Since I’ve started my garden, many people have asked, why are you doing this?There are farmer’s markets, CSAs, independent and chain grocers at your disposal, why did you choose to grow your own vegetables, let alone, research on how to grow them on your rooftop?
I’ve thought about this quite a bit.At first, my response, was, “what’s it matter to you what I do or why I do it?”Then it evolved to: “why wouldn’t I do it, doesn’t it just makes sense?”
The more I think about it the more I feel that there was this idea of relearning about food - where it comes from, how it grows, and how to grow it.Then I started thinking about how can I, a Chicagoan with zero farmable land, grow my own food?Now, I find myself thinking about how to extend the seasons here in Chicago, the best times to rotate plants, where to procure my materials, and how to spread the word.
It’s a “back to basics” thing for me.Why do I do it?Simply, because I can.You can too and it’s not only good for you, it can potentially be good for your community, your environment and other communities and environments around the world. That’s the bigger picture.
Seem lofty?Sure it does but if you think about it, it’s pretty simple.It’s the old, “give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish…” If you learn to grow food for you and your family, and then share the knowledge with other families in your community or around the world, you can change the lives of other people.One organization that is linking this knowledge with technology is The Growing Connection.They aim to engage “people – a network of committed individuals- in an elegant solution to one of man’s fundamental challenges.”
“The Growing Connection (TGC) is a grassroots project developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) supported by a progressive coalition of private and public sector partners.”They see the opportunity to use the recent agricultural technology, also known as SIPs (or Earthboxes, in this case) as the medium to grow vegetables in poor economic or climate conditions.Then, they use the knowledge gained to bridge communities and countries together via the internet.It’s people sharing their experience with other people for a greater good. You can view a video here.
One thing that struck me is how they gather people from the academic setting, neighborhood children, and technology professionals together for this cause.Teaching children and communicating in our information age, has all come together.The bigger picture is starting to become clear.
Made of grilled vegetables, goat cheese, and vinaigrette, it's an elegant way to use what you've grown. And tastes even better than it looks.
If you've never made a terrine, this is a good place for a home cook with, say, intermediate kitchen skills to start. It uses late summer vegetables, ones that your SIPs are starting to deliver. It's also a very flexible recipe. The basic technique can be used with several different combinations of vegetables.
Before I get to the terrine, I'd like to point out that there are countless recipes, and sites devoted to them, that you could use to prepare your vegetables. With good ingredients, simple is better; a plate of sliced heirloom tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, sherry vinegar, basil, salt and pepper. Add a few slices of No-KneadBread , some good cheese and a bottle of wine and it's a meal.
Olive oil to brush on the above prior to grilling, (or broiling) Salt and pepper
2 or 3 sweet peppers, roasted, peeled, seeded, and cut into strips 4 or 5 oven dried tomatoes, (click here for more on this technique), or sun-dried tomatoes
8 oz. goat cheese, softened to room temp.
1/2 c. of your favorite vinaigrette 1 1/2 Tablespoons water 1 teaspoon powdered gelatin
A narrow terrine pan, 10"x3"x3". If you have a different size you'll need to adjust the quantity of your ingredients. Also, any mold wider than three inches might cause the finished product to sag in the middle.
Mandoline, optional but makes things a lot easier Plastic wrap Pastry brush Piece of cardboard cut to fit the top of the terrine pan 2 one pound cans, used to weigh down the terrine while it sets overnight
It takes about an hour of prep time, plus it needs to chill overnight
Yield: 8 to 10 appetizer portions
Slice the first three vegetables as uniformly as you can, a mandoline works best. Brush with oil, season with salt and pepper. Grill over medium heat until tender, turning just once so you get nice grill marks. Transfer to a plate to cool.
Before you start putting the terrine together, taste each of the components. If you don't like anything, change it now. It won't magically improve after being refrigerated overnight in a mold.
Put the water in a saucepan and sprinkle the gelatin over it. Once the gelatin is absorbed (blooms), put the pan over low heat until it's dissolved. Add it to 1/4 cup of the vinaigrette and keep it warm so it doesn't start to set up while you assemble the terrine. Putting the cup of vinaigrette into a slightly larger bowl of warm water does the trick.
Line the terrine with plastic wrap. You want enough overhang, (about 3 inches, on the long sides) so you can fold it over on the top of the finished terrine. Wetting the inside of the mold before you put in the plastic will make the plastic stick in the corners. Put a layer of eggplant slices in the mold first. Put them in crosswise, with the end of each piece starting at the centerline of the bottom of the mold and running up, and over, the side by an inch or two.
Keep in mind that the first layer you put down is going to be the "top" of the finished terrine, so put the pieces down with very little overlap. And that you're going to be serving a cross section of whatever you put inside the mold.
Lightly brush the eggplant with vinaigrette. You might have enough eggplant to put down two layers, overlap the joints where possible. After each layer brush with vinaigrette, it's the glue that holds the whole thing together. Repeat with the zucchini and yellow squash, remembering to put vinaigrette between each. Lay the strips of pepper in the mold and brush with vinaigrette. Gently press the goat cheese into the mold, creating an even layer and brush it with vinaigrette. Lay the tomatoes on top of the cheese, again brushing with vinaigrette. Fold the eggplant and squash flaps on top of the tomatoes, brush the top with the remaining vinaigrette. Pull the plastic up over the top and seal the terrine. Push down on the finished terrine using a little bit of pressure. You want to eliminate any voids and create a fairly solid block of vegetables. Put the cardboard cutout on top of the plastic you just sealed. Refrigerate overnight with the two weights on top.
Take it out of the fridge about a half hour before serving. Flip it over on to a cutting board, remove the plastic, turn it right side up (what was the bottom of the mold is the finished top of the terrine) and cut it into 1/2" slices. You'll get a clean slice if you use a thin bladed knife and pull it toward you with a long stroke rather than sawing back and forth. Clean off the knife in a tall glass of hot water as needed. Serve each piece with a little of the reserved vinaigrette on the side.
Try this recipe using different vegetables: carrots, mushrooms, leeks, onions, or fennel. Or boil, and shock in an ice water bath, some chard or kale to use as the outer layer instead of eggplant. You can play around with whatever combinations taste and look good. I wonder if I could make it a truly vegetarian dish by substituting agar for the gelatin? I bet someone at Ideas in Food or Playing with Fire and Water could tell me.
Rulhman's Charcuterie is discussed here on eGullet. Now that you're familiar with the basic technique, put it to use by making other terrines and patés.
Up on the roof, tucked into a SIP plants have everything they need: sun, organic fertilizer, and water
Eggplant Black Beauty Victory Seeds Not everything goes as expected. We lost three SIPs with black beauty eggplants due to nefarious factors still unidentified. But one recycled bucket planter keeps on producing.
Crop failures: 3 eggplant + one Abe Lincoln tomato It happens.Gardening teaches patience. Don't give up.
Back in May, neighbor Bruce and I went up to Gethesemane Garden Center in Chicago to get some plant starts. We ended up at the seed racks. I'm a sucker for watercolor depictions, and picked up these two.
"Why not try melons?" Bruce asked. Why not indeed.
We direct-seeded the Renee's Garden Icebox Watermelon (rainbow sherbet colors, enough to make any gardener weak in the knees) and Botanical Interests Ha Ogen ("if you have room...for only one melon, Ha Ogen should be your first choice") into some of the yellow buckets in the new run of ten on the roof. My idea was that they'd crawl up and hang off the short trellis Art had built, but soon it was clear the Renee's watermelon plants wanted more attachments, more places to twine onto.
So Art installed a piece of the hard grid we got at an auction way back.
And the melons liked it. Here's a fetal melon with its flowered hat intact. Is there a more charming fruit to grow?
Back to the structure. You can see from photos that these melon babies are just getting started.
It was time for dramatic measures. So Art installed a PVC arch, after which he decided we needed a second arch so they could be tied together for structural integrity. Here's Art screwing in the flagpole holder for the second arch.
And the final framework for what will become The Hanging Melons of Division Street
As of August 1, the melons are thriving. These are the Renee's watermelons, which like the hard grid. The Ha Ogen seem better at climbing the arch. We'll keep you updated.
We're doing this as individuals, with no institutional support, on our rooftops in Chicago. This video shows what's being done in the City of Montreal on a much larger scale.
They've opened up a whole new space for community gardening by making SIPs available to large numbers of people. By following their model, a Program isn't limited to existing, and oversubscribed, official Community Gardens, but can include balconies, decks, plazas and other common areas.
They were led by two teachers who thought our project would fit in nicely with the school's urban agriculture initiative. Michelle Torrise, one of those teachers, described the purpose of the visit this way:
We are hoping to raise awareness of the work being done at the high school and develop relationships with fellow urban farmers. There are several initiatives going on including the development of a social ecology/urban agriculture curriculum, the building of a rooftop greenhouse, and the creation of a community garden in Humboldt Park. Other projects include an after school programs, a student led recycling programs, community beautification projects, and a school wide initiative to fight obesity.
Here is a link to some pictures on Flickr from last year's summer program.
There were about 10 students and they asked some great questions. If I had to describe them with only one word, it would be curious.
And occasionally playful.
I wanted to tie in what we're doing with some of the program's goals. After a moment or two I forgot all about that and just starting talking. So my presentation wasn't all that polished, but I'd like to believe that was part of what made it bearable.
I gave a little demonstration of how my automatic watering system for the SIPs works. From a post on the AWS:
These loops aren't pressurized. Instead water moves from the 5 gallon reservoir to the individual planters via the loops by atmospheric pressure. I'm sure there's a scientific principle behind this, probably discovered by Archimedes, but I don't know what it is. So I'm going to call it the "water-level principle". The expression "water seeks it's own level" is another way of putting it.
This year I've been growing what I thought were Giant Grey Striped sunflowers. Last year I planted the seeds, from Victory Seed Co., and had a great yield. So I saved a head and dried it, thinking I'd use it to plant sunflowers everywhere this year. So far so good. I planted two SIPs on my roof with the saved seeds, plus there are about 10 volunteers cropping up on the side of my garage. You can eat the flowers, just before the heads open up is supposed to be the best time to harvest them.
That's all changed. It seems that last years sunflowers were cross-pollinated by the unidentified rudbeckia that are growing on the side of the garage. (Or more likely from bees who had just come from a different type of sunflower. Thanks for the tip, Mr. BrownThumb.) This year the sunflowers have their usual thick, eight foot tall stalks, sturdy enough to support their giant (typically 12" diameter) sunflower heads. But because of the cross pollination they have 3 or 4 smaller flower heads coming out the sides of that stalk. Weird looking, possibly not edible, but worth talking about as part of an amateur Science Lesson.
I might have emphasized the wrong thing about the sunflowers. I'm guilty of telling you (and them) why I thought they were interesting. Some of the students liked them for a more obvious reason.
It's nice to eat the seeds directly from the plant.
While I was talking to one half of the group, Heidi was giving a demonstration on how to make these planters to the other half. She showed them the kind that are on my roof, as seen in these pictures, and those that you make using 2 buckets. Somehow she found time to take all these pictures.
This student had more to say about the look of the building than what we planted.
I feel like they got something out of it, but that could just be the fog of wishful thinking settling in. We hope to keep working (?) with PACHS . And for anyone else out there who may be interested - Send them an email! It's a great program.
There are some ideas floating around in my head involving the parallels between Basque and Puerto Rican Nationalism, Andoni Aduriz's Mugaritz, and chicory. I can't pull them together though.
This is a simple, easy-to-do project that will let you grow your own food wherever there’s enough sunlight--on your roof, balcony, back steps, driveway, or vacant lot next door. It doesn't take any special skill and the materials are all readily available. A diagram showing what's going on inside a SIP is here. The fundamentals are the same whether you use buckets, tubs, or Earthboxes.
Once you make one, it will produce beautiful food for years to come. You'll decide that one (or four, or six) isn't enough and you'll want to build lots more. This year we expanded with the ten extras at left.
Many of the photos here are from this second SIP run on the roof, and the pretty yellow pickle buckets are courtesy of Bruce's neighbor who drives for Chicago’s own Vienna Beef (Thanks, Rey! We owe you some tomatoes).
While these instructions are full of details, what you want (a healthy, productive plant) doesn't depend on following them exactly. It doesn't need to be perfect. The holes you cut can be raggedy and you'll still get pounds of tomatoes from one plant. Just try it. And if you get better results by doing it differently, we'd love to hear about it.
One 1" diameter watering tube, about 3" longer than the height of one of the buckets, made of safe(r) plastic, copper, or bamboo
One 16-oz or 24-oz safe plastic drinking cup One 13-gallon plastic trash bag One cubic foot potting mix (not soil) Organic fertilizer (1.5 to 2 cups per bucket) For tomatoes only, Hydrated lime (one cup per bucket mixed into top 6 inches of soil)
Electric or cordless drill 1/4 3/8 inch drill bit Box cutter/utility knife Snips or heavy duty scissors
If you've got hole saws it's far easier to cut the two big holes. If you don't have them, you'll just have to do a bit more work.
View this quick video for a sense of how the whole thing comes together.
While it's obviously sped up, it helps to see one done before you try it yourself. Plus, we like the drums.
So now you're ready to make one.
This is the fun part. You get to drill lots of holes in one of the buckets (set one bucket aside and don't drill it):
a big hole that will receive the soil wicking cup
a medium-size hole for the feeding tube
about 30 quarter-inch drainage holes
Because every combination of buckets and cups is slightly different, take a few simple measurements to figure out how big a hole to drill for the wicking chamber. Here's how to do that:
Set the nestled buckets in front of a light source and note how tall your water reservoir is going to be. You need to measure the height of that reservoir. Transfer that measurement to the side of your plastic drinking cup, starting from the bottom. You should now have the height of the reservoir transfered to the side of your cup. Measure the diameter of the cup at that height and add 1/8". That's how big a hole you need to cut out of the bottom of your bucket.
Turn the bucket over and mark the center. Drill a hole for the wicking cup in the center, as I'm doing here at right. If you don't have a hole saw, draw the proper diameter hole on the bucket and drill a series of quarter-inch starter holes around the perimeter of the hole you want to cut out. You should be able to get your snips or scissors in the starter holes and then cut out the larger hole for the plastic drinking cup.
Measure the diameter of your watering tube. Add 1/8" and draw a circle of that diameter about 1" in from the outside edge of the bottom of the bucket. Cut out that hole using a hole saw or with your 1/4" bit and utility knife.
It doesn't matter if the edges are ragged or if there's a gap of a 1/4" or so around either the feed tube or the plastic cup/wicking chamber. You just want to keep the potting mix from falling into, and clogging up, your water reservoir.
Now drill 30 or so 1/4" holes, evenly spaced, around the bottom of the bucket. These are the holes that allow air to get to the bottom of the roots and also for roots to grow down into the reservoir.
You'll want to cut off one end of the feeding tube at a 45 degree angle so when it's sitting in the bucket it won't get clogged up.
Using your utility knife, make 4 vertical slits (evenly spaced, with one in every quadrant) in the sides of the plastic cup. Don't cut through the bottom or the lip of the cup, just the sides. After you fill the cup with wet potting mix (creating a "wick"), these cuts will let water travel from the reservoir up into the potting mix in the upper bucket.
Put the bucket that's full of holes inside the other untouched bucket. As you did earlier, hold the bucket set up to the light and visualize the water reservoir at bottom. This time you want to drill two 1/4" overflow holes, on opposite sides of the previously untouched outside bucket. You want the height of these holes to be about a quarter inch below the bottom of the inside bucket. This means the bottom of the soil bucket will always stay relatively dry, as excess water will run out the overflow holes instead of forcing the roots to stay permanently drenched.
And now you’re ready to plant.
With one bucket sitting inside the other, drop the angled end of the feed tube into the hole you drilled for it. Pack the plastic cup with wet potting mix and set it inside the large hole in the center. It doesn't matter if it sticks up into the potting mix chamber--it's going to get covered up with potting mix anyway.
Fill the soil chamber with lightly moistened potting mix, pressing down every so often so it’s fairly compacted before adding more mix on top. You may want to mix a half cup of organic fertilizer into the potting mix. If you’re growing tomatoes, mix a cup of hydrated lime into the top 6 inches of potting mix. Be sure you have completely filled the bucket with potting mix and pressed it down around the edges at the top. There should be no depression in the soil--rather, it should mound up just a bit at the top.
Sometimes it’s easier to plant larger seedlings by filling the bucket three quarters full of potting mix, planting the seedling, and topping off the bucket with potting mix. Then add the fertilizer ring (see below) and place the plastic over the bucket, gently weaving the plant top and the watering tube through two slits you made in the plastic.
Put one cup of fertilizer around the outside edge of the bucket, leaving as large a space of plain soil in the middle as possible. Put the plastic bag (or clear plastic, as shown here) over the top to keep the fertilizer dry, moisture from evaporating, and UV rays from eating the bucket. Secure with a ziptie or string, cut your hole or holes and you’re reading to plant a small seedling or seeds.
The bucket on the right is ready to be planted with Fin de Bagnol beans, from Seed Savers.
After you plant the seeds (or seedlings), you'll want to water it in from the top. This is the first and only time you'll top water. Pour some water on it to help get it started and ease the shock of transplant). From then on you'll water your bucket by using the fill tube.
You'll be able to see the water level in the reservoir if you look closely. When it gets low, fill it up until water comes out of the overflow holes. Don't worry, you can't overwater it. You can underwater it though, so every few days take a look at the reservoir. When your plants grow larger, you may have to water every day.
Here are a couple more links with tips on planting and growing to get you off to a good start.
If you've got a bunch to do, grab a friend. It's just a bucket!
Since I’ve started my garden, many people have asked, why are you doing this? There are farmer’s markets, CSAs, independent and chain grocers at your disposal, why did you choose to grow your own vegetables, let alone, research on how to grow them on your rooftop?
