The Question Remains...

Green Market Day at Union Square today. It's a perfect autumn day, clear and cool, that quality of early autumn light... I can't do it justice (and I call myself a writer... pshhah). It's that bursting-with-the-wondrousness-of- health-and-life feeling that fills Union Square Park (and one's soul as you walk through) on market day in mid-September. I couldn't even find a good picture or description on the Web. Here's the best I could find (there's a panorama).

This is the time of full bounty. It's harvest time, the (literal) fruits of the summer's labor are all here to be enjoyed. This is commerce at its beautiful, local, environmentally-sound best. Warm-weather veges are at the tail end of peak (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, zucchini), and cool-weather veges and root crops are starting to show up too (lettuces and all kinds of greens, peas, potatoes, spinach, squash in a few weeks...). Plums and peaches are finishing up, apples are back. The bakers are the year-round soldiers (amazing breads, pies, cookies, muffins, scones - mostly organic), and today I bought rainbow trout from "The Trout Guy" (I'm going to have to get his info next time) - the scruffy guy with the pickup truck and beer coolers who raises fish up near Oneonta, and who tells me he's there every Wednesday, all year-round, except for a couple of weeks in February. "Love your city, but just once a week," he says. "Takes me 'til Saturday to recover."

I was there mostly for the plants, though. I've got the go-ahead to do a second round of container planting for the backyard up here in the Bronx. The first round of lettuces did great, and I'm getting ready to harvest and make plastic baggies-full for the tenants here.

(D. the landlord is taking the cheap route on fencing and ground cover in the back, which is unfortunate; hopefully it will turn out all right.) I picked up some arugula (spinach didn't look so good), pansies, and a begonia.

I also stopped to chat with the (sniffle sniffle) orchid folks. I told them about Ella (no, I did not actually admit that I had named her), and their diagnosis was (perhaps not surprisingly) that the vendor was not reputable (hey, those are my people!). Many florists sell orchids but don't grow them, the fella explained. So who knows who grew the orchid, how old it was when I got it, what climate it was most suited for (maybe it was grown in Hawaii and shipped over, for instance). This guys grows his in NJ and insists that all his customers are happy. I guess I felt a little better - that maybe it wasn't me, or, my other fear, the Bronx pollution (he seemed to think that the air couldn't be that bad... but then again, what does he know, he lives in NJ). I had also started to worry that maybe Ella wasn't really dead and I shouldn't have tossed her away; but the guy assured me that, when all the leaves are gone, the orchid is done for.

So maybe I'll try again. Maybe this is a lesson in "you get what you pay for." But NJ guy sells his for a pret-ty penny... I'll think on it. In the meantime, the question remains: does an orchid grow in the Bronx?