Gardening | Brokelyn

gardening

Slash costs with a hori hori knife & other really simple tips

picture-381According to Real Simple Magazine, even your potatoes are ripping you off. Buying a few loose spuds for your Bubbie’s latkes will cost you twice the price of a bulk bag (plus, the more latkes the better.) A fun money-saving feature on the mag’s web site also tells you say no to non-grocery items at the supermarket and yes to multi-use gadgets like the “hori hori” garden tool (part knife and part trowel), an affordable way to keep your “yard” (see also 3×5 patchy lot) in check.

Feeling the urge to call Moscow? Visit aitelphone.com, and find international rates as low as 1.5 cents/min in comparison $1.70/min at Verizon. So slap on a smile and start saving (and jeeze Louise, we can’t see the fillings in the back of your teeth–so opt for silver instead of white enamel and pay half the price for four-times the strength). For lots more of this sort of thing, check out Real Simple’s “How to Save On…” guide.

How to plant a ‘truck farm’

picture-3661From Dumpster swimming pools to a truck farm… how kooky is Brooklyn this summer? The locavore crowd is all atwitter about a vegetable garden growing in the back of a 1986 Dodge Ram, planted by Brooklyn filmmakers Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney as an experiment to show all the crazy places you can grow your own food. (Also excited is one Red Hook insalate caprese lover who’s been helping himself to their car-vest: “Some kid from the neighborhood keeps eating all of our basil,” Ellis told today’s Daily News.) As it happens, there’s more to growing a pickup garden than dirt, water and seeds, and you can click the photo to see videos that show how the duo achieved a mobile bounty of broccoli, arugula, tomatoes, parsley etc. The boys even have a CSA, where you can pay $20 for a “completely unknowable amount of truck-fresh produce,” which may well amount to an arugula leaf and a parsley sprig if this project continues to grow in popularity. Here’s hoping.

Coupon quickie: get $20 off a new tree in NYC

Photo by Dave Shafer.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, photo by Dave Shafer.

Does everyone know you can get $20 from the city if you buy a new tree? As part of Bloomberg’s plan to reforest the city, you can download this coupon from milliontrees.org and use it to get a $20 break on a “1-inch caliper or larger” from a participating nursery. There are five in Brooklyn: Chelsea Garden Center, Dragonetti Brothers, Gowanus Nursery, Kings County Nursery and Liberty Sunset Garden; addresses and phone numbers follow the coupon link.

Brokelyn grow-your-own-food guide, part 1

greenscapegarden

Fire-escape pepper photo by Urban Greenscaper. Click on it for lots more inspiration.

We know, we know… you probably don’t think you have the space or the know-how to grow a measly sprout, let alone the ingredients for a salad. And you might be right. But growing food in tight, urban quarters is not only possible, it’s easier than you might expect. Gardening experts estimate that every square foot of growing space yields almost a pound of food over the course of the growing season. That’s a sizable crop squeezed from even the most meager Park Slope patch of dirt. And if a Crown Heights fire escape is your whole domain, that’s at least a crudité. Here’s how to begin. Read the rest of this entry »

Slash costs with a hori hori knife & other really simple tips

picture-381According to Real Simple Magazine, even your potatoes are ripping you off. Buying a few loose spuds for your Bubbie’s latkes will cost you twice the price of a bulk bag (plus, the more latkes the better.) A fun money-saving feature on the mag’s web site also tells you say no to non-grocery items at the supermarket and yes to multi-use gadgets like the “hori hori” garden tool (part knife and part trowel), an affordable way to keep your “yard” (see also 3×5 patchy lot) in check.

Feeling the urge to call Moscow? Visit aitelphone.com, and find international rates as low as 1.5 cents/min in comparison $1.70/min at Verizon. So slap on a smile and start saving (and jeeze Louise, we can’t see the fillings in the back of your teeth–so opt for silver instead of white enamel and pay half the price for four-times the strength). For lots more of this sort of thing, check out Real Simple’s “How to Save On…” guide.

How to plant a ‘truck farm’

picture-3661From Dumpster swimming pools to a truck farm… how kooky is Brooklyn this summer? The locavore crowd is all atwitter about a vegetable garden growing in the back of a 1986 Dodge Ram, planted by Brooklyn filmmakers Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney as an experiment to show all the crazy places you can grow your own food. (Also excited is one Red Hook insalate caprese lover who’s been helping himself to their car-vest: “Some kid from the neighborhood keeps eating all of our basil,” Ellis told today’s Daily News.) As it happens, there’s more to growing a pickup garden than dirt, water and seeds, and you can click the photo to see videos that show how the duo achieved a mobile bounty of broccoli, arugula, tomatoes, parsley etc. The boys even have a CSA, where you can pay $20 for a “completely unknowable amount of truck-fresh produce,” which may well amount to an arugula leaf and a parsley sprig if this project continues to grow in popularity. Here’s hoping.

Coupon quickie: get $20 off a new tree in NYC

Photo by Dave Shafer.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, photo by Dave Shafer.

Does everyone know you can get $20 from the city if you buy a new tree? As part of Bloomberg’s plan to reforest the city, you can download this coupon from milliontrees.org and use it to get a $20 break on a “1-inch caliper or larger” from a participating nursery. There are five in Brooklyn: Chelsea Garden Center, Dragonetti Brothers, Gowanus Nursery, Kings County Nursery and Liberty Sunset Garden; addresses and phone numbers follow the coupon link.