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Tag: Alpine Strawberries

  • Tiny Gardens: 66 Square Feet for Alpine Strawberries in NYC – Gardenista

    This week, we’re revisiting some of our all-time favorite stories about gardening in New York City. Cultivating plants in the Big Apple comes with challenges—yards tend to be small and shady, and privacy is rare—but if you have the patience, these urban gardens can produce some big-time magic. Behold…

    October…strawberries? That would have surprised me, too, before I grew them myself on a tiny terrace in New York City.

    Several years ago I bought two strawberry plants at GRDN, a pretty garden shop in Brooklyn. The cultivar name was Fern, and, said the label, these were “everbearing” strawberries. That sounded good. Standard strawberries will bear fruit in early summer only. But as a gardener with space issues, I ask a lot from a single plant. More is more.

    I had never grown strawberries before and it sounded hard. Talk of mounding, and rows, and straw, and runners, and renovating…? All I had was some small pots, a lot of sun, a small terrace, and the desire to grow my own. Turns out that’s all you need to enjoy fresh berries till hard frost.

    I put the plants in full sun on my terrace edge, and a month later I was eating the first ripe fruit. Soon, the plants made new flowers, and about four weeks later, more strawberries. And so it went, till the pots froze and snow fell. And they returned in the spring, with no extra protection. They weren’t kidding about the everbearing.

    Soon I was picking handfuls. And in high summer the plants sent out runners—long, tender feelers with a tuft of leaves at the tip, searching for new land to occupy. Wherever they touched down they set down roots. I dug them up and potted these offspring in even smaller 6-inch pots.

    Within a year I had a small strawberry farm, blooming into November. Eventually the reproduction by runners got so out of hand that I was sending the extras to friends, by mail. The parent plants do get tired after a few years, but by then their offspring have risen to the challenge. Life lesson?

    Read on for step-by-step instructions to make a strawberry shrub cocktail called the Ingrid Bergman:

    Photography by Marie Viljoen for Gardenista.

    Above: Is there a more appealing summer arrangement?
    Above: My 66-square-foot terrace.
    Above: Because of space constraints, I housed the strawberries in terra-cotta pots no more than 8 inches in diameter.
    Above: Sweet harvest.
    Above: The Fern strawberry plants bloomed into November.
    Above: When we moved from a sunny top floor in Brooklyn to a shadier parlor-level Harlem with just four hours of direct sun, Fern languished. I sent the sulking survivors to sunnier gardens. But the surprise performer was the other strawberry I had been growing all this time, an Alpine cultivar called Ruegen.

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  • The Food Forward Garden, by Christian Douglas: A Manual that Explains How to Design a Beautiful and Productive Landscape

    The Food Forward Garden, by Christian Douglas: A Manual that Explains How to Design a Beautiful and Productive Landscape

    Flipping through The Food Forward Garden, the first thing you notice isn’t the fruits and vegetables—and that’s intentional. Landscape designer Christian Douglas has been creating backyard kitchen gardens in Northern California for more than 12 years; in that time he has learned that clients are much more likely to tend and harvest from the garden, if it’s also a beautiful and inspiring place to spend time. So it is no surprise that each garden in his new book is as pretty as it is productive.

    From a small city backyard bordered with raised beds to chef Tyler Florence’s elaborate, terraced kitchen garden, Douglas shows us the wide range of what he calls “food forward” gardens—gardens in which the food is brought forward rather than being hidden away in a back vegetable patch. Douglas believes that vegetables, fruits, herbs, and berries should share the prime real estate in our yards with patios, pools, and even the front walk. “By learning how to integrate food into our outdoor spaces, we can make better use of our time and resources,” says Douglas. These gardens aren’t designed to feed a whole family, he adds: “We are looking for people to engage more and grow something.”

    The breathtaking landscapes in this book are also an invitation to readers. Douglas believes that people might be more swayed by images of beautiful, aspirational yards than a workaday, how-to guide. This is not to say that The Food Forward Garden is not packed with practical advice—it is, especially the second half of the book, which covers growing tips and specific plants—but in this book visual inspiration is always hand-in-hand with the science of growing food.

    Here are 7 ideas to steal from this new book that blurs the line between backyard farming and high-end landscape design:

    All photos excerpted from The Food Forward Garden by Christian Douglas (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2024. Photography by Sasha Gulish.

    1. Grow food in view.

    Douglas learned through experience that his clients were much more likely to harvest the food in their gardens if they could see it from their windows.
    Above: Douglas learned through experience that his clients were much more likely to harvest the food in their gardens if they could see it from their windows.

    The kitchen garden should be close to the kitchen. If it’s far away, it’s much less likely to be used. But perhaps even more important, Douglas says it should be right in sight of where you cook. “When it’s in view from the house, you can see when your strawberries are ready to harvest, you’ll know exactly when your broccoli heads are ready and not three days later when they start to go to flower,” he says. “People tend to eat more from the garden and learn faster when they’re seeing the garden several times a day.”

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  • Christian Douglas: An Interview with the Bay Area Landscape Architect

    Christian Douglas: An Interview with the Bay Area Landscape Architect

    When multiple people we admire tell us we should check out The Food Forward Garden, a new gardening book coming out this fall, we pay attention. “It’s a design manual on the art, craft, and importance of growing food closer to home,” says its author, landscape architect Christian Douglas, who has made a name in the industry designing beautiful gardens that provide both nourishment and beneficial habitats. Now based in the Bay Area, he began his career in England, creating landscapes for historic estates and London townhomes, after which he spent several years “exploring desert ecologies and regenerative agriculture throughout the world.” Today, his work is an appealing reflection of this background: His landscapes are a little structured, a little wild—and always teeming with life.

    Christian’s book hits bookstores this October. In the meantime, read his thoughts below on the “Russian doll” method of planting, the plant he’s “fallen deeply for,” and his current garden fetish.

    Photography by Sasha Gulish, courtesy of Christian Douglas, unless otherwise noted.

    Above: Christian, pictured here in the garden of celebrity chef Tyler Florence, a client and friend.

    Your first garden memory:

    Gardening with my father on our wild and weedy 1970s Oxfordshire allotment. Eating muddy carrots and earthing up potatoes. Wheelbarrow rides and grass paths. Watering cans and runner beans.

    The seed that started it all..

    Garden-related book you return to time and again:

    Second Nature by Michael Pollan. A wonderful love letter to gardens.

    Instagram account that inspires you:

    Todd Carr and Carter Harrington’s @hortandpott. These two creatives are fascinating to watch as they develop their business and homestead in Upstate New York. Maximalist, botanical heaven.

    Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

    Above: Christian’s mid-century hilltop home in San Rafael. “We love to host and entertain. Our neighbor’s children love charging around the native meadow and foraging in the kitchen garden,” he says.

    Curated, timeless, immersive.

    Plant that makes you swoon:

    A tangle of Carex pansa and California poppies. I’ve fallen quite deeply for Eschscholzia californica ‘Alba’ (poppies) these past few years. Something about the buttery lemon blooms feel soft and delicious on the eyes, especially when a bumble bee is romping around on the anthers.

    Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

    Blocks of ‘Platinum Beauty’ Lomandra. I can’t quite get to grips with the “why” of variegated grasses.

    Favorite go-to plant:

    Above: “Edible decoration for my outdoor lounge area.” Pictured is ‘Bountiful Blue’ blueberry in a basket planter—”these Prolific smaller varieties have been bred specifically home gardens”—and ‘Rogers Red’ grape creeping in underneath. Photograph by Christian Douglas.

    Vitis ‘Rogers Red’ (grape) and I are having a moment lately. It doubles wonderfully as a shade vine and rambunctious groundcover, with delicious table grapes and crimson leaves in the autumn. Lower water use. Great for florals, too.

    Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

    Close your gate. While both are lovely to have in the garden, deer and vegetables don’t play well together. I’ve learned (and subsequently, unlearned) that lesson far too many times to remember.

    Unpopular gardening opinion:

    Above: For a client in in Marin, Christian replaced a lawn with a stylized French potager with willow planters and gravel/brick pathways. Espalier apple, pears and fig frame the perimeter.

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