FINALLY.

a brief, unscheduled update regarding emotional container gardening

My troubled, grouchy rocoto chile pepper plant has finally decided to get up off its plant-ass and make a pepper.

 

Naturally the pepper came out while I was away on vacation. Now that I'm back in town it will probably shrivel up and fall off within a few days, or develop some sort of exotic mold or infestation. I think I've finally gotten the plant food thing down, at least, because its flowers are a deeper purple than they were before.



My other pepper plant, a serrano, seems to be making up its plant-mind as to whether it ought to make peppers this year. It appears to have recovered from the period of malnutrition I apparently subjected it to, but I can't yet tell whether it's a full recovery or merely an "I'm not dead" partial recovery: there are a ton of new flowers, but no fruit yet, and it recently dropped a bunch of leaves. Either I brought on a freak-out by giving it too much nitrogen, or it was startled by the sudden appearance of its neighbor's vivacious new pepper.

Previous posts about my container gardening are here, here, here and here.

Festive GIF from I'm Revolting.

fruity miserablism

all the latest news about emotional container gardening 

I've been reading The Château de Résenlieu by Lord Berners on the train this week, having picked it up on impulse at the Cabinet magazine book sale, and in it Berners describes the proprietress of an unusual garden he encountered one summer  in Normandy:

Madame O'Kerrins did not have much intercourse with the inhabitants of Gacé. There was one old lady who visited the Château fairly frequently. Her name was Madame Bonnet and she lived in a large, ugly house near the church. In her garden there grew the largest begonias I had ever seen. Madame Bonnet told me that their size and their beauty were due to their being manured by the corpses of cats. In the bedding out season she used to offer a small reward to anyone who brought her a dead cat and when a sufficient number had been collected they were used as a foundation for the begonia beds. It seemed to me a rather macabre idea and I thought that at night the garden must be haunted by the ghosts of cats miaowing and caterwauling. These flowers were in a way symbolical of Madame Bonnet herself.

I'm not likely to take Madame Bonnet's gardening methods as instructive, but on an intuitive level it makes perfect sense to me that all gardens reflect something of the character of their gardener. My container garden just now is wallowing in indolence. My Alpine strawberry plants stopped producing fruit not long after my last update, and with them a great deal of heart went out of my gardening. (It should be fairly obvious that when I characterized myself as "a highly emotional gardener but not a sentimental one," I was making a perverse little joke. Look up "sentimental" in the wonderful iPad dictionary and there's probably a link to this blog, along with an embarrassingly accurate illustrated cross-section of my innards, sliced into translucent ribbons by sentiment.) My pepper plants have been exiled but continue to torment me with their incomprehensible refusal to set fruit — more about this below — and my pineapple sage dropped dead for no apparent reason, after ailing for just a few confusing days. Unless it was an act of performance art, in which case its death was an effective commentary on the dark moods that have discomposed much of my summer. It may indeed have been; in conducting my postmortem I discovered, somewhat disturbingly, "[o]ne superstition was that the plant would thrive or wither according to its owner’s fortune." I prefer to think a nutriment deficiency was to blame, but doom seems to have no shame in being heavy-handed when it comes to call.

My Sorrento lemon tree seedlings, at least, are thriving. All of them, which is a lot! I re-potted them with an abundance of caution and expected to lose at least a few, but not one has died, drooped, or taken on a sickly color. Perhaps they've been buoyed by their early fame — my photos of them in their infancy will appear in a video about citrus produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics program, like these.

I have six pots of baby Sorrento lemon trees at present, scattered all over my apartment, of which the one below is representative. When I re-potted them I was reluctant to try separating the embryonic seedlings from the apomictic ones — I explained a bit about those here — and now that they need re-potting again, I find myself once again skittish about interfering with the mysterious relationships they have amongst themselves. I'm going to keep them together, since they appear to be getting along nicely, while presuming that at some point in their adolescence a dominant tree will take over each pot. If you're in the NYC area and would like to adopt a pot, email me; I wouldn't mind giving one or two away to a good home (i.e., to someone who doesn't look like a plant-murderer). They currently live on south-facing windowsills and don't seem to require any special care beyond the good light they're getting. I'm going to give them bigger pots this weekend, and probably some citrus fertilizer. They've done fine without it so far, but after seeing how my pepper plants responded to feeding I don't feel good about starving the others.

Baby Sorrento lemon trees started from seed, approximately three months old. 

I wear my garden on my sleeve: my favorite swimsuit this summer.

Additional good news: I finally got my pineapple act together and my pineapple plant looks happy. I've written about my desire to grow a pineapple several times (here, for example), but I kept leaving the requisite pineapple parts on top of my refrigerator too long, intending to let them dry out for a couple days but forgetting to plant them before dessication set in. The instructions are very simple; basically you trim the crown and put it in a pot. Voilà, in a couple years or so, a home-grown pineapple. Bob Flowerdew of Gardeners' Question Time promises this:

I guarantee if you keep it warm and misted daily in summer and dry as a bone from autumn through to late spring, you will be rewarded with a spectacular flower and then a sweet, sparkling fruit. If you do a good job, you will get a fruit as big as a baby; if you do a bad job, you'll only have enough for a pineapple chunk or two. But that's gardening for you . . .

My apartment gets ridiculously dry in the winter months and I have high hopes that my pineapple will be the size of a very chubby baby. I've been bad about misting it, but writing these updates tends to get my gardening back on track, and in the meantime it doesn't appear to have suffered from my laziness. The instructions I linked to above say it's normal for the original leaves from the crown to die off, and the new growth in the center of my plant looks healthy. I started with an organic pineapple, by the  way, and I think you should too. Conventionally-grown pineapples are drenched in creepy pesticides.

My pineapple plant. It's supposed to have brown bits round the edges;

that's the old crown dying off. Good riddance!

In related long-range container gardening news, my avocado tree got re-potted and looks happier than ever, though a bit droopy on the morning I photographed it. A good watering enlivens it. I started it from seed approximately three years ago, from a particularly delicious Haas avocado. Very clever of it to have decided to get bushier rather than taller after having reached the top of the window, don't you think? I don't happen to have any photos of it when it was younger, but it used to be just a single, spindly trunk. The smaller, second trunk appeared this spring, I think, and after I gave it a badly-needed new pot the whole plant became fluffier with new horizontal growth.

my avocado tree

As for my chile pepper plants, they have indeed been given the heave-ho, as I was contemplating in my last container gardening update, though I still see them regularly and will probably repossess them at some point. Rather than putting them out on the sidewalk I gave them to a close friend who had a bare windowsill and didn't mind filling it with non-productive greenery. They were already pissing me off, those plants, and soon after I last blogged about them things took a turn for the worse. (There was also a matter of needing to make room for an air conditioner in one window, but I could've chosen other plants to get rid of; my extremely boring Sansevierias had previously been at the top of my shit list). I gave my sulking pepper plants bigger pots and worm castings — nutritious turds, reportedly beloved by all plants — and still nothing. What the hell else did they want from me? It finally occurred to me that the reason they weren't setting fruit was that they just weren't getting pollinated. In my mind putting them on the fire escape had taken responsibility for this out of my hands, but a bit of research revealed that rocotos in particular are often unattractive to insects:

PLANTS MAKE FLOWERS BUT NO FRUIT? Most hot peppers and some sweet peppers require insect pollination to form fruit. If the proper insect is absent, or if the local insects are not attracted to your pepper flowers, you may see the plants flower, drop off and never set fruit. This is especially true for the blue-flowered Capsicum pubescens, the Manzanos or Rocotos, or hot peppers grown in a greenhouse.

Pollen is produced on the stamens by the anthers, and usually ripens between noon and 3 PM every day.

To hand pollinate, take a moistened water-color paint brush, and pick up some pollen on your brush and transfer it to the other flower centers. You can get close to 100% fruit set with hand pollination.

- Pepper growing tips from Redwood City Seed Co.

I'd read about hand pollination before, but there was never any mention of moistening the brush. A dazzling eye-opener for the novice gardener who was doing it all wrong! I diligently diddled their flowers every day. After about a week of this, during which time the plants were indoors on my windowsill rather than languishing on the fire escape, where none of the sexy insects passing by would give them the time of day, the ungrateful little bastards not only didn't fruit, they stopped flowering too. 

I considered adding some companion plants to their pots before giving them to my friend. When I planted the borage on my fire escape I inadvertently learned a bit about this because borage is said to be good for everything it grows near. I looked at a list of companion plants but it was of little use; it indicates that tomatoes are good for peppers because their height helps to keep the humidity level high, but NYC this summer has already been plenty humid. And do you know what plants peppers help? Themselves, and marjoram. Themselves! For fuck's sake. It was then that I really started to wonder whether my particular pepper plants don't simply have a neurotic need for a certain kind of attention. Their reluctance to set fruit or even produce flowers despite appearing healthy and being well-cared for made me wonder if they weren't the plant equivalents of One Of Those Guys. You know, one of those guys who has mostly women friends and as a result seems cool with being equals? Then you get to know him better and a pattern emerges whereby it becomes apparent that they're all flattering him or making him feel important in some grossly retrograde manner reminiscent of a Victorian novel? I'd started to feel that that's what my plants wanted, endless bullshit flattery. "Oh you poor dears, let me get my little brush, just like I did yesterday, and the day before that!" Etc. It wasn't something I felt willing or even able to do, and that is why they're no longer living on my windowsill.

An important clue emerged shortly after they went to go live on my friend's windowsill, however, and I think I maybe had them figured wrong. I also cautiously think they might finally be on the mend. (A thought I've had before, but this time feels more for-real). What happened was that they started dropping leaves. Naturally my friend thought they'd taken an instant disliking to him, but I was grateful to see them finally articulate a little something about their health. Apart from their reluctance to set fruit, it was the first clear sign that they were not in fact as healthy as I thought they looked. And it told me enough to  fix them up with what they needed, I hope: dropping leaves was a big hint that they weren't getting enough nitrogen. Tomato fertilizer is particularly high in this, so I went to my friend's place to mix up some organic (but pink!) tomato stuff in his kitchen. The plants showed immediate improvement. Their maddeningly aloof habit of appearing healthy while not doing  any of the things I want them to do has historically brought out the very worst in me as a gardener, but here, finally, was something I could notice and respond to and, gratifyingly, see results from. Not only did they not drop any more leaves, they started growing lots and lots of new ones the very next day. One more day and they were flowering again. My friend — who has only ever kept cacti, which do just fine with neglect — was mystified by their responsiveness and has come to regard the pink water as having magical properties, and the plants as "a mysterious bunch." He reports that he is diddling the resulting flowers with great enthusiasm (being a watercolor painter, he's got plenty of brushes for this), and once a week or so I go downtown and diddle them myself. I don't believe any have set fruit yet, but surely at least one will finally cooperate? At this point one pepper would mean a lot to me. 

lots of new flowers and new leaves, and
maybe a nascent pepper forming in the center-right?

The cover of Sunset magazine, Sept. 1904, featured a woman drying her

pepper harvest. I doubt I'll have as many. Image from the NYPL digital gallery.

My borage plants did everything they were supposed to do but have nonetheless been a disappointment to me. The leaves have a fishy taste! I think it's got to be coming from the  modest amount of fertilizer I buried in their planter before sowing the seeds. Fish meal is a common ingredient in organic fertilizers (and possibly even in the organic soil I used?), and fishiness apparently ruins the delicate, cucumber-y taste of borage. I had so many plans for my borage leaves: muddling them in drinks, pickling them with golden beets, flavoring an ice cream studded with bits of diced, candied cucumber. Hmph. I probably ought to at least use them to wrap some salmon while it's curing, rather than letting them grow monstrous out there on the fire escape. I've got lovage in the same planter but it's not really ready to use yet, and I've held off on tasting it for fear it's fishy too. I'm hopeful that when mature it will have sufficiently strong flavor to knock out the fishiness. Lovage is a heavyweight and this seems reasonable to me.

borage flowers on my fire escape

Notwithstanding all the problems I've run into, I have a lot of hope about carrying on with  my emotional gardening next summer. I'm planning to take a community garden plot to increase my Alpine strawberry holdings, and there are some encouraging signs that I'm not the only emotional gardener in the neighborhood. Far from it — there's a guy on West 105th St. who is sticking it to his landlord with a very impressive "mother garden," and at our nearest garden center there are people dancing the tango.  

Previous posts about my container gardening are here, here and here.

strawberry letter 23

all the latest news about emotional container gardening 

My SPACE-GROTTO should be here any day now.

Botanical monsters via JB's Warehouse and Curio Emporium.

My Sorrento lemon seedlings are full of surprises. They keep coming, like clowns out of a clown car. It's been several weeks now since the first ones germinated, but every time I look at their little pot there's another just starting to make its presence known. At this point I have more seedlings than I had seeds! I started with twelve seeds, and as of yesterday morning I have sixteen seedlings. Look:

There's no Catholic funny business going on, I can explain, sort of: They are apomictic. One of my sources of information on how to germinate the seeds tipped me off that this might happen:

A interesting thing about citrus seeds is that you may get several seedlings from each seed. One of these will be from the embryo formed due to pollination in the orchard, but the others will be 'apomictic' seedlings which are vegetatively produced. That means that the apomictic seedlings will be exact genetic reproductions of the tree on which the fruit was formed, they are clonal seedlings. The one seedling produced by pollination will not be clonal as it will carry genetic material from the pollen parent (father) as well as the seed parent (mother). In any case, you should have a lemon tree, and it will very likely produce tasty lemons in about 15 years!

- New Mexico State University College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences q&a

Whoever the father is, he has really outdone himself. The oldest and tallest of my vigorous Mediterranean brood are very mature for their age too; they already have lemon-scented leaves (i.e., they're wearing plant-aftershave). I have no idea what I'll do if all of them survive infancy — raising just one lemon tree by myself in Harlem would be a challenge, and here I am with a whole fucking grove — but fortunately they seem to grow pretty slowly. This other blogger's two year-old lemon tree looks manageable, which means I have plenty of time to get things sorted out before harvest time. The same q&a I linked to above says that grafting a seedling on to a mature lemon tree can reduce fruiting time from fifteen years to five or so, but realistically I'll probably need more than five years to get myself settled somewhere more suitable for growing exquisite Italian lemon clones. In the meantime I'm thinking about spritzing their soil with chamomile tea, which I understand they like. After having learned a little something about their incredibly strange sex lives nothing surprises me anymore.

  

Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens at AbeBooks.

The lion is something I picked out at 1st Dibs. Let me know if you see a matching one 

someplace because garden lions should be in pairs. I don't need it right away.

Have you thought about giving your seedlings chamomile tea? It prevents something called
 damping off because it's got anti-fungal properties. I don't believe the tea needs to be
the same nationality as the seedlings; this is just my tea.

My window box full of berries is moderately less productive than my magical everbearing lemon plant pot, but there's nothing disappointing about it. In fact I'm going to hold back in describing the way they taste, for fear of sounding like an annoying Alpine strawberry-munching asshole. I can't really hide it though: They're sensationally, toes-curled-up good. The best among them have been as good as my finest hypothetical mental strawberries. There haven't been many of them yet, and they've been a bit mushy because of all the rain and humidity, but they've been tremendously exciting. I'm guessing that the mushiness is due to the weather because the farmers' market berries I've bought to supplement my small harvests have been mushy too. And, unlike my berries, insipid. I would go so far as to describe my strawberries as the most exciting breakfast to be had in all of Harlem but one never knows what neighbors are up to. 

I've been getting a lot of berries that ripen while still very, very small, but just now I'm starting to get larger ones. I've read about other people's home-grown strawberries magically starting to do this in June too.

My Yellow Wonder strawberries have been the slowest producers so far but
the arrival of June seems to have had an effect.


Shuggie Otis, "Strawberry Letter 23"

There's a fruit vendor on a corner of 57th St. who often tries to get me to buy some fruit on my way home by calling out, "hello lovely miss lovely fruit!" It puts a smug little spring in my step to think that if he had any idea what sort of fruit I'm getting at home he'd blush at the inadequacy and futility of these overtures. 

I've been so excited about harvesting a few berries every other morning that I haven't been observant about comparing the various varieties I'm growing. Now that they're producing more and larger berries I should be able to do a thoughtful taste test soon. 

My borage and lovage are doing well too, though not anywhere near ready to harvest yet. I planted them in the same bucket-bag a couple weeks ago and had long since lost track of which side is what, but yesterday I spotted some borage cress adorning dumplings in the Times and realized that the bigger leaves must be the borage. I'd never heard of borage cress and wondered whether it wasn't simply immature borage — the Times photo only shows its leaves, which look identical to what's on my fire escape right now — but apparently it is indeed a separate thing. A specialty grower in the Netherlands says that full-grown borage leaves are "simply too hairy to use in dishes" and the cress "only has the good parts from this beautiful herb." I've mostly only got the good, hairless parts at present  but as you can see I do have some hairy leaves. I went to the fire escape for a taste and they're very cucumber-y! And semi-surprisingly, kind of mushy. Hopefully at some point this summer it will stop raining every single day.

borage seedlings

lovage seedlings

My success with lemon seedlings inspired me to try germinating some other seeds I happened to have sitting in a little dish on my desk — a hint, they rhyme with merry sauna — using the same paper towel method I used for the lemon seeds. I started them just the other day and I already have one small seedling! I don't think these are particularly difficult seeds to germinate; my excitement stems from the fact that these are very distinguished seeds. And that I'd never before found so much as a single one in this particular merry sauna. To have found four of them during a spell of perfect germinating weather strikes me as an auspicious sign. I'm not planning to grow them myself, I'm much more likely to see them through the seedling stage and give them to a botanically-experienced friend, but who knows. Regulation of merry saunas is changing rapidly these days, and I remain hopeful that by the time my itsy-bitsy seedling(s) have gotten big enough for anyone to care about, it will become OK in NY State to have one's own merry sauna for personal medicinal use. In fact I would like to become an advocate of merry saunas on behalf of the emotional container gardening community. It's something I believe in.

Now the bad news. Naturally there is a bit of it; life in the Tiny Banquet Horticultural Subcommittee Lo-fi Gardening Research Center isn't all sunshine and peppermints.

notebook for keeping track of stuff
via AnOther mag

My chile pepper plants are acting like little assholes. And this time it maybe isn't me. There are flowers all over the place on both of them, but they don't set fruit. Instead the flowers simply drop off, over and over again, as coy as can be. Both plants are steadily getting bigger and they look perfectly happy, but it's all just a tease.

Coy bullshit flowers. They look perfectly capable of setting fruit 

and even give the impression they might be into it, but don't be fooled, this is
nothing more than posturing. You can tell that busted, crumbly-looking little flower 
on the left there is going to drop right off. Presumably out of ennui.

Sometimes one longs to say to a plant, "fine, go live on someone else's windowsill then," but where is the satisfaction in it if the plant is already, in its passive-aggressive little way, doing its best fuck-you-too? I might do it anyhow though. Get rid of them, I mean. It's an unusual step to actually get rid of a houseplant by choice rather than by accidental murder (for me, at least), particularly one started from seed, but my ex-boyfriend put the idea in my head the other day and now I keep visualizing myself putting the pepper plant pots outside on the sidewalk. And I feel free and good when I think this thought! He wasn't suggesting that I get rid of my pepper plants but my avocado plant instead, which he thinks is monstrously large. (It's five feet tall not including its pot, which I think is perfectly appropriate). This same ex once had a pencil cactus that grew bigger and bigger and bigger until it blocked an entire window, at which point he found a cactus weirdo on Craigslist to come take it away, so I understand his concern about my avocado. But the avocado — which I also started from seed, about three years ago — is doing exactly what it's supposed to whereas the pepper plants aren't doing squat. It seems altogether possible that months and months of inattention and animosity on my part have permanently withered their natural pepper-making impulses. Botanically-speaking I'm not sure exactly how that part works, but it seems intuitive to me that one can't throw shade on a plant for such a long time and expect a little friendly attention and a modestly more spacious new pot to just magically make everything alright. The other possibility is that all the humidity my lemon seedlings seem to be thriving on is making the peppers unhappy. I've read conflicting things about chile peppers and humidity and I have a feeling my particular peppers actually aren't all that fussy about it. But maybe I'm wrong; the consensus does seem to be they don't like it. (Exhibit A; exhibit B). I don't think I've been over- or under-watering them because the leaves look healthy. I'm going to try repotting them both again, more generously this time (they do seem to need it), and I've started spritzing their leaves with a bit of Epsom salt diluted in water, which lots of other growers say they like. (It's the magnesium). If they still don't have their shit together in another month or so they're probably going to get the heave-ho. I'd really like to get them to make some peppers but right now the reality is they're taking up a lot of space and requiring a lot of effort I'd rather give to plants I like more, and that like me more. I'm a highly emotional gardener but not a sentimental one.

Epsom salts have all sorts of gardening uses I didn't know about until recently.
I'm hoping they make my grouchy pepper plants ecstatic but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting on it to happen.

The Secret Life of Plants, a 1979 documentary on the sentience of plants.

It's on Netflix too. Via Dangerous Minds, which also reports that chile peppers send each other mysterious signals. More information here. I could hardly be less surprised because mine are obviously conspiring against me, in their half-assed way.

Related reading: What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz, via Brain Pickings.
I haven't read it yet so I can't tell you how it is that my pepper plants know 
that I know that they know precisely how ambivalent I feel about them.


My smallest plant is non-edible and lives between other, bigger plants.
A hopeful note to end on: I think that fluffy little ball of needles 
on the right is going to become a new appendage.

Previous posts about my container gardening are here and here.

relentlessly emotional container gardening

* I'm an idiot and accidentally deleted my May 2102 post on 'relentlessly emotional container gardening' while trying to update the link for the Jesus & Mary Chain video embedded below. The Blogger platform did save a draft of it, though, and I think it's a good read for all the weirdo gardeners out there, so I'm reposting it (more or less) as it was.

yours in springtime,
Madeleine
April 2016

*****

Again? Yes because my last post on this subject focused on the stuff I've grown to date and this one's about what I'd like to grow. It's a long list but many of these plants are for next year. I've been quite restrained about my plant ambitions lately. Yes really! My apartment faces south and I get good light, but with the recent addition of a large pot of cinnamon basil and the seed germination projects described below I've run out of window sill and fire escape space. I have hanging plants too but I can't have too many of those, and I nearly have too many of those now.

Casa Hortícola, a seed and bulb shop in Porto, Portugal,
from World of Interiors July 2011. It's been in its location 
in the Bolhão market since 1921. See more photos here.

Items on my to-grow list:

• Pineapple grown from old pineapple parts. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. I've tried it before, a couple times actually, but things kept happening, things that distracted me during the crucial stage of planting the pineapple parts after they've dried out a bit and before they've dried out too much. This is entirely my fault and not an inherent difficulty; the instructions for growing "a healthy, attractive pineapple for your home" couldn't be simpler. I'm going to make another attempt. I only want to use organic pineapples for growing (and for recipes that use the peel, like making tepache) and they're kind of hard to come by. If you live in NYC, Fresh Direct has a reliable supply of them. Commodities on 1st Ave. next to Momofuku has them too sometimes.¹

• Oyster leaf (mertensia maritima), as shown looking totally fascinating here. This is a plant that grows wild in the Hebrides and reportedly has a briny, oyster-like flavor. It is of great interest to my semi-secret subcommittee for the development of oceanographic snacks, which has become curious about the idea of icy cold oyster-y lemonade accompanying an elaborate beach-going packed lunch.

• Radishes. I understand they grow quickly and without torment to the gardener, and I love them fresh, pickled, or in a soup. I'm starting two varieties from seed right now: Jaune D’Or Ovale Radish, a French heirloom variety, and German Giant Radish ("I think it has just the right amount of spice to it, perfect for eating with salt & a beer," says a reviewer I'd like to have a beer with). I've got another variety of seed on hand, Chinese Green Luobo, but the instructions say to start them nearer to autumn because they only grow well in cool weather. (Summer has barely arrived and already I'm thinking about how nice it will be when I need to put on a woolly sweater for my fire escape radish-harvesting . . .). Radish sprouts are delicious and beautiful but I think they need to be germinated from a different type of seed (e.g.). I'm not growing them right now because I don't want to go apeshit with the whole radish thing.

• More chili peppers. Now that I've put my foot down on the obstinate (at times, truculent) mismanagement of my pepper plants I'm kind of excited about growing more varieties. On my wish list to start very early next spring: Tunisian Baklouti (I don't think I have ever met a Tunisian foodstuff I didn't like); Shishito (a favorite for eating grilled or broiled, but sometimes expensive and less-than-perfectly-fresh when bought in Japanese groceries); Bulgarian carrot peppers (bright orange, fruity and hot); Pequin peppers (my favorite store-bought dried pepper flakes are Pequin and I'd love to try them fresh); and Black Hungarian peppers (attractive little things with reportedly very good flavor, and interestingly they sound as temperamental as actual Hungarians, which I partially am so I can say that). I've also been eyeing these lumpy, pendulous, purple Cajamarcas, "a beautiful fruit that begins a vibrant violet unique to C. chinense and then changes to a rich red. The wonderfully fragrant aroma of ‘Cajamarca’ captures your attention with an intense, spicy-citrus fragrance and the classic habanero fruity undertone. Very Hot," according to The Chile Pepper Institute, which is selling the seeds.

Cajamarcas from The Chile Pepper Institute

• Black sesame. Is it madness or genius to grow yr own sesame seeds? I can see something going terribly wrong at the harvesting stage in particular. Like, a strong gust of wind. But I love, love the flavor of black sesame in both sweet and savory dishes and I'm not likely to have a chance to taste their leaves unless I grow my own, am I? 

• Cucumbers. I'm so intrigued by these brown Russian cucumbers ("hands down the best tasting cucumber I have ever tasted" says the seed store cucumber-eater) and these bright green Parisian Pickle (Improved Bourbonne) ones, but sadly I don't think cucumbers are a good container crop. I'd only give them a try if I had more space for bigger containers. Do you have such a space and would you like to experiment with Skype gardening? I would provide advice and instruction in my uniquely dissolute lo-fi gardening technique and you would send the cucumbers. Think about it. 

• Osmanthus.  I bought a jar of sweet osmanthus sauce in Flushing on impulse a couple years ago and have been crazy about its sweet, salty, floral flavor ever since. I'd love to have a supply of fresh osmanthus flowers for experimenting with. TopTropicals.com says "it is a slow growing medium size shrub or smaller tree that can easily be kept in container as a compact plant for years. You can create your own little Fragrant Valley . . ." I'm out of window sill space but if I can get a suitably large hanging pot I'll try that. I couldn't help but notice the same seller also carries something called Popcorn Cassia, which "smells like fresh cooked, buttered popcorn when you run your fingers through the leaves" but has "the distinct scent of peanut butter" when flowering, but it's a shrub and there's no more room on the fire escape for one of those. 

sweet osmanthus sauce

osmanthus flowers

• Borage. Little blue flowers with a nice cucumber-ish flavor, and bees like them too so it's a good plant for the whole gardening area. Borage has been on my mind since I found some atop a memorably beautiful and delicious plate of sashimi I ate last summer. (I didn't feel a need to snap a photo until after I'd eaten the most beautiful parts, sorry). I'm starting some from seed now.

Innocent Beauty borage from Kensitas Flowers

(1930s cigarette cards) from the NYPL.

• Mint. A must-have for people who like the way it tastes, or who have people over for drinks. I didn't think I had any more room for plants but I brought home some Swiss mint anyhow — chosen  from the Stannard Farm stand at Tompkins Square Park greenmarket for its clean, icy smell and taste — and created a spot for it in The Hanging Mint Garden of Harlem. (A big, light-weight hanging planter with a built-in drainage system, found at Saifee Hardware).

my Swiss mint

• Lovage. I've been banging on about how much I love lovage for a while now. Sadly my efforts to grow it at home haven't worked out for me in the past. The plants I've brought home have withered in the sun before I could even manage to re-pot them. In hindsight I think it was a combination of neglect and . . . honestly it was probably all neglect. I'm trying again and this time I'm starting my lovage from seed. By the way, my borage and my lovage live in the same bag planter. (I've read that lovage improves the health of everything it grows with so I'm not worried about the borage). I thought those planters were a great find because they're only $15 and they're very light in weight. I'm using them to grow the radishes too, and some secret salad greens I'll show you another time.

The Jesus and Mary Chain, "Sowing Seeds"

• Purple tomatillos. I keep missing the window for starting these. They're meant to be started six to eight weeks before the last frost. Next year, etc.

organic purple tomatillo seeds

from Etsy seller cubits

• Sorrento lemons. I mentioned Sorrento lemons recently and I was very sad when Manhattan Fruit Exchange said they didn't have any more and weren't sure when they'd get them again. They're a special variety grown on the Amalfi coast and the ones I bought had such a beautifully bright and true lemon flavor. I've loved lemons all my life, ordinary grocery store lemons, but I don't want to go back to them after having tried these. I want to say they were perfectly tart without being acidic but that would probably sound strange. Anyhow, I saved all the seeds I could (which wasn't many because they had relatively few) and ended up with eight or nine to try to germinate. Unfortunately I'd already planted them according to these instructions when I discovered that other people recommend peeling the seeds first, but I remained hopeful, and for at least two weeks I gazed at their little pot daily with tremendous concentration and affection. I got so impatient that I considered gently exhuming and peeling them, but then I found one more Sorrento lemon in the bottom of my refrigerator, elderly and denuded of its peel, and got an additional four seeds from it. I peeled them carefully as per the new germination regime and tucked  them away under a layer of damp paper towels, and covered their plate tightly with plastic wrap. The exciting news is that after one more week of waiting, an exceptionally humid week here in NYC, both batches of seeds have sprouts! I'm going to give them a little more time, and if more of them succeed I'll seek a good home for the seedlings here on my blog and on the food bloggers' mailing list. For now I'm going to keep making encouraging eyes at what I've got. I'm not sure if anyone else would want them anyhow. Trying to grow Sorrento lemons in Harlem is right down the narrow, bat shit-splattered alley where my container gardening takes place.

my Sorrento lemon seeds sprouting

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1. For the record, I take exception to that link's description of the "fairly large selection of organic, freshly-spritzed vegetables and unbruised fruit" at Commodities; it's expanded over the years and they now have a large selection, period. I've bought all kinds of great produce there, things like fresh tumeric root and little red bananas and seasonal oddities such as ramps and fiddleheads.