This morning, I harvested two heads of lettuce form the garden plot. The garlic scapes are coming in, and with the recent heat, things are growing nicely. I also finished weeding the communal bed, planted the last Zinnias there and mulched the entire bed with straw.
Over the last two days, I completed almost all the planting for my plot. I transplanted my tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, squash, hot peppers, marigolds, strawflowers and dahlias, and also added an Asian eggplant seedling I had purchased from The Neighborhood Farm. My lone surviving Delicata squash was leggy and did not survive transplanting, so I will pick up two more Delicata seedlings from The Neighborhood Farm this weekend. All that’s left for now is to inter-plant everything with more marigolds, and sow nasturtium and beets. I may move the dill I had planted last week closer to the cucumbers. I also need to stake the tomatoes and refine my cucumber teepee.
Today, I spent several hours in the community garden to (finally!) finish getting the plot ready for planting. Because of a major leak, the water in the garden was turned on super late – only about a week ago – which delayed everything.
I weeded and amended the soil with manure and city-provided compost, and I also got my first seedlings in the ground: leeks, chives, dill, snapdragons and zinnias. The flowers were inter-planted with chives. I also sowed two rows of cilantro.
I just love the view from my third-floor back porch in May. The cherry blossoms are fading now (they were an incredible sight for the past two weeks), but our lilac and our neighbor’s dogwood are glorious. And the scent!
It has been a super slow start to the gardening season, and other than the shallots, I have not planted anything in the plot yet. Because of a water leak, we still do not have water in the community garden. I do not trust the weather, and I am not schlepping gallons of water several blocks down to the garden. But my seedlings are ready; they are practically bursting out of their little containers. Fingers crossed the repairs will happen this week.
Meanwhile, my container plants on the back porch are very happy. The spinach (two containers) really took off, as did the radishes.
My lettuce mix never germinated, so I transplanted one of the three Salanova Green Butter lettuces into that container. The other two will go in the plot. The seeds were old, so I unfortunately only got three seedlings out of the handful I started. Over the summer and into fall, the salad container will have Thai pepper, Thai basil and flowers.
It has been an excruciatingly slow start to the season. Such a cold and rainy spring so far, which after this long and cold winter is especially hard. So, things in the garden have been slow to come up. I did not plant peas this year, and have not started anything yet in the garden plot. But both, the garlic and the rhubarb are coming up nicely. As are the grape hyacinths and a few tulips, which have yet to open.
My dining room table is full of seedlings. I thinned the basil seedlings on March 30th and plan to re-pot tomatoes, Swiss chard, sage and thyme this weekend. I will also start hardening off the snapdragons. The kale has been living on the porch full-time for about a week now. This weekend, I also plan to plant my shallots and start my cucumber and squash seedlings.
The radishes and spinach on my porch are coming up nicely. I had started them on March 30. Because it was so cold (we even still had a few frosts), it took them a while. On April 21, I also started leaf lettuce mix in one of the big containers.
It has been a long, cold and snowy winter, and things in the garden are just starting to emerge. The rhubarb is looking healthy, as is the garlic. Yay to new beginnings!
I started my first seedlings today – leeks, sage, thyme, snapdragons and two kinds of hot peppers (Thai and Tennessee Spice, the latter was a freebie from Sand Hill Preservation Center, and I have no idea what that pepper even is). The leeks and hot peppers are for myself, the snapdragons (mostly) for the communal flowerbeds, and the sage and thyme are for the new community garden at the Mildred Haley Housing Development in Jackson Square. They are currently undergoing a redevelopment, which will include creating community gardening spaces, and I will start seedlings (flowers and herbs) this spring for the borders of that garden.
It was time to make the calendula salve. I gathered the ingredients – homemade calendula oil, beeswax, unrefined shea butter, and essential lavender oil. I also needed a water bath, a spatula and tins for the finished product.
I started by weighing out the beeswax and the shea butter. The recipe calls for 1 oz. beeswax and 0.5 oz. of shea butter for every 8 oz. of oil. I had 12 oz. of oil and adjusted the amounts of the other ingredients accordingly. I melted the beeswax and the shea butter in a water bath and then added the calendula oil.
Once it was all melted – taking care not to heat the oil too much so it would retain its medicinal qualities – I added a few drops (around 8) of lavender oil for fragrance and filled four 4 oz. tins.
I left the tins undisturbed for the salve to harden and settle and added labels.
Voila! My first-ever batch of calendula salve.
The next step in my calendula salve project was to make the calendula oil. I needed dried calendula flowers, a carrier oil (I used 500 ml of sweet almond oil) and glass jars. It is a simple process: Fill the glass jars with the flowers (about 2/3 to 3/4 full) and top them with the oil. There should not be much room between the oil surface and the lid as contact with air can make the oil rancid.
I initially used non-standard jars that held a bit more than a cup each. But I miscalculated the volume and ended up having to switch to smaller jars half-way in the process to make the oil fill all the way to the top (to minimize exposure to air). As I had already covered the flowers in the initial jars with oil, in the end, my jars held more flowers than intended. This will make the oil more potent, but also potentially will yield less oil as some of it will be absorbed by the flowers.
I let the oil infuse for about 6 weeks in a warm, dark place (under a cardboard box next to the radiator in my dining room), turning the jars every couple of days.
After those six weeks, I strained the oil using a sieve lined with one layer of cheese cloth. I tried to squeeze out as much of the flowers as I could.
In total, infusing the flowers with just under 16 oz. of almond oil yielded 12 oz. of calendula oil. As expected, some of the oil (a surprising amount, actually) had been absorbed by the flower petals and the cheese cloth. I then stored the oil in a dark bottle in a dark corner of my cool bedroom for a few days. The oil can be stored this way until the original expiration date of the carrier oil. Onto the next step: calendula salve.
I love growing flowers in my community plot. Last year (2024) was the first year I grew calendulas. I decided to grow more this year (which could not have been easier as they self-seed like crazy) to make a calendula salve. Calendula has long been used as a medicinal plant to soothe irritated skin and eczema as it has anti-inflammatory properties and is an excellent moisturizer. To make the salve, you need to make calendula oil. The first step is drying the flowers.
I had been harvesting and drying calendula flowers all summer and fall. I only harvested unblemished flower heads that had just begun flowering. I tried to always harvest early in the morning on a dry day. The flowers were then placed “face down” on a paper towel-lined paper plate and left to dry for two to three weeks in a darkened room, away from direct sunlight, until they were crumbly. I dried and stored them in a dark corner in my bedroom, the coolest room in the house.
I harvested two plates worth once or twice a week and collected the flowers in a large mason jar once they were fully dried.
