My first victims were these charming “Paris Market,” or Parisienne carrots, with their squat, rotund shapes with blunted ends. I’ve also heard of them referred to as “Thumbelina carrots” — in any case, they’re clearly adorable and I thought they’d be great for pickling when I bought the seeds.

Then, there were some lemon sorbet-yellow Nantes carrots that had grown to wildly differing sizes; and “dragon” carrots with deep wine-colored exteriors and bright orange cores. They all smelled extremely sweet and carrot-y as I was washing off all the dirt from their skins.

The most fun part was pickling them, though. I chose an apple cider vinegar base, and cooked it a little with cinnamon sticks and black peppercorns. Two different types of hot peppers — orange Thai peppers (the skinny, long ones) and Aurora peppers (the multicolored Christmas tree light-looking ones) — went into the bottoms of each mason jar, along with a few cloves of garlic.

As a last-minute touch, I snipped off a few wisps of a fennel plant that was long past its bulb-forming time. These sturdy green wisps have a strong anise flavor and hold up well to a soak in brine, too. I’ve seen wild fennel that looks pretty much like this old plant of mine growing all over the Bay Area — it’s nice when there’s some yellow flowering parts to combine with the green fronds in the for a floral touch, too.

I popped open one jar of these and noted that they do taste pretty spicy, thanks to the peppers used. Thankfully that can always be adjusted to taste, but I rather like ‘em hot. Can’t wait to put them on an hors d’oeuvres spread at a holiday party in a few months.

Spicy Pickled Carrots with Fennel Fronds
(makes one 16 0z. mason jar)

about 1 1/2 cups carrots, trimmed, scrubbed and cut to similar-sized spears if large
8 oz. apple cider vinegar
4 oz. water
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp black peppercorns
2 tsp Kosher salt
2-3 cloves garlic
2-3 small hot peppers (such as Thai peppers, jalapenos, etc.)
2-3 long wisps of fennel fronds

Boil the mason jar and lid completely submerged in water for 10 minutes to sanitize. Keep water boiling for processing step at end (see last instruction).

Combine the vinegar, water, salt, cinnamon stick and peppercorns in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Let simmer for 5-10 minutes.

Place the garlic cloves, hot peppers and fennel fronds in the bottom of the mason jar. Arrange the carrots inside the mason jar. Fill carefully with the hot brine, pouring in the black peppercorns and the cinnamon stick, too. Screw cap on tightly. Place the jar upright in the boiling water so that it’s mostly submerged up to the cap (but doesn’t reach the cap’s rim). Let boil for another 5-10 minutes. Remove and let cool at room temperature. If the lid’s seal sucks in tightly after a few hours, you’re safe to store at room temperature until opening (after which point you can store in the refrigerator).

What to do with a random smattering of peppers, pole beans, cucumber, and cherry tomatoes to harvest on any given day? Well, one of the easiest things you can do is to put them out, fresh, as a fresh salad or crudite platter. After doing this a couple times this late summer, it occurred to me that they would do better with a thick, tangy dip on the side than a thin coat of dressing, so people could snack on them on their own time.

The first dip that came to mind was hummus. But garbanzo beans take so long to soak and cook when you start off with them dry. So I took a gamble on a package of dried yellow split peas, and cooked them just until tender in about fifteen minutes. To this, I added the classic hummus accoutrements — crushed garlic, tahini, lemon juice, olive oil and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper. It looked a little more yellow than hummus tends to, but it tasted pretty much the same.

As a last-minute flourish, I plucked some of the white blossoms off the tall shoots of chives that had begun to bloom this early fall. These are tasty, and attractive garnishes, and they’re also great to use as a seasoning, too. So I picked apart some of the chive blossoms and dropped them into the hummus in its final stirs. Another plucked chive blossoms was placed on the crudite platter for garnish.

When staffers dunked their fresh veggies into the stuff at the brewery the next day, nobody questioned what was in the “hummus.” And the vegetables were all eaten up.

Yellow Split Pea “Hummus” with Chive Blossoms
(makes about 1 pint)

3/4 cup dry yellow split peas
1 large clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons tahini (ground sesame paste)
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
salt and black pepper to taste

Cover the split peas with about 1 inch of water and bring just to a boil. Reduce and simmer on low heat covered for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until water has all been absorbed and peas are tender. Let cool uncovered, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes.

Transfer the split peas, tahini, lemon juice, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper and garlic to a food processor and pulse several times, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Drizzle in the extra-virgin olive oil and blend until smooth. Add the chive blossoms and stir once more. Taste for seasoning, adding any more seasonings as desired.

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, almighty!

Then, I’ve been out of circuit for the last month, and was relying on the account of the wonderful garden apprentices I’d appointed while I’d be out of town. I can’t tell you how funny it felt to be volunteering at the 40th Anniversary of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard event in Berkeley on August 27th, and spending most of that time talking on the phone or emailing with my constituents back home on how to secure the chicken coop. I was freaking out so much during this festival, that I could barely cut the dozen barrels or so of watermelons that I was designated to do that day.

enormous red okra; a bee feasts upon chive blossoms

As it turned out, all was taken care of — the coop was covered with a tarp via staplegun, all loose objects were moved from the roof, and I cut watermelon after watermelon — but the uncanny difference between two very different (and yet, strangely similar) coasts was impossible to miss. I’d traveled to California to get a fresh perspective on the farm-to-table food scene. There I got it, but it was my home in New York that propelled me to research this topic more.

incredibly, the multi-colored peppers turned just that instead of all purple!

I’m grateful to say that our garden at Sixpoint is doing just great, given the challenges that the summer of ’11 has thrown at it. There are a lot of things that you can do to prepare for the healthiest plants (and chickens) over a growing season. But some things, you just have to leave in nature and fortune’s hand. So we’re fortunate for a great crop of peppers, cucumbers, herbs, leafy greens and red-colored okra, which came up late. The tomatoes were great for a while in August, but they’ve weathered too many summer storms and weakened as a result (like the tomato plants of many neighbors’ container gardens that I’ve seen or heard of, too). We’re grateful for all these things, as well as the continual surge of pole beans which refuse to stop growing, it seems!

However, not all of the Northeast was pretty, farming-wise. We’ve gotten word that some 15% of the farmers who supply CSA shares to New York City have been flooded, and their crops were demanded unfit for selling. That’s 70-80% of the remaining harvests at these individual farms, according to Just Food’s website, and a loss like that right in the middle of harvest season is nothing to sneeze at for the struggling small farm. You can help out! With events like Lots of Hudson County Farms Need Your Support and more, to be listed on Just Food’s website. I know that CSA leader Wen-Jay Ying and I are already talking about a fundraiser for Rogowski’s farm, which was hit very hard by the hurricane as well as edicts to not sell the food from which.

the Free Farm in San Francisco

Growing Home Community Garden in San Francisco

While on the West Coast, I got to visit many urban farms, including Hayes Valley Farm and the Free Farm in San Francisco. I talked with their principals, ate from their crops, attended their workshops and inspected their plants. And I was able to glean from them a great perspective on how to maintain and organize a community, based around a garden. But the specific growing conditions for every climate, region, and particular season, are always going to be different, day after day.

I’ve learned that it’s not so much about what you do in a garden, but what you do with a garden that counts the most — to your community at least, if not to the plants. And to that respect, I’m most proud of my garden interns, Sarah and Kristina, who helped tend to the Sixpoint garden for a whole month while I was away and got some experience in rooftop container gardening as a result. You guys held down the chicken coop in a Northeast hurricane while I was bat-shit crazy during an Alice Waters event. Thank you, thank you. And let’s eat real soon.

I was even frightened by the sight of it, and thought at first a pumpkin or butternut squash had come early. It was so heavy that it had actually grown into a space in between two keg-containers, and was situated snugly there to keep above the ground. That’s why there’s a slight dent in one side, from the contours of the containers.

But a cucumber it was, and there were many more that I’d recently plucked from the vines, too. So, on one of the hottest days of the year thus far, I whipped up a great batch of cucumber salad, with fresh mint.

There was a small handful of sungolds and red cherry tomatoes that had just turned ripe, and a number of bell peppers. The heirloom Sultan’s Gold pole beans plant is still producing. So a few of these vegetables were chopped up to toss in, too.

The mammoth cucumber, however, seemed to demand special treatment. After cutting it in half to make sure it was actually a cuke, I noticed that despite its size, its seed pocket was quite small. I continued slicing into it, to see further into the thing. The great, dense discs plopped over onto the cutting board, about the size of silver-dollar pancakes. They were too impressive to cut further. So I prepared this cucumber as a separate salad, sprinkled with sea salt, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sprigs of fresh herbs, more or less like a platter of fresh tomatoes.

Now, I just wish I’d saved some of those slices to place over my eyes and escape this heatwave!

It’s funny, because the seed package for them showed an array of different colors, just like Christmas tree lights. But for some reason both plants of these that have made it past flowering thus far have produced only purple fruits. How peculiar! But what a pretty color anyhow.

So, if you think you know the name of these bright, hot and PURPLE peppers, fire away! And if you have a good suggestion for how to use them next, I’d appreciate that, too. Pickled purple peppers sounds pretty good to me right now — they’re so fiery it would make a bright addition to a winter stew.

There are also medium-hot, mild and sweet peppers starting to produce greenish fruits now. I love the specific names for them all. This one has a name that could be that of a woman’s. I’ll keep clues to that for now before the guessing begins!

And I’ll hook up the first person to comment with the correct name of this plant with one of each of Sixpoint’s four-packs of cans. That’s right, a pack of Bengali Tiger, Sweet Action, The Crisp and Righteous Ale, no matter where you live. Let the guessing begin, and look forward to announcing a beer that will actually be made soon with a rooftop garden ingredient for inspiration…

So I’ve found these deviled eggs to be an easy fix for snacks, or a side dish to a platter of sandwiches. The secret is whole-grain beer mustard, made by our friend Anna Wolf of My Friend’s Mustard. This gives the deviled custard a noticeable texture, from mustard seeds that pop in your mouth like caviar. And, it’s made with Sixpoint’s Brownstone Ale (the brown ale mustard, that is), so the flavor is quite familiar and well-liked around here.

photo by Local Roots NYC

We served these deviled eggs, topped with some rooftop greens, at 61 Local recently for a special event. In collaboration with Nona Brooklyn and Local Roots CSA, the bar hosted two local food makers for a meet and greet over their wares. Anna was on hand to sell her mustard alongside Mike Kurtz, who makes Mike’s Hot Honey. The deviled eggs were added to the bar’s menu for this occasion, as well as a special grilled cheese sandwich with Mike’s Hot Honey and roasted peppers.

There are three different flavors of My Friend’s Mustard now, so it’s been fun experimenting with each one in deviled eggs (they all taste great). I wouldn’t know how to start making my own mustard, and with a friend who makes it like this I’m not sure I will. If you don’t have one of these jars handy, it might work with any other grainy, textured mustard instead. But it’s really the “it” factor about this recipe. And chives, the preferred herbal topping for it here.

Deviled Eggs with Beer Mustard and Chives
(makes 24 pieces)

12 eggs
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup My Friend’s Spicy Brown Ale Mustard (a whole 8 oz. jar)
about 1/4 tsp salt
black pepper to taste
chopped chives for garnish

Hard-boil eggs. Peel and slice in halves lengthwise, reserving the cooked yolks in a large bowl. Mash and whip with the mayonnaise, mustard and salt and pepper to taste. Transfer to a piping bag (or a clean plastic bag with a corner snipped off) and fill each egg white half with the custard. Top with chives.

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, purplish-pink, somewhat string bean-looking objects to everyone and anyone who comes by on any given day.

It seems that I bought only the strangest beans among the seed catalogs and called it a day. I don’t miss normal green beans one bit with these heirloom gems hanging from the stalks. That’s a great thing about being a home gardener rather than commercial one — you don’t have to feel tied to your customers’ expectations, and grow whatever you want so long as that their seeds still exist. I like it when people don’t know what a vegetable is called nor has ever seen or tried it before but chomps it up anyway. These beans are a real test of that attitude.

These beans, which are certainly long and do have “long” in their three-word name, taste sweet and crisp when young. When they’re fully mature — about two feet long yet still the same width as a regular string bean — they begin to taste even more sweet and a little bit starchy, and the pebble-like beans inside the pods are much more pronounced. You could shell them and just eat the small beans, like favas. I threw some on the grill at a 4th of July barbecue yesterday and they tasted great a tiny bit charred, too!

Now I have a hankering to try out pickling them, like I did with the Sultan’s Golden bean a couple weeks ago (which turned out quite tasty according to its winner). So the first person to correctly name this plant in a comment below will receive a jar of home-pickled X beans — those above!

This is another tough one. I don’t expect anyone to have seen it or eaten it before, as I certainly haven’t until inspecting the leaves and gently plucking them off, like an archaeologist at a dig. It’s a very unusual leafy green, that’s at least for sure.

The name of this plant has “spinach” in it, but I read that it’s not really in the spinach family. Rather, it’s a succulent plant, with thick, watery leaves that produce an almost slimy texture when chewed, like purslane (also a succulent). Want to have a stab at it? The first person to correctly name this plant in a comment below will win a very special gift. It’ll be a half-dozen eggs from our hens — they’ve been laying them quite frequently as of late, and since they’re so fresh, a couple days of shipping should do them no harm at all. Plus, I’d love to share with avid readers the richness of a homegrown chicken’s egg — they are so deep-orange in the yolks. We made plenty of use for these at a dinner last week, called The Feast of 61 Local Ingredients, at 61 Local public house in Boerum Hill. We also made some deviled eggs with them last week at the brewery. That recipe should be coming up soon.

But back to this plant. Let the mystery be solved! I’m so in love with its delicate texture and mild, sweet taste that I think everyone should be planting the rare thing soon, too.

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 has been beating down hard on the rooftops of Red Hook, these uniquely outfitted keg-containers have proven themselves so much worthy of the effort that was put into them. The plants in SIPs are really outdoing all the others.

Last fall, I became aware of a gardening tip ardently encouraged by a horticulturist named Bob Hyland, of Inside Urban Green. His recommended system for healthy, productive plants in tight quarters such as the city was by sub-irrigation. Essentially, a reservoir is placed at the bottom of a contained soil system, from which moisture wicks up to the roots in the plant, and in turn, the roots reach its depth of hydration as it grows. I wrote about this on Brooklyn Based, and had Bob and Frieda Lim, a Brooklyn rooftop gardener who had enthusiastically subscribed to his work, on my radio show, Let’s Eat In. And of course, they offered to figure out how to outfit the existing converted kegs on my rooftop into sub-irrigated planters.

We spent the good part of two afternoons figuring it out. Unfortunately, when we first created these planters back in the spring of 2010, we’d drilled five large holes in the bottom of each one, in addition to sawing off their tops. This was an obstacle to holding water at the bottom of each planter, the key to SIPs. So we figured out a way to plug up the holes with none other than corks — nature’s impenetrable wood. (Truth be told, many of the holes varied in size, and we had to adjust the corks to be thicker or narrower using duct tape and a straight-edge knife.) Next, we had to create some sort of container that would hold the water in the bottom of each keg. In came some of Bob’s most trusted recyclables — corrugated plastic tubing, used water bottles, and plastic containers of other sorts. Ultimately, we used mostly corrugated plastic piping to create donut-shaped rings that would sit at the bottom of each keg, and made feed tubes that fit snugly into the corrugated tubing made from plastic piping from Loew’s.

In the end, it was definitely a project that owes to the collaboration of many. From our community garden member Shunya, who spent an exhausting afternoon with me pulling apart and cutting holes into the slinky-like plastic tubes to Sarah, who had actually drilled the initial holes into the kegs last spring and had to help in plugging them up this one with corks, it was a group effort. But I’m proud to share that it was well worth the effort. These thirty containers that we had successfully retrofitted as SIPs are growing the most productive and healthy plants on the roof.

There is also a drainage hole on the bottom-side of each keg, where a thin tube was placed in order to drain water so as to not let the soil get water-clogged. This is just above where the reservoir sits; it’s not healthy for plants to have no drainage whatsoever, so this tube solves that. See how the water flows out from it after being watered overhead?

To be honest, there are much easier ways to create SIPs than having to convert these kegs was, we realized. Short, rectangular containers with no holes at the bottom to begin with work much better than having to plug up existing holes, and creating a reservoir that would fit snugly at the base of a round, narrow keg. But it was either that, or saw off the tops of more kegs, and we opted for this version. We’ll see long those corks hold up. So far, though, they’re doing their jobs.

As Bob and Frieda will tell you, those who have consulted on numerous individual SIP garden projects, no system is identical in its parts and outfitting. But the essential idea is the same: the planters have a pool of water from which to gently “sip” from beneath, rather than being dry as a bone at the bottom when not watered quite enough. Plus, the SIPs conserve water, so are more hands-off to work with. They ensure happier, healthier plants thanks to the constant source of moisture from beneath. They also conserve more nutrients in the soil, rather than having to fertilize frequently, because they are a contained system and don’t flush out the way regular (small) containers tend to. All this is good news for the urban gardener. Added bonus: SIPs can be moved around an area, such as a rooftop, without disturbing the plants one bit.

So here’s a nod to that effort from earlier this spring, and I’m looking forward to the tomatoes, peppers and squashes/cucumbers that I planted in those thirty of them. Stay tuned for how they turn out…

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 mature, the pods are edible and have a distinct curled shape. Think you can guess what they’re called?

The first person to comment with the correct name of this variety of beans will win… a jar of them pickled, by me! I have been really enjoying crunching into pickled green beans like Ricks’ Picks “Mean Beans,” and think I need to put up a couple jars to see how they compare. These beans taste really great fresh — sweet, grassy, crunchy and mild. But I’d bet they’d be interesting soaked in vinegar, too.

A couple clues: the name of this bean has a royal title in it. It also has a word that describes its color. Good enough to go on? Win the pickled version of them if so! And let me know if you have any suggestions on spices to pickle with them, too.