Meanwhile, on the rooftops in Boston

The Harvard Business Publishing rooftop gardeners are having a grand season up in the eaves, larking around like chimney sweeps with their produce.  Let’s take a moment to peek in on them:

[Contributed by Martha, one of the eight]  

Hi!  Welcome back to HBP’s rooftop garden.  A lot has been going on and I’m afraid I’ve neglected you all.  However, we have NOT neglected our garden.  After our initial planting of lettuce and peas, we spent time hardening off the rest of the plants and getting those into containers.  The last of the plants started inside were planted just after Memorial Day weekend.

 And then the rains came.

 Oh lordy, but June was cold and rainy.  We had so much rain that I swear I saw people building arks.  We were still wearing long-sleeved shirts and jackets at the end of June.  I was really worried about our plants, and some did take a beating.  One of the eggplants and two of the cucumbers and melon plants did not survive.  The great thing about seeds is we just planted more. 

 The lettuce and peas loved that weather.  The lettuce is pretty much done now but the peas are still motoring along flowering and bearing pods.  They are hardy little buggers.  We have been picking the peas and either eating them on the spot or taking them home to mix in with dinner.  Finally, around 4^th of July weekend, we got some dry, warm weather and the plants have really started to take off.

 Miraculously all the tomato plants survived June.  As you can see from the picture, we have lots of tomato plants.  The cherry tomatoes are blooming and putting out little tomatoes.  The Big Boys are also blooming but don’t seem to be quite as prolific.  One of our gardeners, Matt Han, cannot wait for the first tomato to ripen.  He has salsa recipes and canning recipes all ready.  Matt Wagner has a marinara sauce recipe all ready to make.  Others of us are hoping for tomato, basil and mozzarella Panini’s. We’ll see what we’ve got once these start to ripen. 

 We have been harvesting other things besides peas and lettuce.  We have six containers of basil and we’ve been harvesting it almost daily.  We had enough for a wonderful pesto that Tara made (using pistachios and Asiago cheese rather than pine nuts and parmesan).  We had a pesto pasta salad mixed with baby spinach, tomatoes and red peppers which was delicious.  We picked the lone cucumber and it was the sweetest I’ve tasted.  We do have a number of herb plants besides basil.  We have tarragon, sage, parsley, dill and cilantro.  We’ve started harvesting some of these others. 

 Matt Wagner indicated he was going to make chicken soup this weekend using some of the tarragon.  Unfortunately, when he did this, it came out tasting like grass, and the end result of boiling a chicken with it was so shameful he daren’t bring it in.  Upon research he found that you can’t actually grow the aromatic tarragon from seed :o)  It turns out that the aromatic version spreads mainly through cuttings or via its root system (much like oregano) and that the kind you get from store-bought seeds is essentially a flavorless weed.  Who knew?  Well, lesson learned for next year.

We have had a lot of blooms on other plants as well.  Check out the ornamental gourds.  These plants have been flowering profusely and guess what?  I discovered a baby gourd on one of the plants!  It’s so cute!  The cucumber plant has had lots of blooms but only one cucumber has developed.  There have been lots of blooms on the melon plant but no fruit.  Hmmm, I do hope something comes of our efforts with these plants.

 The most unusual plant in our garden has got to be the eggplant.  I’ve never grown them and had no idea that the leaves had spines right down the middle.  I discovered a blossom on the big one yesterday and can’t wait to see it bear fruit.  It should be really cool watching it grow.

We’ve started planting some beans too.  We had a couple extra containers and decided to start our beans in them.  Since the lettuce is gone, we will revitalize that soil by adding some fertilizer and maybe some extra soil and plant some more beans.  I’ve got a hankering for some beans and hope we can get a good crop in before it turns cooler.

Well, that’s the update from HBP.  Thanks for stopping by and I will really try to check in more often.  Happy gardening!!

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Harvard rooftop gardeners chime in

A few posts ago I gave some advice to gardeners on rooftops in Boston.  Here they introduce themselves:

Hi there!  Welcome to Harvard Business Publishing’s rooftop garden project.  This is the second year of the project and we have a scrappy team of enthusiastic gardeners who are eager to share our experience with you.  So, come on—let me show you around and introduce the team.

 We are located in the old arsenal near Boston which has been converted to office buildings and restaurants.  

 Ours is a ballasted roof that has some kind of membrane underneath which prevents us from walking directly on the roof (we’d puncture it and that wouldn’t be good).  Therefore, the tiles you see in the picture are where we must walk.  The containers can be on the stones but we need to stay on the tiles.  We are positioning the containers to run along the sides of the walking tiles. 

 The Team:  From front to back, Matt, Tara, Suzi, Martha, Matt and Zach.  Not shown: Roisin and Doug.

We are on a very small budget, so many of us have donated containers for our garden and are bringing in our own tools.  We do have access to some cedar planters that were bought last year as well as some tools and watering cans.  We don’t have a hose, at least not yet but there is talk of getting one up to the roof.  I’m not sure where it will get the water from.  I didn’t see a spigot up there.

 We started a lot of different seeds indoors about a month ago.  We may be a bit over-enthusiastic about what we are going to grow.  We had a lot of fun in the store looking at various seeds and imagining our garden and we may have undertaken a lot more than we realize but hey!  We’ll figure this out and learn from our mistakes.  At least they should be fun mistakes! 

 We’ve been germinating and growing the seeds in our cubicles.  They make for great conversation and distraction pieces.  If someone is trying to get information, data or work out of me, they see the plants and it always side-tracks them.  (Now you know my secret to less work and more play.)  I’ve got cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, eggplant and ornamental gourds all growing in containers in my cubicle.  Suzi is germinating several varieties of herbs including basil, cilantro, dill, parsley, sage and tarragon.  Matt has started peas, edemame and several types of tomatoes.  Tara started lettuce at home outside.  Unfortunately, the birds got the first plantings so she replanted and covered with netting. 

 We planted outside for the first time last week.  We have lettuce started along with peas and radishes.  We started the peas inside which I don’t think was necessary but considering it took us so long to get going on the roof and we were just anxious to plant something and watch it grow, we started them anyway.  After 5 days, the radishes look pretty good and the lettuce is growing nicely.  The peas and edamame need a trellis which we hope to get up this week.  Starting next Monday, we will start to harden off the rest of the plants for planting the week after Memorial Day. 

 So, that’s who we are and what we are growing.  We’ll check in periodically to let you know how things are growing and the challenges we are facing.  Feel free to drop by anytime!  We like showing off our project.

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Ground rules for Rooftop container gardens

Feel your sap rising but don’t have a place to get down in the dirt? Are you quietly pining for a swatch of land to grow a few sweet tomatoes or crunchy-crisp lettuce?

Coworkers at Harvard Business Publishing in Boston are and, eager for the chaos only Mother Nature can bring, bravely launched into the second year of their rooftop garden. Any time we have the opportunity to turn white collars green, we’ll take it – so let’s celebrate the efforts of Martha, Matt, Susie, Matt, Doug, Zach, Tara, and Roisin with a bit of advice on container gardening.

Ok, you’re on a roof; it’s accessorized with air conditioning units, pipe stacks and other roof things. So, a few ground rules:

1) Keep your plants away from intake fans. Though the screens might have you thinking “hey, what a great trellis!” do not give in to temptation. These fans provide persistent suction, pulling air into offices below; chopped plant parts sailing through the building are not a pretty sight, and no, it is not a way to freshen the air.

2) See the gutters? They’re for channeling water away from the building, not for bordering your garden with pretty posies (you’re in the Northeast, you get rain!  We don’t in Colorado, at least not much. Do not do as we do and reinforce the supports, fill them with potting soil and plant low growing flowers (see photo). We’re crazy; you’re not).

3) Get to know your facilities people; invite them to visit your garden. Chances are there will be muddy shoe prints, a few bits of plants dragged indoors, and the odd leak or two. You need these fine people on your side.

4) Get ready for birds. Eventually they will believe that the garden is there for them, not for you. Plan on protection such as netting, flashing mylar strips, or one of the executives that really doesn’t have anything better to do. Cover your seating area when you leave to go back to the office.

5)  Bugs fly. They’ll find your crop tasty too. Check with your group to get a consensus on pest management. Don’t automatically assume you can spray whatever you want to around intake fans (see item number 1, and add a floating cloud of…well, you get my drift).

OK, now for a bit of advice. When choosing pots for your plants, make certain you have drainage holes. To avoid problems from lead leaching into your soil, go with pots that don’t have a glaze on the inside. Clay, plastic, metal, wood – the choice is yours, but be aware that you’ll need to pay closer attention to watering plants that are in porous pots which wick moisture away faster than plastic, metal or glass.  Anything can be a container. 

Don’t be boring – mix up the size and colors of your containers. Group plants together in nice communities, varying the number of plants in the groups and occasionally placing a few singly around the area.

Keep in mind that vegetables need plenty of root space to be productive.  There’s a great list of pot sizes and soil volume per plant type in The Ohio State University factsheet on container vegetable gardening. Clean potting soil is best; don’t reuse soil left over from last year.

Once you’ve planted your garden, remember that those plants are now dependent upon you to provide for their nutritional needs. In other words: fertilize them. Container plants need extra care, since they can’t access naturally occurring nutrients. Balanced fertilizers are best; if you’d like to add a timed release into your soil mix, blend it in well before planting. Follow the ratios for mixing on the label.

What varieties should you plant? Depending on the size of your containers, look for compact plants to do better in containers. Several All America Selections are wonderful for this: Carmen pepper (most peppers work well in containers), purple Hansel and white Gretel eggplants, which provide sweet, tender fingers of fruit; or Honey Bear acorn squash.

Bush beans do well, but you’ll get more production from a deeper pot and pole beans running up a trellis, or try letting melons ramble across the roof. I love Charantais, the small, succulent cantaloupe from France. But you need a bit of experience to tell when it’s ripe, otherwise it has the bad habit of exploding – a drawback if you’re sitting near one in your business clothes.

Plenty of tomatoes do well in containers. Try Early Girl or Celebrity for slicers, Sweet 100 or Tomatoberry for cherries. The list for tomatoes in containers is a long one; it’s best to check out the habit of the plant before you buy it. Go with compact plants and provide a cage for them.

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