Local and Educational Resources

Hi! If you heard Jessie Banhazl speak at the American Heart Association's Go Red luncheon, or you are just interested in learning more about where to get local, healthy food, the history of the US food system, of how to grow your own, see below for resources recommended by Green City Growers:

Reading (Current Food Issues):

"In Defense of Food" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan

"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" By Barbara Kingsolver

"Eating better than Organic" by John Cloud, Time Magazine (Click HERE for article)

Watch:

"Food, Inc" (it's available on Netflix Streaming!)

"Fresh"

"King Corn"


Reading (Growing your Own):

"All new Square Foot Gardening Method" by Mel Bartholomew

"The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener" by Eliot Coleman

"The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses" by Eliot Coleman

"Gaia's Garden: A guide to Home-Scale Permaculture" by Toby Hemenway

"Lasgna Gardening: A new Loayering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding!" by Patricia Lanza

"The Sustainable Vegetable Garden: A Backyard Guide to Healthy Soil and Higher Yields." by
John Jeavons

High-Quality Seeds:

High Mowing Seeds (Vermont)

Johnny's Seeds (Maine)

Find a Local Farm, Farmer's Market, or CSA:

www.Localharvest.org

www.Farmfresh.org

You are also welcome to ask GCG for advice! Email us at greencitygrowers@gmail.com

A New Kind of Tea

Like any good southerner, I would enjoy a nice cold glass of sweet tea after a morning of installing garden beds in the hot sun. On cold winter afternoons I love to curl up with a hot mug of peppermint tea. When I'm feeling a little crazy I might even go for some chai.

Well, today Anne and I had an adventure with a new kind of tea. Loose leaf? Maybe, but it's made with what used to be leaves rather than what is still in its leaf-like state today. Where tea leaves are usually dried, our experimental leaves were, well, decomposed. What exactly were we doing? We were exploring the art of brewing tea for our plant friends.

Being inclined to have my tea sweetened with honey rather than rice hulls, I think I will leave it to the vegetables to do a taste test.

Here's how we made compost tea:






Step One: Get compost














Step Two: Find cheesecloth (at Market Basket it is located above the hot dogs in the refrigerator section), soybean meal (in lieu of aloe or yuca extract), and fish emulsion (a brown, lumpy, fishy smelling liquid fertilizer that shows up at GCG more often than you would wish for)







Step Three: Fill a bucket with water and place an air pump in the bottom to ensure good percolation
















Step four: Suspend a cheesecloth teabag filled with compost into bucket with water, soybean meal, fish emulsion, pump, and sit back and enjoy your handiwork. (As you can see, Anne knows this tea is where it's at!)

An Essay from a Summer Intern

Working at Green City growers will be unforgettable for me even when I go back to Korea.

Actually, when I decided to work here, I didn’t know exactly how this company would function to grow lots of vegetables and what I should do to make Green City Growers flourish. However, as I worked here longer, I learned lots of precious things that I was not interested in before.

Firstly, while I worked at G.C.G, I learned how to make lines of irrigation which can support plants firmly. It was a new experience for me to make these. When I accidentally found the lines of irrigation I had made in the garden outside, it made me feel worthwhile. Also, I used to sort seeds according to alphabetical order.

By sorting, I became familiar with what kinds of seeds can be helpful for people who want to eat vegetables such as tomatoes, broccoli, kale, spinach, basil and something like that.

And it was also an interesting experience for me to transplant plants to grow much bigger and healthier. After I learned how to transplant plants well, I recognized there are lots of ways to promote the growth of plants.

Even though I had never been interested in organic vegetables, now I think that I should protect plants just like humans and each creature.

What I want to thank Jessie and Anne for is that they not only gave me opportunities to get exciting experience but they gave me a realistic environment where I could speak and practice speaking English by working with other interns who are native speakers.

Even though I can’t speak English very well, they helped me achieve my goal to speak English better.

Although I go back to my country, I will not forget and I will miss Green City Growers’ staff.

I hope Green City Growers can flourish more and more.

-Nyeong Soo Jung, a summer intern

Nyeon Soo is a student in the Kaplan English as a second language program. She interned at Green City Growers this summer in order to improve her English.

In the Garden

Here are some photos of the things we saw in the gardens last week:






We continued to harvest chard with brightly colored stalks in reds and yellows.















The carrots are getting so big!















Tomatoes are starting to grow larger on the vines, still mostly green. We harvested some Heirloom Black Prince tomatoes at a house in JP! Why are these particular tomatoes so ahead of the game? Perhaps the saxophone player who lives next door is working wonders with his musical interludes. Do tomatoes like jazz?











We also saw some adorable baby cucumbers, covered in a prickly outer layer, flowers still clinging on.

Cucurbits!

Many of our clients chose to plant a variety of cucurbits in their gardens for the summer. The cucurbit family includes squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and melons. After sprouting up their initial oval seed leaves, the plants grow heart-shaped leaves that are often covered in a gentle layer of fuzz. When cucumbers and melons start to take off, the plants look like massive bushes of stems displaying their green hearts to the world and holding their yellow flowers close to the center.

Cucurbits are monoecious, meaning that each plant has both male and female flowers. The plant first produces male flowers, the ones that make the pollen, and then grows the female flowers. Honeybees carry the pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers, where little cucumbers and melons begin to form. A few days ago, Allison and I were looking at some cucurbits in a client’s garden and were surprised to see what looked like little baby cucumbers at the base of some of the flowers while the flowers were still in full bloom. It turns out that the flowers that are swollen at the base are the female flowers, and the ones that have thin stalks are male flowers. Once the female flower is pollinated, the base of the flower will continue to grow into a cucumber or squash, but if the flower isn’t pollinated for some reason, the flower will eventually drop off the plant.

Recently we have been spraying our cucurbits with a solution of kaolin clay. This turns the leaves a speckled white, but is very helpful in the quest to keep away destructive critters. Kaolin clay reduces the risk of squash vine borers and squash bugs from finding the leaves and vines tasty and killing the whole or part of the plant. Squash vine borer larvae tunnel into the vines, damaging the tissue and killing everything beyond where they have entered the plant. Squash bugs drink the sap out of the leaves and inject a harmful toxin that severely damages the plant.

Make sure your cucurbits are getting enough sun, water, and fertilizer this summer! We mound the dirt up around the base of the plants to make sure they are getting as much warmth from the sun as possible.

Green City Growers in the Globe!

Green City Growers' partnership with Recover Green Roofs at Ledge Kitchen and Drinks is featured in the G section of today's Boston Globe! The article, which talks about restaurants making an effort to grow their own herbs and produce, includes a video of Green City Growers employees planting the rooftop garden. The article also mentions Green City Growers' partnerships with b. good, Tables of Content, and Gourmet Caterers. Green City Growers has also planted an herb garden for Ula Cafe in JP.

If you are interested in the logistics of turning a roof into a vegetable garden, check out the Recover Green Roofs blog, which provides an explanation of the project. The blog also has a great video showing the process from bringing the dirt onto the roof to planting in the vegetables.

We're very excited about this project!

Bolting

In the gardens around Somerville, summer crops are starting to take off. Gardens that were planted early in the season and have plenty of sun are starting to overflow with fat sugar snap peas hiding among green leaves on the vine, and tomato plants are growing big enough to be velcroed to stakes and produce tiny green tomatoes. Clients who have been used to going out into their gardens to harvest a salad for dinner are seeing some changes. As the days get longer and hotter, lettuce begins to go through a process known as bolting. The plant shoots up a tall stalk with flowers at the top, getting ready to go to seed. Although it may be charming to watch your lettuce flower, bitter bolting lettuce is not so charming to the pallet.



There are a variety of ways to slow the process of bolting and extend the life of your lettuce crop farther into the summer. One method is using the other plants in the garden to create shade. We planted new mixed greens a few weeks ago in a garden in Cambridge using the shade created by a wild and abundant crop of sugar snap peas. The peas, growing ferociously up and away from their trellising, extend out over a few squares of the garden, protecting the little lettuces from the sun and the heat.

Another method of extending the life of your lettuce is known as ‘cut and come again.’ Rather than waiting for the entire plant to grow to a harvestable size, cut the outer leaves as they grow big enough to eat. The lettuce plant will continue to grow leaves from the center out. Cutting a few leaves at a time keeps the plant from feeling mature and ready to bolt.

Or, if you have had enough of salad, you can enjoy the summer crops that are about to come—peas and carrots are already big enough to eat, squash and cucumbers are growing on the vine. If you are in the mood to embrace your bolted lettuce, some people recommend cooking the leaves in stir fry or soup. Others advocate harvesting your own lettuce seeds to plant next season!

Whatever you choices you make about your lettuce, don’t forget to make sure your whole garden is getting enough water in this heat!

From the Jungle to the Ledge

Until about two days ago the yard outside of the Green City Growers office was getting very difficult to navigate. Looking out the office window, you were transported into a jungle of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and melons. Eggplants held their own in a bed, herbs poked their little leaves out of the fray, blueberry bushes calmly ripened their berries. The tomatoes and peppers were jumbled together: Black Prince next to Black Velvet, Yellow Brandiwine in between a Sun Cherry and a Jet Star, Commandment pepper squeezed beside a Jalepeno. There was nowhere to walk because the squash were in the path. The gate could barely open as the jungle inside, bursting with leaves and flowers hoping to turn into fruit, pushed its way outwards.

Then, the jungle moved to a farm. Well, much of the jungle. And the farm isn’t traditional. It’s rather small on the scale of farms. But it’s on a roof. This “farm” is the rooftop garden on a restaurant called the Ledge, in Dorchester. This installation is different than some of our other rooftop projects because we are working with green roofing engineers: instead of putting garden beds on the roof, the entire roof has become a garden.

When you step onto the roof, it appears that you are walking on mulch, but it is really recycled car tires that have been painted brown. Underneath are a few different materials designed to help with drainage. The garden beds themselves are much larger than our typical 4x4. There are four beds which stretch out across the roof, each containing two, or three, or more, mounds wide enough for two tomato plants to sit comfortably next to each other. The planting medium is a special lighter-weight soil mix that will allow the plants to grow while keeping the roof from collapsing under its weight.

Yesterday we finished planting at the Ledge. The garden is filled with tomatoes, squash, eggplants, and herbs. After mapping out the crops, Marianna estimated that there might be over two hundred plants on the roof.

The jungle next to Green City Growers has moved. The space next to the office looks rather prim: the plants politely staying out of the paths, the vegetables respectfully giving each other room to breathe. On the roof, the newly planted vegetables have an exciting view: guests dining on the patio, cars moving on the street, and other, less attractive, roofs nearby which are, sadly, plant-less.

Ladybugs in the Refrigerator

In the small fridge in the back room of the office, nestled behind a chocolate mocha cake, is a bag of rather subdued ladybugs. They are not a snack for hungry Green City Growers employees. No, instead of hanging out in the fridge waiting to be eaten, they are hanging out waiting to eat.

Ladybugs are one of the best biological controls for aphids, as they find this common garden pest to be particularly delectable. Aphids are small insects that suck the sap out of plants. This can stunt the plants’ growth, make the leaves curled or yellowed, and transmit viruses to the plants. Aphids also excrete a sticky liquid called honeydew on the leaves that can lead to a build-up of black sooty mold. Bad news.

A plant with aphids on it might look like this:



Last Friday, one of the gardeners, Allison, and I released ladybugs in a client’s garden in an attempt to rid the garden bed of aphids. Hopefully, this will happen:


So that’s why we have a bag of presumably slightly hungry ladybugs in the office. Why are they in the refrigerator? It helps them chill out.

Some tips on releasing ladybugs in your garden and make sure they stay:

-Put them in the refrigerator for a few hours to calm them down first
-Spray your plants with water so that the ladybugs will want to stay and drink
-Release them in the evening so they will stick around and get acclimated
-go to http://www.naturescontrol.com/ladybugs.html for more tips

The Art of Mixing Soil

You might not think very much about the soil that fills your garden bed. Maybe it looks dark brown, you notice if it is dry, or it is just the background to the beautiful flowers and tasty vegetables that grow out of it. Here at Green City Growers we think about your dirt. We spend abundant time on the art of mixing dirt, working with a palette of peat moss, compost, vermiculite, and top soil to create that deep brown that makes your greens happy.

Last week we mixed some quality soil for two new clients: Ula Café in Jamaica Plain and Mathworks, a software company in Natick, MA. After loading up the truck with forty-two bags of compost, an assortment of other soil components, a wheelbarrow, seven wooden raised bed frames, and irrigation tubing, Jessie and I drove to Ula Café where we met her brother Brett to install the beds. Once the beds were laid out, we mixed the soil, pouring the different ingredients onto a tarp, swinging the tarp from side to side so that the peat moss, compost, and vermiculite swirled together in a mess of brown, black, and silver, and dumping the mixture into the beds. We reached our arms into the dirt, mashing up large clumps of compost and looking for buried treasure: a hidden heap of airy vermiculite or a dry pocket of peat moss. Our work done, we ate a lunch of delicious sandwiches at Ula Café where the beds would soon grow a variety of herbs, and moved on to Mathworks where we installed four vegetable beds on the patio outside of the cafeteria.

Yesterday, another summer intern, Marianna, and I spent the morning mixing up two large tubs of soil to repot some zucchini, peppers, and eggplants that had outgrown their small pots. With the heat of summer upon us, the summer crops are raring to go!

-Amy Shmania, summer intern