Because Alliums Often Remind Me of 🎆 Fireworks and It's the 4th

But they are much much quieter going off.

In the Parking Lot With Plants

Plants just seem to make everything better. I was in a parking lot at Hostra when I snapped these photos of a median strip garden.

Alliums (alliyums) For All

Alliums just for decoration to go with the grass or alliums for the bouquet or to sprinkle in a salad.

Alliums for making soup and to make most things you can think of more delicious or native alliums for pollinators up high on green roofs.

How useful, delicious and gorgeous is this genus? Very. Some alliums are outside blooming now.

Because When the Going Gets Tough

the really tough are only just getting going. Think you could survive two gnarly New York City summer heat waves with no supplemental water up on a green roof in the Bronx? I know I couldn't. I barely made it through just this afternoon intact and it wasn't nearly as hot up on that roof as it must have been last week in the baking sun.

I tried counting the bees today and I tried not to sweat. I failed at both.

One For my Mom's Table

This year I harvested most of my garlic scapes about a month ago. Those scapes made their way into salads and one tasty pasta dish that I was surprised came from my own hands at the stove. The rest remained on the garlic plants which were just pulled this week to cure. Those remaining scapes just opening made their way into the bouquet for my mom's table above. I was getting teased down at the community garden though about leaving those scapes on. But it's win/win as far as I'm concerned. I had some scapes for eating, some for flowers and still enough garlic to harvest and of decent size to be happy with. There's more than one way to skin a cat or so I've heard.

Yeah I know You're Supposed to Eat Them

but sometimes that feels beside the point. Pictured here, Jen's fire escape chives. I still think everyone ought to have a sweet little box or pot of them.

It's downright ridiculous how many pictures I have of chive flowers. But you know, I've got a thing for the allium flowers. Right now, there are some sweet ones blooming behind a locked fence that I can't get to and drumsticks still to come.

I did manage to nab this lone sweet moly though before the addition of bigger badder lock on the lot.

Waiting on a Bloom

I know the trend in plant breeding is towards repeating bloomers, but there's something sweet about waiting on a bloom and seeing it and enjoying in it's own time. And I love seeing something from the vegetable garden up on the greenroof. Chives are a triple threat. Talk about form and function and a willingness to thrive in a tough environment, this plant has got it all.

Planting Bulbs With Emma

What beats planting bulbs with your second-grade, gardening niece on one of the best weather late afternoons of fall? Not much, I'd wager. I'm hoping the alliums and muscari come up better looking than the sad picture I drew to explain to her exactly what her birthday present was. I'm no artist, but I think they'll pass for symbols at least of the plants that she will be watching next spring, and I'm pretty sure she's gonna love them.

Another Day, Another Stage

in the life cycles of a butterfly and an allium. I bet the Black Swallowtail caterpillar above is nearly ready to overwinter in its chrysalis and man, if I could get a picture of that for my bug-loving nephew, it would be cool. I'm betting that he can figure out which end is which on this caterpillar just by looking at its legs.

Below: garlic chives going to seed.

An Early October Bouquet

Zinnias and Garlic Chives Seed heads

So what if they're common? Zinnias manage to provide blooms for so long and are cheap from seed and you can plant them in any color you like. The colors of mine are a surprise to me because they came in a mixed seed package. I planted this round direct in the garden along with my fall crop of carrots, beets and greens and they started blooming last week.

It's All About Garlic at Saugerties This Weekend

Spanish Roja. Killarney Red. Polish White. Sicilian Gold. Rock and Roll Rocambole. Ok, that last one I made up, but the rest are all garlic varieties and the place for tasting and purchasing these different varieties for eating or planting this weekend is the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, NY. We took a bus there yesterday, with fellow community garden members to purchase some seed for planting later this fall direct from the variety of garlic growers on hand. We're only going on our fourth season of growing garlic, so there's still plenty to learn about the crop and master. We got the bug for growing it our first season at Floyd Bennett from watching Rocco's garlic and knew we had to make room for it in our plots that fall.

Some of next year's garlic from the area's growers.

Another Day, Another Allium, Another Pollinator

Euodynerus sp. Wasp on garlic chives, Brooklyn

If you told me four years ago that if I started growing vegetables that I'd eventually end up spending half my time in the garden crouching, spying on wasps and half my free time at home researching the identities of said wasps, I might not have believed you. But when you fall in love with something, you fall hard and you want to know everything you can about it. The allium I know, but this is the beginning of the garlic chives bloom this season and it's in a family of plants that I love for the eating, the pretty blooms and for the pollinator watching. The wasp I had to research. I won't pretend that I understand the language in the key to identifying the Euodynerus species here yet, (I'm a gardener, not an entomologist) but I think I'm on the right track with Euodynerus schwarzi or Euodynerus megaera. I'll settle for genus Euodynerus, and call the day's garden studying done.

Garden Fresh, A brooklyn garden that is

It's what's for dinner.

Trust me, the potatoes and leeks cleaned up nice, just like the gardeners. We made one of our favorite soups for this time of year, Cream of Tomato and Potato Soup, mostly following Elizabeth David's recipe in French Provincial Cooking, though we are apt to toss in a little more leek, butter and potato. More is more, apparently, as far as we're concerned. The major ingredients of the soup (the potatoes, leeks, tomatoes and parsley for garnish) were only a few hours out of the garden when all was said and the meal was done. Now if we could only rassle up a good Jersey cow, a salt mine and a greenhouse to grow the pepper vine in down at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, we'd really have it made. But still, growing what you can in a community garden plot in New York City feels like enough to celebrate.

Joe's Beautiful Garlic (Take Two)

Garlic flowering in Brooklyn

Last year, I celebrated the beauty of Joe's recently harvested garlic bulbs. This year the harvested garlic is just as beautiful and delicious, but I'm celebrating the flowering head of some unharvested bulbs. (Joe left two scapes on and allowed them to mature.) Now, I know there are bulbils and they constitute most of the "bloom", but it does look like some kind of flowering parts are present as well, sterile though they may be, reaching out of the bulbils themselves. It reminds me a bit of the Walking Egytian Onion actually. I hear that you can plant these bulbils and eventually you will get some decent-sized garlic, but I'm not sure that I have the patience or space to dedicate to this experiment. It could take two or three years of planting, harvesting and replanting these tiny clones from what I've read. I have trouble just waiting from fall planting to summer harvesting.

Labels" Allium, Bulbs, Floyd Bennett Gardens Association, Summer, New York City, Garden

Three Cool Things in Brooklyn Botanic's Native Flora Garden Now

what looks like Native Columbine seedheads slowly fading, nearly translucent and illuminated by sunlight

I'd be lying if I said there were only three cool things about visiting Brooklyn Botanic's Native Flora Garden right now. Even in this sweltering heat, the best place to be outside in New York City, besides near the shore catching a breeze, is under some big old trees in the shade. Anyday is a good day to take a stroll in the Native Flora, but in the summer it's always a hair cooler there. So these are just three cool things I noticed on Thursday while visiting. (Probably the coolest place to be temperature-wise and also for learning a thing or two is the Steinhardt Conservatory, where Uli's amazing pictures of native plants line the walls in a display celebrating both native plants and The New York Metropolitan Flora project. 20 years of scientists mapping what's growing wild in a 50-mile radius of New York City, now that's a project to celebrate.)

Clematis viorna (Vasevine) flower drying on the vine

Nodding Onion (Allium cernuum) blooming

Ba-Bang

What your garlic will do in July if you let it. I forgot that I was going to let one go to flower this year and harvested all the scapes and the bulbs themselves last weekend, but I managed to snatch these out of the community garden garbage when an old garden plot was cleared out this weekend for new gardeners. The flower of garlic is about as fantastic as any decorative allium I've seen, though I've admitted before that I'm pretty much a sucker for most of them.

Update: Waiting on Joe's garlic scape to open to see what kind of bulbils they produce. The flowers above, while they smelled like garlic are probably from an elephant garlic plant. Joe tells me his garlic never flowers so spectacularly. Bummer.

Awakening

Allium Schubertii opening

In those last moments before the bloom, there is magic. Lucky are we, the witnesses.


Lavender bud getting ready to bloom

I Sit Around With My Head Hanging Down...

You have to love those flowers that hold their heads low and demure, as if they weren't as fabulous as they are. (Photographs taken at Brooklyn Botanic this week.)

Busting Out

Ornamental Allium opening in foreground, with a close relative of the eating kind (garlic) in the background.

Last week was one of those big weeks in the garden where everything finally busted out or tripled in size, and on Sunday I wondered if I sat still long enough would I actually hear the garlic stretching toward the sun or catch an allium flower in its opening. It was the week in May where the spring vegetable garden hit its stride and also the week that my decorative alliums from Susan started their show.





For the first time this season, I looked around and felt that I had dominion over a garden and not just a straw-strewn field of weeds. Now, I'm looking forward to harvesting lettuce, seeing blooms of yarrow and lavender, and discovering what's next for the Lily below. On the pest front, in the next few weeks I'll start scouting for Colorado Potato Beetles. Usually I start seeing them before the end of May.

In Joe's Garden Plot Mid-May

Bumble Bee (native pollinator) on Hairy Vetch

Joe loves his cover crops in the garden and so it seems do the local bumblebees. Above, one on the hairy vetch we got from our friend Martha in the next row over. He also loves his herbs and his sage below is getting ready to bloom big real soon.



The chives are ahead of the sage and almost fully open. You have to love those chive flowers. They're so beautiful in bloom and those flowers are really sharp and tasty in a salad. What more could you possibly ask of a plant in the vegetable garden?