Brooklyn Farm in the New York Post

In March we were contacted by a writer who was working on an article for the NY Post about Urban Gardens. The article coincided with the announcement of an enormous 100,000 sq ft rooftop farm developed by Bright Farms in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. They are hoping to produce 1 million lbs. of produce every year. Stiff competition! Anyways, here's images of the article. Read it on their website.

Beginning of June

June has already begun and we are still busy planting crops. You can see only a few of the boxes have been opened up on the left.

Farmer No. 1 has put up bamboo trellis structures for the Avocado Squash and cucumbers to climb. We started all of these from seed and transplanted them a few weeks ago. Looks like they'll make it.

Seeds in action

There's a lot of little activity on the farm. All the seeds that we started a few weeks ago are progressing along and are being transplanted now. The new box has been deemed a lettuce, basil and beets box.

It's not all weeds back there

We are finally getting serious about the farm for this year. We really thought the entire farm was infested with weeds. Well we were 90% right. In one of the boxes is a lively display of greenery. We thought that they could only be weeds since we haven't planted anything yet. Well… we are pretty sure that these are all tomatillo plants. Last year we planted three tomatillo plants in this box. The seeds must have survived the mild winter and are back at it. We do have to thin it out. 

We also discovered a luscious lettuce plant that has been taking care of itself with absolutely no help from us. Last season we planted lettuce seeds in this pot and none of them really worked.

Hopefully we are right about these two situations and they are not actually in fact weeds.

Fresh construction on the farm.

Before we get really deep in planting time, we decided to add another box to our Northern territory. We usually grow tomatoes and peppers in this area. But a couple things have come up in the last year. One is that with all the construction done last summer there's an abundance of dirt that we need to contain. And second, we want to grow fresh lettuce again and it will need to grow it in a new box with new dirt. So with confidence, Farmer No. 1 cut out the wood to fill up the area perfectly. Oops. Never round up, measure twice, cut once.

We leveled the ground, added two inches of gravel for drainage, and put the wood walls in place.
Next we'll add new dirt with compost and plant!

Happy New Year!

It's early, but we are already getting ready for another season on the farm. In the coming weeks we'll be doing clean-up and soil prep. Here are some shots of the current state of the farm.

We got smart and covered the boxes with scrap wood for the winter. This means we won't have spend a day sifting out cat poop.

That's our christmas tree on the left covering the ground.

And the barn made it through the winter! We never showed you the completed project, so here' s short video.