March pics (the transition)

March 14th

My last week in the city the cherry trees around the neighborhood were coming into bloom.  This one is on 30th Avenue, and I'd pass it every day on the way to work.  Behind it is Dillinger's, which was our favorite local spot to go grab a beer and great meal for cheap.  I had no idea during my last week off in Astoria that I would never return for any length of time because I would be so busy with the new job.

But we know we will always have Astoria, Queens, only a couple hours away. 

March 16

This is Puck, aka the fat man, and the wonderfully dated kitchen floor in our apartment. It was a great home, and our landlady Pauline was the best.  The kids had gotten pretty comfy there too. 

March 17

Last Saturday at the apartment.  Mandatory afternoon NASCAR and suds following final packing session.

...and Melvin, aka the fuzz, reminding me it's time for food.

March 19

7:07am

First day at the new job in the country I wake up to trees and fog, no concrete or skyline in sight for the first time in 9 years.  It's so quiet, almost surreal.

6:17pm

Krissy took me to work that morning and took a few hours before eventually hitting the road and heading back to Queens.  She left me notes all over the house where I was staying for the six weeks we had to be apart.  They made my day, and would for weeks as I kept finding them.  Following my first day at the new gig and new life back out east this was the first one I found.  What can I say, she is loving and very smart woman, and knows me all too well.

March 20

There's an ocean out there somewhere.  Indian Wells before work.

March 22

2:00pm

Headed to Shelter Island to be introduced to a wonderful couple and their most magnificent property. 

A lot different looking than the north end of Central Park.

8:00pm

In the chicken shack rocking and rolling.  Officially back in Bonac.  Definitely a long way from Queens.

March 24

A couple pics from the new office

March 25

For the next weeks Krissy came out on the weekends with another load of stuff from the apartment.  This was a Sunday afternoon trying to relax before I had to see her go back to the city for another week.  We knew the transition was going to be tough, but we just focused on the end goal.

March 29

The end goal: being able to have any kind of day, good or bad, and always being able to go to the water's edge and breath and put it all in perspective.  Invaluable.

Well, that, and checking out the surf. 

Moving Day

The fat man is ready to roll.  We're moving out of New York City today, after 9 years for me and 12 for my wife.  It changed our lives and is one Hell of a town! But it's time for us to go start a new chapter.

the cats, at home in Astoria

 

 Melvin

 Puck

Pandora

one of the things I will miss...

We get to watch some of the best sunsets over New York City every evening from our place in Astoria, definitely one of the things I will miss when we no longer live in town. There's a lot of that recently, realizing what we will miss and not miss about city life. I will miss my friends and mentors in Central Park, the best volunteers in the world, all my horticultural connections around town, and the invaluable people watching that NYC offers, though I have to say I don't think I'll miss the packed mass transit and steamy concrete jungle soon to be back in effect. It will be hard to go, in part, but we know we will return to get that shot in the arm when we are getting a bit too stir crazy in the country. I imagine once you have lived in a place like New York City a little part of it will always be in you.

packaging genius?

Came across Biofeel this afternoon at our local grocery store. Great to photograph, as I am a total sucker for bizarre packaging, but I can't say I'm necessarily dying to try it. Hmm.

subway evening sky

love her

the oldest, most famous... in the universe!

Really there is nothing else to say. The Bohemian Hall Beer Garden is truly one of a kind, and forever a favorite of ours. Not to mention this evening we got to reconnect with fantastic old friends and catch up over delicious pitchers of IPA and plates of food sure to fill up even the hungriest man. A win-win.

a thing of beauty

Saw this '65 Chevy Impala on the way home on 30th Avenue. Love the environment, but I will always have a thing for muscle cars. Someday I will have one of my own.
Someday.

favorite poster

"Youth and Beauty"
subway ad
Astoria, Queens, NYC

I usually get out of the house a little after 5:30 in the morning. By quarter of six I am on the local train platform, watching the M train pass and waiting until the R train comes through. It will show up at 5:53am like clockwork. Across the tracks I stare at this subway ad. It's for a show at the Brooklyn Museum up through next weekend. The poster has obviously been up for a while and adorned accordingly. As a silly game to play with myself I try and keep tabs on the new posters when they go up and see how long it takes before they get defaced, but inevitably I forget or realize it's really a totally ridiculous exercise and continue about my business. But I never tire of the metamorphosis these posters go through over the weeks and months exposed to the masses. I love this poster to begin with, the painting by American painter Luigi Lucioni from 1928, but with the blue tag and scratch I somehow love it that much more. The Art of the American 20's meets the art of the 20-teens. I love capturing these snapshots so that I can revisit them years down the road and be taken right back to the early New York City mornings like this one.

pics from a morning stroll

I decided to take my camera along for my little walk and errand running this morning. Even though just a Hosta in this small cement urn I couldn't help but like the way the sun was hitting it from behind.
Everywhere in my neighborhood you see these small herbaceous plantings, such as these mums, peaking through the chain link fence in search of the sun. Get it, kids!
I could create a whole blog that was just old dilapidated laundromat signs from around the city. There is something about each sign and storefront that makes it unique, like the funny crooked ampersand.
People do some fabulous container gardening here in Astoria, land of the Greeks. Here they started with tall, narrow pots planted with red Mandevilla, a great flowering vine of an annual, and trained it up to create this whole elaborate trellis you walk under when coming or going. ...pretty fabulous.
Then I had to get stuck looking at all the new street trees. The Parks Department is about halfway through the planting efforts associated with their Million Trees NYC initiative which means over 500,000 trees have been planted in the last four years or less. As an arborist it's great because I never have to go far to find myself noticing new trees, eagerly trying to identify each one.
I am guessing that this new addition is a young black oak, Quercus velutina. Many oaks within the red oak family can look alike so often you have to carefully examine other parts of the tree in order to make your best educated guess. You need to look at things like the buds the trees set in fall that persist through winter.
In some cases you need to take into consideration the bark.
In both cases the buds and the bark seem closest to a black oak, though most of the black oaks I know are much older so there is some difference in their appearance. The reddish buds with their gray pubescence and gray bark with hints of a more yellow inner bark tend to make me think it is Quercus velutina over the other usual suspects like northern red oaks, pin oaks, and scarlet oaks. But again, just a guess for now.

no photoshop required

Out the living room window I looked west towards Manhattan to see this fabulous red spot amidst the gray clouds. Grabbed a quick snap before it faded. No photoshop required.

another killer couch-side cloud show

Ha, "couch-side cloud show", try saying that five times fast!

After Irene, mostly comical shots

Hurricane Irene rumbled her way into the tri-state area through the night and surprisingly we slept right through. We really thought we would have been woken by wind and crashing sounds outside but we would wake the next morning to see that little had changed on our block. Before bed I took a couple of shots of the block from our front stoop, ready to take the after shots the next morning showing all the downed limbs and chaos that ensued. But we were very lucky and sustained little to no damage. Even the dead wood that I was figuring would definitely fall was still there atop the trees the next morning, stubborn and rigid. All Cosmo had to do was go over to his garden patch across the street and restomp the roots of his six foot sunflowers back in the ground and they were back up and at 'em like nothing had happened. We decided to heed the over sensationalized media coverage and stay in until the afternoon when the winds finally calmed. We heard via facebook of friends and family losing power out east on Long Island and up in Connecticut. Vermont was probably just getting the wrath they were dealt as we were sipping our coffee and checking in with the world. My parents out in East Hampton would be without power and water for a week, some Connecticuters that long and then some. My high school dormhead and mentor Grim would post pictures of where he now lives in Vermont, complete with destruction like I have never seen up there before. The youtube footage of flooding down in Long Beach and other favorite coastal spots had us rapt.

Eventually we would take a walk through the hood to take care of a cat sitting gig that felis femina had and I brought my camera along. Quickly we realized that Astoria did not escape totally unscathed, though the scenes were mostly comical.
You got to love how well New Yorkers pay attention and observe safety precautions. The greatest city in the world, they never said anything about common sense.
Of course we had to have a celebratory post-Irene pint with the gang down at Dillinger's, our wonderfully reliable local haunt. The menu was limited because they had not gotten a few deliveries, but the taps were flowing just fine.
We stopped at the grocery store to grab a couple things we needed. Or rather, we stopped at the grocery store to find that the hysteria had them totally picked clean.
No hamburger buns for you!
Finally Sunday afternoon we got the first glimpses of blue sky in days and it was glorious. Is that a black cloud over the city or is it just me?
Before the Empire State Building put it's evening lights on....
Thanks Irene for another fabulous sunset here in Queens.

5 o'clock world

It was a pretty perfect weather day, especially for late August in New York City. The evening sky not a bad way to end it.

self portrait on a train

"Early Sunday Morning", a la Astoria

I've mentioned before my love of Edward Hopper's paintings. His brilliant insight into classic scenes of Americana transport you instantly to another place and time. I suppose it's too why I love walking this city and coming across these old signs. Strolling to the grocery store the other evening I passed the "Sparkle Plenty" Laundromat amidst the hubbub of the evening rush. Delivery drivers were dropping the last of their loads in a fury while motors idled, the machismo men of my neighborhood in their fancy import cars nearly running down little old ladies with their pushcarts full of veggies from the local market, everyone rushing like hell but ultimately for no real reason. We're all still going to get where we need to go. The work day will end and we'll all be free, just like any other day. I made sure to stop and appreciate this wonderfully campy sign and it's nod to a simpler place and time, before the advent of the internet and the cell phone, before we all got stuck on this idea that everything has to be so damn instant. A woman rushing by looked at me taking this photograph and scowled with perplexity, clearly not understanding what I was doing or why I was taking the time. She could have taken the time too, though, the three layers of plastic surrounding her meats and cheeses preventing them from spoiling, even in this heat. Some years from now these signs are going to be gone, these links to that older, more sane sense of community and neighborhood. I stood and enjoyed the pause, clicked a couple snaps, and continued on my stroll, seeing if I could walk a little slower than before to make sure I didn't miss anything else.

Recycling in the garden

I saw this today and thought it was brilliant. The quick explanation is that someone used their cut bulb foliage as mulch for their freshly planted veggie garden. Knowing how recycling your cuttings can give back to your soil and your plants essential nutrients that they need to strive through these hot summer months, priceless.

the longer train of thought goes like this:

Often I don't think your average gardener is educated enough about recycling in the garden. When we cut and remove green foliage from the garden because we are tired of it we have to remember that the garden can still use that "garbage". When you study professional turf management (a bit of a tangent, I know...) you learn the real value of Nitrogen, the macro-nutrient that plants need to survive that keeps their foliage green and plush. Everyone wants a rich green lawn that looks and feels fabulous, let's face it, it's a great thing to have. So you do the right thing and in the spring you over-seed if necessary and apply the right fertilizer with 25% water soluble Nitrogen for the quick shot and 75% water insoluble Nitrogen which is going to slowly breakdown and give your turf a nice steady feed through the summer months. Maybe you spoon feed your lawn a bit around July 4th, but ultimately you are set until the fall and can go on about the rest of the yard. You get into your summer mowing schedule and if you are most people you pick up and remove the grass clippings. But have you ever thought about the nutrients you are removing in the form of those rich green clippings? What most people don't know is that grass cuttings can be left on a lawn and refeed those thousands and thousands of plants with an unbelievable amount of nutrients. Yes, over time you have to then learn about the "thatch" that dense turf creates and you will have to incorporate aerating your lawn into your spring protocol, but you can maintain a much more self-sustaining and healthy lawn in the long run. You'll be psyched and your neighbors will wonder how you do it.

So take that thought and revisit the cut bulb foliage used as mulch. Yes, ideally you want to leave bulb foliage attached to the plant for as long as you can stand it after the flower is past until the foliage is totally yellow and no longer photosynthesizing. However, let's face it, you look at your daffodil and tulips leaves for so long and they begin to look pretty tired and your patience is gone, it's time for them to go. It's time to make way for the other perennials emerging. But if those cut leaves are still green then they still have valuable amounts of Nitrogen and other nutrients that can be recycled back into the soil. The only thing that I would change is that I would try and grow a lot more bulbs so I had even more foliage to lay as mulch, which would allow for really making a great look out of the long strands. You could lay a lot down and give the mulch a greater sense of movement and design. Weeks later I would see that the woman also used cut iris foliage, which is big and flat and gray-green and beautiful and she had enough of that to lay out a great looking pattern below the brightly colored swiss chard at the other end of her genius mini veggie garden. I love being impressed by the things people come up with in the garden when you think a little bit and go with your own creativity. Makes me wish I came up with the idea! You're mulching which is one of the best things you can do in summer because you are regulating the soil temp, keeping moisture in, and helping to keep the weeds suppressed. Not to mention you are recycling valuable nutrients and making your soil better so you can grow whatever you want to try. And you're not spending anything more than time in your awesome garden, making the earth that little bit more green. Like I said, priceless.