Category: Garden Activity

I’m super pleased to have successfully created a spot where folks can stop and sit for a moment to catch their breath on their way home… and I’m looking forward to this area being a flurry of green in a few weeks.

After a very stressful couple of days, this weekend’s drama around the sidewalk garden appears to have receded.

The details are still a bit fuzzy, but it now seems like the city inspector didn’t actually rule the garden illegal — instead, they noted an unrelated issue with the area in front of the building, and somehow the two issues got mixed together.

My confidence is still a bit shaken, but I hope that all of this is now behind us, and I greatly appreciate the support I’ve received from so many of our neighbors over the last few days.

The one bit of good that came out of all of this is that in the course of the weekend’s frenzy, I moved all of the planters, swept the entire area, and put everything back in an organized fashion, so I’ve gotten a jump on the spring cleaning that I would otherwise have had to tackle next week.

I’m still gathering details, but earlier today I heard second-hand that a city inspector had discovered some problem with the sidewalk garden and it might need to be cleared.

I’m working to get official confirmation of this order, and if necessary, to find new homes for all of the flowerpots and plants that have made their homes here over the last decade.

I spent more than an hour last week, rearranging all of the planters on our sidewalk, dragging them back and forth to create a pleasing arrangement for the season ahead — then looked out my window the next morning and discovered that the facade-repair project next door was extending their scaffolding twenty feet further to cover part of our building, blocking the sunlight to that end of the garden.

And they say the scaffolding will likely remain in place for a full year!

I’ve now managed shift most of the planters down the block, but still need to tackle the espaliered tree that has its branches woven inextricably into the iron fence… moving it will require cutting off a significant number of branches, but if I leave it in place, it will probably die due to lack of light.

It’s very frustrating.

It’s mid-July and despite the heat, the garden is looking lush.

While I am generally happy to provide the limited funds needed to cover the garden’s operations, neighbors do occasionally donate supplies, for which I am very grateful.

My thanks go out to the following for items received this spring:

• Peter Arndtsen for his gift of two young evergreens and numerous cuttings.
• A couple in 217 W 106th who provided dozens of flower starts and two large bags of potting soil.
• Someone who had discarded a metal “grow” sign which I rescued from the garbage and attached to one of the treebeds.
• An anonymous donor who left three hanging baskets on the steps this morning. [Update: I got the backstory on these after the fact; a neighbor collected these from a scrap heap after another garden decided they had ordered more than they needed.]

Over the last six weeks, I’ve planted well over 750 daffodil bulbs around the neighborhood, as well as a smaller number of other bulbs — hyacinths and grape hyacinths, two varieties of tulips, crocus and dutch iris. Nearly all of them went into sidewalk tree beds, with the remainder buried in large planters in public space.

I’m down to a few dozen bulbs that I’ll finish planting over the coming week before our first real hard freeze.

It was hard work, but with a bit of luck we’ll see lots of bright green shoots and colorful yellow flowers emerging next spring and it will all have been worthwhile.

The process of making hundreds and hundreds of six-inch-deep holes in hard-packed earth was greatly eased by use of an auger drill bit that attaches to my cordless impact driver — it’s a huge time-saver, although it does feel odd to be gardening with power tools.

During that same time, I’ve also given away more than 500 daffodil bulbs to folks who offered to plant them in other parts of the neighborhood, or further afield, such as the few dozen that went to Brooklyn and the hundred that went to an abandoned lot next to a public school in Patterson NJ.

Along the way, I’ve also sprinkled more than a dozen tree beds with assorted late-blooming wildflower seeds — mostly gathered during a trip to the Hudson Valley at the end of the summer, supplemented by a few bulk seed packets from Everwilde Farms. With a little luck, some of those will survive the winter snows and sprout next spring, although I don’t yet know how successful they’ll be.