July 2010: 100 Degrees+ on the Chicago Roof Farm

I walked to the bank after lunch and the thermometer read 100. It's blazing hot on the roof, a gift to the vegetables, though the bees' water trough was dry.



I'm grateful for the larger SIPs we set up for the tomatoes and eggplants--the water reservoir is at least four times that of the 5-gal SIPs. Here's a beautiful cluster of an unknown variety. Anyone have an idea?

In the wake of our failed spring tomato starts and the subsequent rush to locate heirloom varieties in the neighborhood and get them planted, my labeling system apparently collapsed, or at least several labels flew off their buckets. Hence the mystery of the beautiful pleated bundle above.

Other rooftop puzzles include this beauty, possibly an Italian grape, a gift from Debbie, Kara's mom.


Here are a few I can identify:

Black Prince,
from green to orange to dusky dark.

Brandywine Pink.

Cherokee purple.

Black velvet.

Given the bounty, we're not too worried about exact identification (that's a fib--we really do like to know).

The melons already need twice daily watering in this heat.

And I had to put a cloche on the red giant mustard seeds I started this morning. Otherwise the seeds dry out too quickly in the heat and can't germinate.

The baby bok choy and Debbie's heat-tolerant lettuce we planted just last week are flourishing.

The Armenian cukes are (cross fingers) powdery mildew free and happily climbing Art's trellis. I'd never started cukes in June--always in cooler, wetter May, which may be why they've always been decimated by powdery-mildew.


Bruce has been pickling vegetables. He brought over a sampler to have with our lunch. I hope he blogs about it soon.

Delectable pickled zucchini, onions, and eggplant
(the latter from his garage roof).

He cut up some of our tomatoes.

I made these flatbreads, somehow convinced that baking them on a cast iron griddle on top of the stove would be less hot than in the oven (it wasn't).

Art started building a sandwich on the flatbread with Bruce's pickled onion and avocado.

A cool lunch on a hot day.

Saving Seeds, Replanting SIPs, World Made By Hand

Yesterday in the blast furnace that is Chicago this week I got myself up to the roof early. I wanted to do two things (three including watering) before 10:

• Pull plants that had gone to seed and harvest the seed

• Replant those now-empty SIPs
  

Here's a bad photo of the baby bok choy we planted on St Patrick's Day (3.17).

We enjoyed a lot of green from this one.

Once I'd pulled the plant, clipped the stem, and stuffed its top into a paper bag, I culled the crusty old fertilizer from around the SIP edges and tossed it into my bucket that comes downstairs to go into the composter.

The nice thing about mid-season SIP replanting is that you needn't dump out all the growing medium. Just re-dress the top for a new planting.

I topped up the potting mix
and added two cups of fresh fertilizer.

Then I flipped over the plastic shower cap
and retied it.

In this SIP, I planted all-season Romaine lettuce mix that Debbie (Kara's mom) gave me.

We'll see if it's truly all-season...

I also sprinkled on some of the bok choy seeds I'd just harvested.

See them here,
in their pods?

(click to big it up)

Finally, before heatstroke set in, I bagged up the IDed seed heads for the bok choy and cress. They need to dry out a bit more before the seeds are separated from the chaff. Two done. But it felt like something.

I just finished the James Howard Kunstler post-oil collapse novel World Made By Hand and there's little chance I'll ever again toss away perfectly good seed. I was struck, honestly, by how much we re-use, re-tool, and re-claim in our own day-to-day life. Without having to.

Here's a quick vid to set the scene for the book, an easy summer read that illuminates the very meaning of "local." Can any author truly imagine the fractures of a post-oil world? Unlikely, but Kunstler's fable was compelling enough to trigger changes in my own thinking after I put down the book.

From Orion Magazine...

Farmers have begun growing poppies, not for the drug trade, but to keep the local doctors stocked with powerful painkillers. The local dentist stays in business using a salvaged pulley drill, and patients bring in their old gold jewelry to use as cavity fillers in place of the high-tech composites used by dentists in ol’ 2007. The electricity doesn’t work anymore, but people in town still get water thanks to the gravity-fed reservoir ...

... the soft underbelly of Kunstler’s rage against what he perceives as America’s obliviousness is that he’s actually a true believer in humanity.