Summer may be over, but the sidewalk garden is still ticking along.
The asters which have looked plain all year are suddenly showing their delicate little flowers.
A couple of the rose bushes are still putting out new buds that are so intensely colorful that my phone’s camera doesn’t really know what to do with them.
The tomato plants are dying back, but throwing the last of their energy into ripening just a few more fruits.
And the giant sunflower has decided to go out with a bang.
It was only this spring that I learned that coleus is a member of the mint family — square stems, pointy leaf tips, spike of little flowers — but despite this fact you definitely should not eat it.
These little mushrooms popped up in one of our treebeds earlier this week, and will likely be gone in the next week or so, after they’ve finished releasing their windblown spores. But their web of mycelium will remain underground, where they help to break down dead plant matter, exchanging water and nutrients with plant roots in vast networks of underground fibers extending under the sidewalk.
I don’t know enough about mushrooms to be sure, but I believe these are examples of “Shaggy Parasol” a type of mushroom known as chlorophyllum, and I’m glad I caught sight of them during their brief visit aboveground.
Typically I’m excited to find unexpected plants cropping up in the garden; I know many people would classify these surprise visitors as weeds, but I’m usually happy to find something new that’s vibrant enough to make a go of it in the challenging environment of our sidewalk containers.
However there are a few exceptions, and when I noticed that a “tree of heaven” (Ailanthus altissima) had cropped up in one of the big grapevine planters, I knew it had to be removed. This invasive species not only has a tendency to crowd out other plants, it’s a preferred food source for the spotted lanternfly — spotted lanternflies flourish and produce more eggs when tree of heaven is present, and then go on to attack other nearby plants.
This unwelcome volunteer has now been banished to the city’s organics recycling bin, and I’ll keep an eye out for any siblings that may be lurking nearby.
I held off on growing roses for a long time, on the grounds that they were a cliche — but then a few years I finally got one and it was such a pleasant addition that I’ve finally gotten over myself and now there’s a handful of specimens in the garden, including this one yellow example.
My thanks to the Columbus-Amsterdam BID for providing more than thirty pounds of compost produced by Big Reuse as part of GrowNYC’s community composting program.
This rich organic material will be scattered in a light layer over the surface of the soil in tree beds and sidewalk planters here on 106th Street to provide a slow but steady trickle of nutrients to the trees and flowering plants that protect and brighten our neighborhood.
Over the last decade, I’ve received more than three thousand pounds of compost from the Big Reuse composting facility under the Queensborough Bridge to be applied to sidewalk treebeds all over our neighborhood — which is why I’m incredibly disappointed to learn that the NYC government is killing it off with a one-two punch: eliminating all funds for community-composting programs from the city budget, and revoking the license for the under-bridge space so that it can be converted to a parking lot.
I hope that those short-sighted policies are reversed, or that our city finds another way to fill the gap that will be left by this tragic loss.
The giant alliums have put up their starbursts of flowers in our sidewalk treebeds — mostly purple, plus this one even-larger white specimen. These bulbs were planted a few years ago and seem quite happy to come back every spring.