The weather is starting to finally brighten up in NYC, enough for me to start my seeds, but I won’t be doing any fire escape gardening this year because I am moving across the country to Los Angeles. By no means does this mean that I am going to stop gardening. It just means that I won’t be gardening on a fire escape. I’ll be trading it in for a balcony....
Author Archives: Mike Lieberman
So I’m giving the worm composting another shot after several unsuccessful attempts at it. The woman at the Lower East Side Ecology Center who sells me the worms was hesitant to sell me another pound because I’ve killed so many. I let her know about the new bin and she seemed genuinely concerned about my previous experiences. We chatted a bit more, sold me...
The fine people at Natures Footprint Inc heard about my worm killing ways and were concerned. They contacted me and thought that it could be the bin that I was using. Of course they did because they make worm bins. They offered to send me a Worm Factory 360 to try out. I willingly agreed. It arrived in the mail last week and is quite the beast. I need to read the instructions...
The final question that I have before starting my vegetable seeds is do they require direct sunlight? Can they get by with indirect sunlight? I could easily put them out on my window garden. It gets a few hours of indirect sunlight a day, but no direct sunlight. The fire escape is an option as well, but having to get into and out of it everyday would be a pain since it’s...
An easy way to start your seeds indoors is to use toilet paper or paper towel rolls. There are two advantages of using toilet paper rolls. The first is that they are free. It’s likely that you already have both items available in your apartment. Ain’t no better price than free. The other is that that they can be put directly into the soil when transplanted...
Truthfully a lot of that last frost and zoning information is a bit over my head. So I had to look it up quickly. According to the book Incredible Vegetables from Self-Watering Containers, New York City is in Zone 7 and the last frost date is sometime in mid-April. The map and legend were hard to decipher. In the video, I erroneously say Zone 8 and mid-May. Genius idea...
Now that I’ve figured out a way to compost in my kitchen without worms, I’ve started to pack as many containers as I can to make compost. I found an empty container of cat litter on the sidewalk that I brought home and filled. I’ve also had my roommate keep his coffee containers and have begun to use them as well. More food scraps were added to the original...
Since I’m still new to this gardening thing, I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my first year. I’ve also had many successes as well, with the most memorable being my first lettuce harvest. For this post, I’d like to share the Top Five Gardening Mistakes that I’ve Made. Life ain’t perfect and neither are my gardens. I know hard to believe....
Not sure if it’s me or the crowd that I keep, but it seems like a food revolution has started. People are starting to take food back from corporations. This is one of the reasons that I started to garden. I wanted to get back in touch with my food. I feel that America has lost its connection with food for business and corporate reasons. The fact that gardening on...
I’m sure that most of you think that having a fire escape garden is easy. Well it aint’s. You already know that my fire escape garden is out of my roommate’s room. There is a radiator that is in front of the window that the fire escape is out of. On the radiator is a bunch of stuff that I need to take off each time I want to go out. Then I have to open...
After checking in with Miss Avalos and the Urban Kinder-Garden, the kids showed me how they watered and tended to their garden. Before they watered the garden, they filled me in on what’s been going down with the garden since I last saw them. “Some of the plants died, but we got more in and they are still growing,” one student told me. That comment was...
It’s been just over two months since I set up the Urban Kinder-Garden with Miss Avalos’ class at Kester Ave Elementary, so I took a visit to check in. Shortly after the garden was set up, the students went on winter break. Some of the students families took the containers home to care for them. Unfortunately, there were some casualties and not all of the plants...
When I asked for help buying vegetable seeds, I got all kinds of advice and suggestions, which are much appreciated. Spinach, chard and all sorts of greens were the most recommended. I don’t really eat that many starchy veggies like carrots and beets, so didn’t want to get those for my fire escape garden. Since I only have three containers for veggies and the...
I started a kitchen compost bin since I’m done with worm composting. Gabriel Withington (@IntegroDesign) gave me a great idea. He said to compost in buckets similar to the the aerobic compost bin that I built. The main difference is that there is no need to drill holes to aerate the compost. If you leave enough room, you can shake it up to aerate. If it gets too...
I can honestly say that I am done with worm composting after killing my third set of worms. This isn’t much of a surprise since they were literally crawling out of the bin a few days back. My first set of worms I killed because they were too damp. The second batch were too dry and this batch…obviously I have no clue because I keep killing them. So I’ll...
I must be making a name in the worm community and not a good one. When I checked on my latest batch of worms some of them crawled out of the bin. The ones that escaped didn’t last long and were dead under the kitchen sink. Since I started this third bin, I moved it under the kitchen sink to protect them from the light. I also noticed that some of the worms were...
Now that I’ve gotten some advice on planning for the garden beds in my Grandmother’s backyard, I made a call to obtain some horse manure. I definitely want to add things to the soil to mineralize and amend it. One reason that I want to do this is because Brooklyn soil is known for being flat out nasty and on the border of toxic. The other reason that I want...
This spring season, I plan to use some of the garden beds in the backyard vegetable garden at my Grandmother’s. I got her approval and documented in the video below, but I’m sure that she’ll still have some complaints about it. There are four beds that measure approximately 4×2, 4×6 (which has a little bit of moss growing on it), 4×4 and...
One misconception about my fire escape garden is that it is outside of the window in my room. Well, it’s not. The fire escape is actually outside of my roommate’s window. So I have to go through his room to get to it. One of the windows in my room is where I initially planned to garden. I even built a window garden, but it gets absolutely no sunlight. Having...
