In a word: we’re totally fine! Yes, Red Hook, Brooklyn was looking to be the eye of Hurricane Irene according to many experts’ forecasts in the few days before it hit the East Coast. But luckily, we chanced out, and our little rooftop garden suffered only a few snapped sunflower stems as a result. Hallelujah, [...]

They say you should pick cucumbers before they get too big and start to turn yellow, a sign of over-ripeness. Well, we apparently missed the boat on this one — weeks ago, it seems. While peeking underneath big leaves in a particularly lush and crowded row of the garden, I came across this enormous, deep-orange… [...]

I’ve misplaced some of the half-empty seed packets that were used this spring, so it took me a little while to retrace what this plant’s called. But it has definitely been the question of the hour at the brewery, since their stalks are so productive that I’ve been handing out one of these incredibly long, [...]

It’s high time I shared the revelation that’s come to our rooftop garden. This project has been months in the works, and years if you count the work of my consultants on this project, who have dedicated their life’s work to exploring and sharing the virtues of SIPs (sub-irrigated planters). And now that the sun [...]

Spring is evidently still in full-swing on the rooftop, although the warm weather might have us think differently. These pole beans have just hit their stride and are proliferating with a handful of mature pods each day. They’re an heirloom variety that I’d previously never heard of nor seen before buying their seeds. Yellow when [...]

Thank goodness for the rain last week. It came just in time to save the fledgling plants from the heatwave — and to refill the rainwater collection system, which had been dry for nearly a week. This means that our humble rooftop garden will be ensured of plenty of plants to play Name That Plant [...]

If “Saison” means “season” in French (and it does), then this drink is actually a double entendre — it’s strawberry season on the rooftop! Or, make that “saison des fraises.”

I’ve been nipping the buds off of herbs for weeks now — thyme, caraway and even sage that had overwintered. But since planting them in the kegs early April, some of the leafy greens are about at that precious stage now. Picking the flowers off of these greens — deflowering them, as it were — [...]

Beans. They’re actually the seeds of the plant. And even though they may look bone-dry and ready to cook to death in soup, these dried beans are essentially what you plant in spring, to have a giant beanstalk by the start of summer. We had our beanstalks pretty much grown by this time of year [...]

Now that is what I call a hop-head! These hops, planted last spring and grown to taller lengths than their bamboo poles could reach by late summer, have come back with a vengeance this spring. And we didn’t have to do anything this time to make that happen. That’s the beauty of perennials — they [...]