mobile garden on Track for Chicago

Good news in our inbox this morning: CTA has given the mobile garden project a green light to move forward.

What is mobile garden?

A garden on a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) flatcar
that will travel with the train as part of regular service.

We can scarcely think of anything cooler.

mobile garden creator+artist Joe Baldwin visited the roof this summer and told Green Roof Growers about his concept, which germinated in a sustainability and design graduate seminar class at University of Illinois Chicago.

We urged him to consider sub-irrigating the train car and hope he'll call on us to help. We'd also love to see him plant some hardy vegetables, which we can start from seed for him if he wants.

Today we congratulate him on his tenacity in keeping the project alive. Way to go, Joe!

(Thanks to Inside Urban Green for alerting us to mobile garden. Sometimes it takes a village...)

Rat-Proof Composting + Compost Tea for SIPs

Today I'm interviewing my partner Art on his rat-proof composter, which he also designed to produce compost tea to feed the SIPs.

Here are 333,000 ideas on how to keep rats out of your compost. And here is Art's:
What motivated you to build the rat-proof composter?
Apple cores and various vegetable remains sitting on the exhaust manifold under the sheltered hood of my truck. Rats would take from our open compost heap and go picnic in peace.

After we decided to ditch our open heap 5 years ago (H2: we had an open heap for 15 years), I purchased a commercially produced, heavy-duty plastic compost bin to keep the rats out.

Here's what happened to it.

In other words, plastic doesn't deter rodents.

Do you have more rats now than you did 20 years ago?
More rat activity anyway. Over the last few years massive rehab and tear-downs were occurring in our neighborhood. This is extremely disruptive to rat patterns, sending rodents out of their hidey holes into a newly gentrified world. Our street has also become a sort of club+restaurant row, with 6 new restos in the past 5 years.

What got you thinking about this raised composter?
I had a couple of steel plaster tubs I'd purchased at a construction auction a while back and decided to put them to alternate use. I positioned the composter off the ground both to discourage the rats a little (though they're capable climbers) and because I wanted it to produce compost tea.

Most people don't add compost to the growing medium for SIPs (at least we don't--they seem to require a non-organic mix to maintain their wicking capability), but you can add liquid compost tea to the water reservoir for the plant roots to take up.

So how did you approach the project?
I put the two plaster tubs together in a clamshell arrangement using a piano hinge and set the composter in a stand 3 feet off the ground, with one end about 4 inches lower than the other to facilitate gravity flow of rainwater passing through the compost. I coated the interior of the bottom tub with linseed oil to prevent rust.

Then I built a frame (with 4x4 leg posts) to sit it in and drilled a series of quarter-inch holes along the low underside of the bottom tub, where the liquid would gather and drip through.

Lined up with the holes on the bottom tub, I attached a rain gutter that's pitched toward a compost tea reservoir sitting on the ground. It's made from a kitty litter container I found on the street.

How does the compost get oxygen?
I put a handle on the top plaster tub and also cut an access door into the end where we add kitchen scraps (H2: no meat, bones, or fat--maybe we have vegan rats). The hole is a little larger than the old tupperware bin we keep near the sink to collect compost bits.


We open the composter to turn the heap and also when it rains, so the moisture can get to the contents. When it's not raining, we leave it open to dry and oxygenate the heap. We close the lid at night, when rats feed.

How hot does it get in there?
Last summer temps got as high as 120F. I painted the exterior of the tubs black to enhance the heating and drilled a hole in the lid through which we slide a thermometer.

What about that handsome wood surround you made?
Mainly aesthetics and to create a semi-enclosed area underneath for storing buckets of unfiltered compost tea. The amount we get depends on how much rain we have.

Tell us how you manage the compost tea
It's a gravity feed system that drains into the kitty litter container, to which I attached a valve and a clear piece of tubing so I can tell when it's time to empty the container into the back-up buckets.
To get tea, we position the container on a higher spot and drain it into a 5-gal bucket, using a sieve to remove any large bits.
Then the filtered tea goes back into the container and we use a funnel to send it into recycled two-liter bottles, which we transport in buckets (we use a lot of buckets around here) to the roof.

Last season H2 gave compost tea our large 6-gal in 7-gal SIPs, which grow tomatoes and eggplant, delivering one two-liter bottle per SIP via the fill tube. Since it was a wet summer, we had enough tea to provide three doses, one each in June, July, and August.

H2 doesn't give straight tea--she sets down a two-liter bottle next to each SIP and adds it over several days to the water already in the reservoir. Here's an eggplant diggin' the tea.

What do you do with the compost?
H2 shovels it out onto our small in-ground bed that gets sun enough to grow things. It's a richly endowed garden bed, with about 5 inches of compost applied each fall. Here's a shot from last spring.
So did you stop the picnicking rats?
Yes! There was no evidence of rat buffets under the hood of my truck last summer. I'm not naive enough to think I can ever completely outsmart Chicago's Norway rats. Even though the link says they can gnaw through cinderblock, we'll see about steel.

H2 final note: Art has set up a trapline around the courtyard. Don't let him fool you--he will never stop trying.

Results in Roof Growing 2009: Emptying Your Sub-Irrigated Planter

In this link, we show you how to make a two-bucket SIP, or sub-irrigated planter. But what happens when the growing season ends?

You pull the top bucket out and get to view plant behavior underground. In this photo, the lefthand bucket grew greens with shallow roots. On the right, a tomato.

Note the tomato roots have plunged all the way down
to the wicking cup and out its slits into the water reservoir.

This year we tried something new with buckets. While a majority of our SIPs are made from 5-gal in 5-gal recycled food-grade buckets, last spring Art ordered a bunch of 6-gal and 7-gal food-grade buckets to make sets with larger reservoirs.

Click the photo to see the height of the overflow hole
in these 5-gal SIP sets.

Now check the height of the overflow hole
in this 6-gal in 7-gal set.

We haven't measured exactly how much more water the larger bucket set holds, but it's considerable. You don't need a larger bucket set. It just cuts down on the frequency of watering at the height of summer, especially for the heavy drinkers, tomatoes and eggplant among them.

We also wondered if these same veggies might benefit from the extra space for growing medium--obviously more potting mix fits in a 6-gal bucket than in a 5-gal bucket. I'm not sure we saw any difference, but summer weather was very odd this year so it's tough to compare.

I thought you'd be curious to see the root system in the larger buckets. To make the wicking cups for the larger SIPs sets, we used recycled two-liter pop bottles with the top cut off and slits downs the side.

Look at the density of eggplant roots
in the two-liter wicking cup.

These ropey eggplant roots
know where to head for water.

A long view.

The Official Earthbox™ Planting Guide says you can re-use potting mix year after year without emptying the boxes, but I don't do that with my two adopted earthboxes. I believe any type of SIP needs emptying, airing, and drying out to limit the chance for disease.

With bucket SIPs, because the plants so completely occupy the growing space, you need to extract the roots at season's end and toss them away to compost somewhere. Your goal is to pull out as much of the organic matter as possible.

Pulled root mass with potting mix
shaken off for re-use.

We combine used potting mix with fresh mix in a large bin and use it again to plant the following spring. Our blend contains mostly peat and perlite with a little coir. Mea culpa: we're going to try to use less peat next season and boost the coir--coconut fiber that's vastly more renewable than peat.

Goodbye I Say Hello: 2010

Too cold, too wet, too hot. Goldilocks would have been right at home on our roof gardens in 2009.

As the year turns, we spend more time in the kitchen. Yesterday we cooked some pheasant breasts hunted by a friend, with onions, olives, capers, and preserved lemon.

Bruce made this eggnog. Art found the Myer's Rum.

Needless to say, slurp.

Here's to a bountiful 2010. May all your SIPs bear mightily.

Growing Organic Greens Indoors: Winter Solstice Update

It's not as though we wouldn't love a hoophouse on a nice sunny lot, filled with cool-weather greens for the tossing.

Challenge is, we live in the city and don't have the space. So we re-use the same SIPs we grow in during the summer, planting them in autumn before bringing inside to sit in a cool-to-cold, south-facing window.

These greens, along with those growing in six other SIPs upstairs,
provide a small salad every other day for two.

Remember when we planted this garbage-picked Olive Garden take-out bowl?

It's bearing greens again.

Chicago's dark, northern hemisphere winter days don't offer a huge amount of sun.

This year these collards and kale will get a boost
from two fluorescent shop lights Bruce is loaning us.

Even on the darkest day of the year, indoor-grown Chicago greens can be harvested and enjoyed with summer rooftop tomatoes. I confess to my twisted plot: let the last of our tomatoes ripen on the counter and eat them as close to year's end as possible.

These tomatoes still taste like summer.

Are you planning to try SIPs next summer? We've got lots of links in the right-hand column and the web is rife with resources. If you have questions, just ask.

It's the winter solstice, and that means the light is returning.

Eating a Pig's Head: Testa

There are plenty of reasons not to cook a pig's head; I don't eat much meat anymore, and with so many other disembodied parts of the animal available, it's easy to avoid.

Most of us don't want to be reminded that meat comes from animals. Grocery chains don't display animal heads in their meat cases, judging that sales would drop after they made explicit the connection between pork chop and pig snout. How to square this with the fact that people have been eating heads as long as we've been eating meat?

Before I walk you through this, a Public Service ad: If you're eating the pork chop I think you should eat the head. Though I've eaten pork my whole life, I've only cooked one head; I'm glad I did. So now, with all the zeal of the recently converted, I hope that after reading this post you'll do the same.

[I'd like to note that there are no graphic slaughter pictures in this post. There is a picture of a cooked pigs head further down the page. At the very end there is an embedded slide show that contains 4 pictures of the head as it came to me from the slaughterhouse.]

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After watching a pig butchering demo given by Rob at Mado Restaurant in Chicago, I decided to make testa/headcheese. Mado's supplier, Slagel Family Farms, sells ethically raised and slaughtered pork. Better still they'll deliver it "free" to Mado, only a quarter mile from my house. You can find like-minded farmers near you by searching EatWild.

I've never cooked a pig's head before. Once I decided to butcher and use every part of the pig, figuring out how to use the head was the next big step.

Cookbooks and websites cover it in some detail, though none of them prepared me for the shock of opening the cardboard box I picked up at Mado. There's nothing I can say, or show you, that could get the rawness across. It's one of those things you'll have to experience yourself.

Here are a couple of ideas on how to prepare the head:

A careful deboning of the head prior to cooking gives you a single sheet of meat that you can roll up in cheesecloth and braise. Once it's finished cooking, re-wrap it in fresh cheesecloth and hang in the fridge overnight to firm up.

From there you have a couple of options:

One is to slice very thin cross sections and arrange them on a plate to serve as an appetizer, as you would prosciutto or other cured meat.

Another is to cut the roll in 1" slices, moisten with dijon mustard, coat in bread crumbs and then sauté in oil until crispy.

Chris Consentino has six short youtube videos showing what else you can do with a pig's head. Knowing that it's possible to eat poached and then sautéd brains with scrambled eggs is enough for me right now. I don't need to try it. Maybe down the road.

Mike Gebert made a terrific video featuring Mado's testa. You can pick up some useful hints from it; even if you have no intention of making testa its worth watching.

Sky Full of Bacon 04: A Head's Tale from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

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With all this in mind, I came up with a plan. I combined the recipes of Paul Bertolli, Michael Ruhlman and Rob Levitt of Mado. (Someone thinking along the same lines posted his recipe here.) After simmering the head with a couple of trotters, aromatics, herbs and spices for 3 hours, the meat falls off the bone and the poaching liquid has absorbed not only the gelatin from the pig parts, but all of the flavor as well.

You shred the meat and dice the cooked tongue, yielding about 2 pounds of meat. These morsels are drizzled with reduced stock and then chilled overnight in terrine pans or improvised molds.

Below are the two slightly different types of testa I made, ready to be served. In order to form a compact roll, I had to squeeze the air out, that in turn forced out almost all the stock out as well. The stock was poured on top of the meat in the smaller rectangular terrines, filling the voids nicely.

It is very rich, and packed with flavor. The word "headcheese" has all sorts of horrible connotations. What I made has no negatives: No unpalatable textures or tastes. It is delicious.

The pig's head and two trotters cost $20. From that I was able to make testa (serving about 15 appetizer portions), a half pound of cracklings from the skin, 7 quarts of intensely flavored gelatinous stock, and a half pound of rendered pork fat.

Click through this slide show to see the entire process. Photos #3-6 show what the pig's head looks like straight from the slaughterhouse. I hope after the initial discomfort of viewing the pictures wears off you'll go back and look at them again. I know I have.

Homemade Crackers Go With Everything

Crackers make life worth living, if you ask me. I've always wanted to try making my own. Plus, someone needs to offset the sugar tsunami of the holidays, so when I stumbled on this recipe at Culinate for Lora Brody's Multi-Seed Crackerbread, I thought: OK then, yum, the time is right.

It's true what they say at the link about crackers being fun and easy. I kept wishing my pal Heather were here as I rolled them out (using a bottle of wine because I was too lazy to walk upstairs to search for the seldom-used rolling pin).

My favorite line from the recipe:
"the goal is to get the dough as thin as possible
and impregnated with seeds"

The picture above shows the set-up after you mix the flours, cornmeal, water, and 2 tablespoons olive oil. Worth noting: I didn't have rye flour but I never let that stop me from riffing on a recipe. I subbed organic brown rice flour I got from the bins at Whole Foods.

So you mix, knead quickly, and divide the dough into 8 little balls. Stir the seeds and herbs in a bowl. They offer ideas, but I say go with the flavors you love and have on hand. Our custom blend included fennel and sesame seeds + dried basil and rosemary + pink salt and freshly ground pepper.

I liked spooning out a tablespoon of the seed/herb mixture onto the board and then smashing one of the dough balls into it, as recommended. A lightly floured board and wine bottle work well for rolling, with the seeds acting as a sort of ball-bearing mat to keep the dough from sticking too much to anything.

When you can roll no more, slide two of the large cracker ovals onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for 7 to 10 minutes while you roll out another set.

Mmm. I knew I would love this cracker.

If you want yours to look like these, flip them over halfway through baking so the other side browns. I'm drawn to the visual and flavor of brown, and if you've diligently rolled your crackers thin enough, you'll get some nice crispy edges. Note the anemic-looking cracker in the upper right corner of the photo above. That's what happens if you don't flip 'em halfway through.

You won't believe how often you'll reach for one of these. They're a fine accompaniment to soup, fruit, cheese, or testa (more on that from Bruce soon).

Or even a SIP-grown rooftop salad.