he said something like burlap, not plastic), then refill the plastic-covered hole with a mix of the original soil and a new topsoil mixed with peat moss.  Had this occurred 10 years later than it did, I’d have documented it with my digital camera; but alas, I had no such instrument back then. Only my memory serves.  For Christmas, I bought a four-foot tall blue spruce and kept it inside, its rootball in a large bucket, for the season.  After Christmas, and after some snow melted, I planted it out front, and much to everyone’s surprise, it took.  Over the years, it grew tall and wide and is now taller than the two-story building I live in.

Big Blue in January 2012 -- yes, ten minutes of snow melted ten minutes later.

Beyond its beauty, Big Blue (as I called it) offered a habitat to birds and shelter to me as well.  Its boughs covered part of my bedroom window, so people walking along the street couldn’t just see in – they’d have to get past the scratchy needles to do that.  More, Big Blue sheltered my front stoop, allowing packages to be delivered in safety without my taking off work to receive them.  I could tell any delivery service just to leave it on the stoop, Big Blue protects it all. 

Blue has been a part of my daily life for many years, a welcome home sign, and the landmark that my friends and family could use to differentiate my building from the others along my street.  Some weekends are chock-a-block full and busy, but I noticed a weed tree was growing strong between Blue and the building, so I resolved that I’d go in and cut that away the coming weekend.

That Tuesday, I came home in early dusk.  The black-eyed susans that had been clinging to the corner of the building were gone.  As were the hostas near the stoop.  As were Blue’s branches from the ground to six feet above.  My beautiful blue spruce had been butchered, the ground around it cleared of all perennials.  It was appalling.  Blue had been violently shaved, and I couldn’t help thinking of Eleanor Parker’s desperate whispered lines in the 1950 movie, Caged, after the other inmates had hacked her hair off:  “It’ll grow back.  It’ll grow back.”  The dirt around Blue was naked and lifeless, no longer covered by Blue’s protective needles.  My stoop and window were naked. 

twilight shock

One of the first things I ever transplanted was a hosta.  It’s still alive, out back.  Hostas are therefore, to me, almost impossible to kill, since I had no skill in transplanting.  Yet the hostas at the foot of my tree were gone.

The management office of the co-op closes at 5, but I wrote an email that evening complaining bitterly of the destructive act.  Home on Wednesday, I awaited a response.  The site manager and a minion came around with a camera.  I charged outside asking if they’d done it.  I was not calm.  They were.  After a few minutes she (the site manager) claimed it had been chopped up due to a security issue – the alleged security guard had allegedly seen a kid smoking pot behind my tree.  Obviously he was not well hidden, since the security guards never get out of their golf carts.  Poor kid, if he’d thought about it, there are plenty of places the security guards never notice where he could have smoked in peace.

Not that I believe that story.  If there had been a security issue and they didn’t inform me of it, surely that would be negligence.  If I was in danger because of my tree, surely they would have been concerned enough to send an email (they have two of my email addresses), a phone call (they have my numbers), or, easier still, put a note through the mail slot in my door, the way Metro Management generally communicates with the residents.  I received no warning of danger and no notification that either I should prune my tree or they would. 

What some incompetent fool with a power tool did to my tree was not pruning.  Metro Management does not hire people with any knowledge – the same unskilled labor paints porticoes and tromps through gardens with leaf blowers, and wreaks havoc on innocent plants with power saws. 

 

I wrote to every member of the Board of Directors of the co-op as well.  I have yet to receive a response.  To say nothing is to condone what was done.  It could have been a mistake, apologized for, and offers of new annuals to cover the naked soil could have been made.  But that didn’t happen.  In the weeks since, I’ve walked around Parkway Village, taking pleasure in people’s gardens and noting every tree or bush that could be seen as a security issue.  I won’t tell, though.  Metro Management might chop them down.

So, the upshot is this:  DO NOT EVER BUY INTO A CO-OP IN NEW YORK.  You’ll have no rights, merely responsibilities.  You will not be a homeowner.  Unskilled and ignorant laborers can destroy any landscaping you may choose to do with impunity.  Especially if the co-op board is foolhardy enough to hire Metro Management.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to go plant some impatiens around my poor tree, and a new hydrangea under my bare window.

Happy Cinco de Mayo

With my niece’s wedding successfully concluded last weekend, this was my week for gardening. I didn’t get to it until yesterday, but since it rained a lot, I chose not to do wet raking. I find it inefficient. Today, however, is glorious, so out I went, foolishly ungloved, just to do a little bit of raking to start. Of course, that means raking up everything I should have raked in October and discovering all sorts of things underneath. Hunks of tree bark amid the ivy – what tree? Tiles, stones, pieces of plastic wrapping?? It was a rough winter on all of us, and the evergreens out back are hanging lower than ever as if the snow still weighed them down. Lots of pruning to do.

So, once I started, I raked up two big “outdoor trash” bags of leaves, twigs, branches, pinecones, vines, and whatnot. Today’s raking barely dented the back 20. That’s 20 feet by a good deal less than 20 feet, not acres. Day by day, little by little. While I was out there, I saw many dandelions, just as I had any other day the past two weeks walking along GCP. Big gorgeous dandelions.

When I was a child, I picked some dandelions for my godmother and presented them to her as if they were magnificent. Well, they were, and are, but at the time…. My godmother accepted them graciously, but later my mother told me they were weeds and that my godmother was allergic to them. Alas, so much for flower gathering.

Now, though, I look at all the dandelions and wonder how many dandelions it takes to make a pot of dandelion tea. I referred to my cousin Maggie’s blog, where she gives a recipe for dandelion wine. That’s my cousin for you. This recipe seems simple but requires patience, as it must ferment! http://albionmaggie.blogspot.com/2010/05/dandelion-wine-recipe.html

The answer to my original question is: To make tea you need the roots. Flowers are for salads and fritters and such like. While I felt my neighbors would not begrudge the picking of what they all consider just a weed marring their mostly bedraggled lawns, I am in the habit of reading thoroughly, and the web site on which I found a tea recipe warned the reader to be sure to pick flowers only where I could be sure no fertilizers had been used. Well. The only place I could be sure of that….. was not in Queens. So, I’ll just have some ordinary green tea, thank you. In a little bag. The lazy way for this city girl.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to luxuriate in store-bought green tea over a good book. And perhaps a dollop of brandy….