ECO Rooftop Garden

early May showers bring late May flowers. And workshops!

Posted on May 8, 2012 by ecorooftop

It’s been raining constantly here in Chicago these past 2 weeks. Coupled with intermittent sun, the plants are all growing like crazy! We have a bit of a slug and snail problem again, which is funny to me on a rooftop, but they love it because it’s been so very wet. We’ll need to put beer cans out in our garden again. Always a funny battle, I put them out, and others remove them as trash. I should label them largely with “SLUG TRAP”. Hopefully that won’t deter the slugs.

Garlic babies, grown from bubils from adult plants harvested in June of 2011. They’re coming up quite well, and will take another 2 years (I believe, this is my first time growing from bubil) to reach full head maturity. For now, they’re doing great in their starter tray, and most all of them have come up. Roasted garlic, I’ll see you next year

Lettuce, lettuce, and more lettuce. That’s the story of this spring. I have the most amazing lettuce heads like I never have before So good! The rain has also helped the lettuce to be super juicy and leafy. But, the slugs love it. Almost as much as they do my seedlings. I’ve lost almost 20 seedlings – mostly basil, eggplants, & peppers – to the slugs. This is war.Here you see our medicinal herb bed. The spiral has filled out quite nicely here in it’s 3rd season. It’s beautifully lush with local medicinal herbs.The oregano, thyme, chives, and sage absolutely love the cooler weather. The anise hyssop is beautiful right now, as well. Dill and fennel are coming up, and are incredibly delicious. I have so much growing right now it’s hard to make use of all of it appropriately. With Edible Alchemy in house, we have so much food all the time. Anyone want some garden goodies?

Posted in flowers, medicinal herbs, organic growing, photos, rooftop gardening, seeding, Spring | Leave a comment

Grow your own Greens workshop & volunteer day! 4/21

Posted on April 16, 2012 by ecorooftop

Join us this Saturday, 4/21, for a “Grow your own Greens” workshop from 10-11:30 followed by a volunteer day from 12-4pm on Eco’s rooftop garden. We’ll be rebuilding (anyone have carpentry experience?) compost bin lids, seeding carrots and greens, and perhaps turning the compost. Workshop info below, RSVP at ediblealchemyfoods.com/playshops. See you there!

Everyone knows you should eat your greens. But many don’t know that harvesting them fresh right before eating allows the body to absorb maximum nutrients and plant sugars– as the plant is still alive as you eat it! Learning to grow your own veggies brings fresh, succulent greens into your kitchen, and impresses family and friends. Studies also show that getting your hands in dirt can help alleviate stress, tension and anxiety. Anyone looking to increase their health this spring by eating healthier & learning a bit of gardening is welcome! No previous experience with plants necessary.

In this class, you will learn how to grow your own fresh greens in an apartment window or balcony. Using recycled containers to help divert materials from the waste stream & reduce our carbon footprint, we’ll learn how to create our own potting soil, plant seeds effectively, and take care of the seedlings once sprouted. All participants will go home with 2 containers topped with lettuce, spinach, and/or arugula seeds that will sprout in 5-7 days. Greens will be ready to harvest in around 3 weeks, depending, and can be regrown 1-2 more times! An informational zine will also be provided for tips, tricks, and more information on how to take care of your seedling babies.

Materials Provided / What to Bring

a notebook for notes
an apron (if you don’t want to get dirty!)
comfortable shoes
You’ll go home with all the fixin’s for a window garden full of greens, planted and ready to sprout

When: April 21, 2012 10am-11:30pm

Location: Eco Rooftop Garden off the Damen pink line station (RSVP for exact address)

Instructor: Andrea Mattson-McGaffey

Cost: $20

RSVP: www.ediblealchemyfoods.com/playshops or http://dabble.co/classes/grow-your-own-greens/s/3631-20120421

Posted in classes & workshops, organic growing, rooftop gardening, seeding, volunteer! | Tagged volunteer! | Leave a comment

lettuce, anise hyssop, chives, and crabapples — April 2012

Posted on April 6, 2012 by ecorooftop

Anise Hyssop leaves coming up

Chives rocking it like they love to do in the early spring. Alliums (all onions, garlic, chives, garlic chives, etc…) are quite cold tolerant, and do very well in this area. Chicago, before it was built up, was a huge chilly wetland and swamp- perfect for growing onions.

Crabapple tree blossoming. We were donated a bunch of trees from HomeDepot last fall- the crapapple is doing so very well already this spring.

A head of “Grandpa Admire’s” lettuce, an heirloom from Seed Saver’s Exchange in Decorah, Iowa. This plant was overwintered in a hoop house, and is an excellent specimen for a heading lettuce! This variety does incredibly well in our garden.

I also (finally, what procrastination) tallied the numbers from our garden log from last year. Keep in mind that this more of a ball park figure rather than a hard fact… BUT! We harvested over 185 pounds of produce in 2011, over a May-October growing season. The numbers broke down to: 12.5 lbs of herbs, 36.6 lbs of greens, and 135.75 lbs of vegetables- and 5+lbs of cut flowers. Pretty amazing, eh?

Posted in harvest, hoop houses, photos, Spring | Leave a comment

Early Spring in 2012

Posted on March 26, 2012 by ecorooftop

Spring came with a blast this year- 80 degree days mostly out of no-where.

Our hoop houses housed all our fall plantings so very well, much of them came back, and came back really strong this year. Onions, garlic, beets, carrots, shallots, flax, lettuce, spinach, kale, oregano, thyme, chives, and cilantro are all growing. The mint, lemon balm, crysanthemums, and medicinals are all starting back as well. It’s so green out there all of a sudden!

Posted in season extension, seeding | Leave a comment

Seed Swap! Sunday Feb 26th, 2012

Posted on February 5, 2012 by ecorooftop

Looking to garden and grow things this year? Well, Eco’s hosting a seed swap on February 26th! Come swap seeds with other gardeners to improve your garden’s variety this spring & learn a couple of new things about growing. Bring seeds that you have saved over the growing season, *still viable* seeds that you have left over from last season, or new packs you’ve purchased for this season. And, bring a dish or drink to share with everyone, because snacks are always good.

Some things:

Package saved seeds from your garden in paper coin/junk mail envelopes or plastic baggies & label seed packs with botanical and common name.
Bring viable seeds in packets bought from seed companies (please make sure they are not too old)
Bring small jars and envelopes to split other seed packets. We will have a limited amount available for you.
If you don’t have any seeds, pick some up to trade with. Or, ask around- many people have seeds laying around.
The more seeds you bring, the more you can trade.
Cuttings of plants are welcome too. Please bring written info on cultivation & plant name (if you know it)
Any leftover seeds will be donated to the Eco Seed Bank, which is available for free to anyone wishing to grow.

We’ll have an info station on starting seeds, and there will be many gardeners around to answer questions & compare notes with.

Sunday Feb 26, 2012 2pm-5pm

@ the Eco Collective, in Pilsen

RSVP for the exact address

$5 donation (benefits Eco Rooftop garden)

Posted in community, rooftop gardening, seed saving | Leave a comment

Re-Defining Roots Documentary

Posted on January 28, 2012 by ecorooftop

My long time friend Mike Silberman is heading up an amazing project called Re-Defining Roots. They are filming documentaries about food-related projects around the city- people who are making a difference and doing it in innovative ways. He has 4 documentaries out so far: see them all at www.redefiningroots.com. Eco and Edible Alchemy are featured in his 4th documentary- watch it below!

Re-Defining Roots Edible Alchemy Documentary

This from the ReDefining Roots website:

We are a small crew of documentary filmmakers who are set out upon the hopes of uniting various sustainable movements across the country into a grand scale collective project.

The rehab of a former meat-processing plant on Chicago’s South-side may seem a strange place to start a project documenting green change in food systems across the American Midwest, yet that is precisely where the web-series “Redefining Roots” begins. The meat-processing facility, now termed, “Plant Chicago”, a zero-energy sustainable green business incubator, will house an aquaponic farm, fish hatchery, micro-brewery, and 40,000 square foot shared kitchen, all powered by an anaerobic digester. An apt place then, to start a series focused on innovative local food solutions. From urban markets and production, to local organic farms, Redefining Roots profiles the projects of local growers and entrepreneurs re-shaping America’s food system, one seed at a time.

Part documentary series, part how-to, part “Mr. Rogers goes to the crayon factory,” Redefining Roots traces the interconnections in “green” food systems. Its main highlights being innovative and sustainable techniques that bring food from seed to table, meeting plenty of insightful characters along the way. More than just an online show, Redefining Roots focuses on empowering its viewers by means of information, connection, and instruction. Redefining Roots encourages viewers to get involved by sharing content and ideas for new projects. It also hopes to inspire viewers to work with, or on, projects profiled in the show. As an online media channel, Redefining Roots connects problem solvers from differing fields and regions while encouraging DIY experimentation and providing an outlet for otherwise less visible, but no less essential, “green” projects.

There are plenty of food related problems out there: from the epidemics of diabetes and obesity, to urban food deserts, to unsustainable resource use in farming, to greenhouse gas emissions from food production. Thankfully, there are plenty of clever people working to address these problems. There’s no single solution, and the projects profiled on the show, even the show itself, are only small parts of a sustainable future; but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We need each other’s help. Let’s unite and find our voice, so that together we can manifest our sustainable reality and do what is needed to redefine our roots.

We aim at Inspiring and connecting individuals by planting one seed at a time.

Posted in rooftop gardening | Leave a comment

7 hoop houses

Posted on November 9, 2011 by ecorooftop

Today, we installed the hoop houses on the rooftop. It was cold, with a high of about 46 degrees, insanely windy, and misting for much of the time.

Hoop houses are season extension tools- allowing the grower to incubate plants for a couple more weeks past the last frost date, and in turn, to protect them a couple of weeks earlier than the last frost date. In a climate such as Chicago’s, they’re essential when looking at self-sustainability and growing your own. And they aren’t that hard to put up, at all.

Granted, there are many different ways for season extension- the mini-hoop houses we put up are the way that best suits the rooftop garden that we have. There are cold frames, larger greenhouses, larger hoop houses (of all shapes and sizes!), domes, and more. Find out what works best for your garden by doing just 15 minutes of research online using the above keywords. There are tons of designs, tutorials, and plans all available for use.

In our garden, we first install the flexible PVC hoop structures in the beds. Bolt them in with the appropriate pipe strappings to the fronts of the beds, and secure a rib on the top to keep the hoops from slipping, and to allow snow and ice from caving the structures in over the long winter (this year we inserted threaded 1/4″ metal poles through drilled holes n the hoops. Other years we’ve used PVC or spare tomato stakes lashed to the hoops with zip ties. Be creative with the resources you’ve got.)

Cut an appropriate piece of clear plastic (The past 2 years I’ve used painter’s plastic, which works alright. I’d recommend going with a clearer, though same thickness, grower’s plastic available online) for the dimensions of your hoops- carefully measuring & adding up the height, width, and length of the hoop structures. We stapled lengths of wood to one of the long edges of plastic to help tuck in the back edge under our roof parapet for security from the wind & snow of winter.

The plastic is centered over the bed, the back edge with the board is tucked in, the plastic on the back half of both sides stapled to the bed, and the rest neatly folded and weighed down in the front.

The plants inside looked quite snug, I was jealous standing outside in the cold and rain myself.

Right as we finished carrying in the last few planters (so the plants wouldn’t freeze), the wind picked up and the rain started falling, icily. whew!

Glad the plants were in their new hoop homes and we were bound for hot pancakes and curry inside. What a day.

Thanks to Dietrich, Josh, Egon, Tiana, Alex, and Natalie for all their hard work in the cold mist today.

Posted in Autumn, compost, hoop houses, rooftop gardening, season extension, working | Leave a comment

Compost

Posted on November 7, 2011 by ecorooftop

Compost is an essential part to any organic garden. Compost is the connector that completes the loop of home gardening: your food scraps become dirt again, to grow more food. It’s one of my favorite concepts- seriously. And, it’s hardly a concept. It’s just what mother nature DOES.

With America throwing away an average of 40% of the entire harvest grown here (this including farmers, manufacturers, distributors, processors, stores, restaurants, school cafeterias, and households)- we need to start diverting these rich nutrients into compost piles. When these valuable nutrients mingle with dead batteries, chemicals, and off-gassing plastics in landfills, the nutrients become virtually unusable and lost to the food chain. Our topsoil is being depleted by intensive farming all over the globe- we need to start to see food scraps & spoiled food as valuable resources: not as trash.

For those of you unfamiliar with composting, I’ve uploaded the zine I created this summer about home composting here in Chicago. It’s really quite easy, and there are lots of different methods to compost in the city: vermicompost (with worms!), tumblers, fully enclosed bins, mesh bins, anaerobic digestors, and more! The city regulates that the bins must be off the ground and be enclosed (fine mesh is great) to keep rats from breeding in piles. ick.

The zine below details what you can and cannot compost. Generally, anything coming from a plant is fine (except weed seed heads & diseased plants, which will just bring you more trouble later. Burn these!). Unbleached paper, cardboard, shredded paper, juicing scraps, kitchen scraps, sawdust (moderately), mushrooms, eggshells, and leaves/yard clippings are all great. Do not compost dairy, oils, meat/bones, or large amounts of grains.

Make sure to have a good ratio of BROWN TO GREEN. Brown material contains carbon and is generally dry: leaves, dried yard clippings, mulch, paper, coffee grounds, etc… Green material contains nitrogen and is generally wet: kitchen scraps, green yard clippings, and juicing pulp. You’ll want to try to layer your compost pile with 40% green, and 60% brown materials. Though there is no rule, really. Composting happens regardless of your ratios- it just might smell a bit more if you have too much green, or go slowly if you have too much brown.

Turn your compost pile as often as you can- an ideal is every 2-3 weeks, though once a year is totally fine. Harvest the finished compost (it will look, smell, and feel like SOIL!) when you turn your compost by sifting the larger, uncomposted chunks out with a bread tray, large colander, or mesh screen. VOILA! rich composted soil for your garden. Mix into potting soil, mound around the base of plants in beds or containers, or turn into a bed before you plant it. Your plants will appreciate the extra nutrient and microbe boost, and will be all the tastier and bigger for it.

Here at eco, we keep our compost in a large closed clear tupperware on our countertops, and take it out every day or two. Our friends who bring their compost to our bins store their in either large 5 gallon buckets in their kitchen/porch, or in bags in their freezers. Both are great ways to keep food from becoming part of the waste stream.

Contact me with any questions, or investigate the link for composters, composting, and more I’ve included below. Happy soil-making!