Brilliant use of Spanish moss for an interior design concept.

I guess I should rename my blog to 28 (mostly empty) pots.  Many of my plants are dormant or dead from the two rounds of frost we’ve had, so the roof garden is looking pretty sparse these days.

I’m already looking forward to when the seed catalogs arrive and I can start planning next season’s garden.

I am all about hanging on to warm weather these days.  So for about $25, I have made a really cheap season extender for the veggie box.  I mounted some PVC pipe to the sides of the box with copper pipe straps.  The PVC is bent across the box to form supports for clear sheets of plastic.  This setup ends up resembling and functioning like a mini greenhouse.

We’ve had some pretty chilly weather in the past two weeks, but this contraption warms up in the day from the sun and protects the winter greens from cold temperatures.  If it keeps working, we should have a new batch of radishes and arugula by the end of the month.

After 3 months of waiting since the figs appeared on our fig plant, we have ripe figs!  There wasn’t a tag on the plant when we bought it, but we think we have Brown Turkey figs.  We ate the first two figs today with one of our favorite blue cheeses, Valdeón.  Delicious.

The growing season is definitely coming to a close as Fall settles into the Northeast.  But the garden is still an exciting place.  The garlic has been planted.  The winter greens are really taking off.  Our figs are finally (!) ripening (photos coming soon).

Late summer can be a sad time in a container garden in the Northeast.  Most plants are starting to show signs of senescence.  All of the tomatoes have been harvested.  The growing season is coming to a close.

But several types of winter greens, such as chard, spinach and arugula can be grown into the cool months of the Fall.  I’ve planted some of these winter crops in our veggie box on the roof, which I will eventually cover with a cold frame.  The radish seedlings pictured above just emerged from the soil in the last few days.

Anne Raver wrote an article in the New York Times today about how Harvard Yard is now organic.  I’ve been doing some consulting work with this project to examine the fungi and bacteria living in Harvard Yard, such as the symbiotic fungi shown on the roots above.

I know I haven’t posted in a long time.  My life has been taken over by a fungus.  But I promise I am working on a really fantastic post that will be up soon.  It’s a photo documentary (if you will) on the beast of a plant shown above.  Stay tuned….

I thought I’d follow up the not so pretty compost post with a flower photo post.  This is a flower of the purple queen Datura.  It’s planted in the “garden of good and evil” part of the garden that includes both edible and poisonous plants.  This plant happens to be quite poisonous.  It’s a member of the nightshade family (as are potatoes and tomatoes).  Ingestion of Datura can lead to delirium.  So does grad school.

No garden is complete without a compost system.  We don’t have the luxury of a large yard where you can pile coffee grounds, rotting vegetables and other household biodegradables in an out of the way corner of the garden.  Instead, we compost in Rubbermaid bins on the roof using the lasanga layering approach that I learned in the Master Composter program in Ithaca, New York.  Green wastes from the kitchen and garden are interleaved with layers of newspaper.  All of this year’s compost will be worked into the potting soil for next year’s garden.