New York City Garden 2016

It’s been a long year or so without our balcony herb garden. Mandatory brickwork outside our apartment started in April 2015 with a Cristo-like gauze wrapping around the entire facade and taping shut our windows and balcony door. We lived like that for almost an entire year, until finally, in April, we were allowed access to the balcony again. That’s the bad part. The good part is that I got to start the balcony garden all over again. The building had removed our handmade deck floor, so I replaced it with a wonderful and inexpensive Ikea deck floor. I also swapped out our rusting bistro set and rickety plant stand for a bistro table and Sophia Chairs (ridiculously cheap on Craigs list) and a couple of Ikea plant stands. The window boxes and all the pots survived on the roof during the construction, although we lost all the herbs save the hardy chives that have come back every spring for almost 20 years. I planted the window boxes with a brown grass, coleus, Thai basil and asparagus fern that I found at my new favorite garden store – GardenWorks in Flushing. After some searching around for them, I found some straggling hyacinth beans for a song at Chelsea Gardens in Red Hook. They had wilted in the heat and looked terrible, but the salesclerk promised me they’d be fine and she was right. They are rapidly lining the trellis and railing, keeping the eyes off the ugly white storage building across the street and focused instead on the garden and t...
Source: The Blog That Ate Manhattan - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Gardening Balcony garden Best garden supplies NYC Garden centers NYC Manhattan New York New York City resources Urban gardening Source Type: blogs