Oct 2012: 80-Degrees Roof Clean-Up (?) + Flowering Tomatoes

It poured yesterday, but 80 degrees is predicted for Wednesday (with temps in the 70s bookending it), making this a good Chicago week for roof clean-up, which entails cutting back plants and getting damp potting mix out of the SIPs to dry.

I'm letting those tomatoes up there ripen on the vine, hoping a kiss of warmth this week will sweeten them further.

Amongst the detritus Oct 22:

 the biological imperative

Cleaning the growing roof involves lowering down tubs filled with spent plant material to the compost bin on the ground. It's the very antithesis of in-ground organic growing, where end-of-season plants can simply be knocked down and left alone or dug under.

On the roof, we cut off and pick up every last bit to keep the gutters clear and prevent a layer of compost from developing on the roof's reflective surface. That old adage is true: compose happens.

Spring Cleaning Your Sub Irrigated Planters (SIPs)

In the back of my mind after four summers of growing vegetables in our sub irrigated planters (we began in 2007), I've wondered about the integrity of the potting mix. Could pathogens survive winter and affect the plants in subsequent years?

Aug 2008

Earthbox says you can re-use potting mix for five growing seasons. We remove the mix from all our SIPs each fall and dry it out in the sun. The SIPs themselves get a swipe with a stiff brush...

...but stubborn attachments remain.

I was inspired after reading this post at Love Apple Farm (on growing potatoes in containers) to disinfect all our SIPs. I used their approach: a 10-to-1 water to bleach solution. If you click through, you'll see a happy worker twirling a potato bucket in its dilute bleach bath. 

If life were so easy.

I spent parts of the last three days on the roof, scrubbing away every last scrap of anything that was attached to our grow buckets. Art set me up with a nice hot-water hose run from the laundry room (because our last frost date is May 15, we don't have the full watering set-up on the roof going yet) and a mortar mixing tub. 

 

On the first day, I used rubber gloves and all kinds of bleach water got in and and made my hands raw.  On the second day, I used packing tape to seal the gloves where they met the skin on my arms (nice look, Pippi). 

Better, but today Art came home with these babies. Exceptional gloves.

I scrubbed everything, including the fill tubes, and let the sun do the drying.

In the middle of all this, Bruce emailed to say: as long as you're bleach-washing...we need 200 clean grower cups to transplant the eggplant, tomato, and peppers into. I was all over it. Disinfecting and reusing these cups year after year is a way to keep plastic out of the waste stream.

There they are. I'm glad it's done.

I'm still not sure about pathogens in potting mix. Love Apple Farm uses fresh mix every year to grow its container potatoes. That would be a deal-breaker for us. Let's hope all this bleach scrubbing leads to a glorious season of clean growing.