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How to eat blueberries . . .
The answer is one at a time: That’s right. No bowls. No spoons. No popping two in your mouth at once to save time (this is slow food, after all, and who wouldn’t want to extend the exquisite...
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Rats on the roof!
No, not the dreaded Rattus rattus or any of its vile kin, but the wonderful Rat’s Tail Radish, or Raphanus caudatus: I have fed the seed pods of this plant, which looks like a cross between a green...
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Hic sunt dracones
Or, “Here be dragons,” for those readers whose Latin is a bit rusty. Yes, right here at Battery Rooftop Garden, on the 35th floor in the heart of downtown Manhattan. Spotted and photographed by...
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Just Food
Tuesday night, at 11 venues scattered around New York City, generous and lucky diners celebrated the food of the season, the urban farmers who produce it, and the chefs who render it delightful. This...
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Awesome
In the world of ornamental horticulture, perhaps because of the pervasive influence of our British cousins, etiquette demands a certain reticence when discussing one’s own garden. Pausing with guests...
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Finally, a professional
BRTG hosted an event recently where the sponsor engaged Peter Doyle of Peter Doyle Photography to take photographs. With Peter’s permission I thought I would share some of his work with readers of...
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Dead or Alive?
The sharp blade slices through the skin, flesh and vascular tissues with ease. Pressure in the vascular system collapses. Almost immediately senescence – a genetically regulated process which...
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Sandy
Your correspondent returned to lower Manhattan today, fearing that, like Icarus, he had dared to fly too high, to grow food where nature did not intend, and that he would find his presumption rewarded...
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Allotments
In the UK in the years before Margaret Thatcher whipped things into shape, there was not very much that the Battery Rooftop Gardener, then an American graduate student first discovering England, found...
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The Snow Storm
The National Weather Service and New York Times have authoritatively harrumphed that the recent winter storm does not in fact have a name, “Nemo” having been chosen for ratings purposes by those for...
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It’s about time
Mea culpa. Your blogger has no good excuse for his long silence. Here is an update in three parts: fruit, vegetables and horticulture. 1. Fruit Report What a difference a year makes. The...
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Bugs
Between late May and late October 2012, Jeremy Law, a graduate student in the Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology Department at Columbia University, conducted a study of arthropod diversity...
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Harvest Time on Wall Street
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. But I...
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Tribute in Light
It is rare for a memorial to be perfectly calibrated to the nature of the tragedy it marks. The elegant Stone of Remembrance designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens for the British World War I cemeteries is a...
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How to eat
For omnivores like us, the choices are many, and growing every day: Paleo, raw, pescatarian, macrobiotic, vegan, lacto ovo vegetarian, and many more. Michael Pollan gives us a simple answer: eat...
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We are family
Pop quiz: what do beets, spinach, quinoa and Swiss chard have in common? No, they are not all grown at Battery Rooftop Garden (no quinoa, yet). Yes, they are all delicious, nutritious and ancient...
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The Perfect Rooftop Fruit
Plants, like people, tend to get around. A plant on my roof got its start in China about 2000 years ago, and by the 8th century AD found its way into Japan. When it arrived in Nepal and the...
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Breaking Records
Just before the ground re-froze, we harvested some sweet winter carrots and were rather amazed when this giant emerged from the relatively shallow soils of its rooftop bed: I’ve always been drawn much...
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Hollywood Comes to the Roof
Well, not exactly Hollywood, but the sort of ultra-low-budget film project that will eventually displace a chunk of big-budget entertainment, as surely as green roofs and urban farms will replace part...
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All right, Mr. De Mille, I’m ready for my close-up
Norma Desmond may have been over the hill, but here in early July some of the stars of Battery Rooftop Garden are in their prime. Nature at landscape scale, such as the views of New York Harbor from...
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