A (Very) Early Spring Day in Chicago

On Jan 9 I stepped out and sniffed the 50-degree+ Chicago air. Like an animal waking from its winter slumber, I smelled the warm earth and immediately had the urge to plant something. So I located a few empty SIPs and washed them in hot vinegar water.

Happily, I have a friend on the roof to hoist up my planting boxes and watering can (no running water up there in winter, despite these occasional oddly warm temps).

The sun was shining as I opened the potting mix bin to reveal a couple of bags of peat, ready to be mixed with perlite this spring to create fresh potting mix.

I filled my small SIPs...and added a little balanced fertilizer.

Our growing roof is all tucked in for winter. Some of those yellow SIPs have even been washed and dried, stored now in the unheated greenhouse, which is where I'm heading.

I always have winter-spring seeds on hand, including some I ordered from Franchi late this fall.

Root Simple recently wrote about one of Franchi's gorgeous salad mixes, shown here growing in their LA garden. Eye-popping color.

Hey, I'm planting! This makes me happy.

We watered in the seeds lightly and covered the grouping with a plastic bag. As the greenhouse warms on sunny days, so too will the potting mix. During the single-digit cold coming this week, the mix will freeze, mimicking the in-ground environment.

When spring temperatures and increasing sun crack those seeds, they'll show some green, like these snap peas I planted in SIPs in the greenhouse in just the same way last winter. Here are their sturdy sprouts on March 11, 2012, when they were easily lifted and transplanted to one of our earthboxes. Check out the root development.

Why not plant peas or greens directly into a SIP? The greenhouse-trapped sun and heat prompts  germination weeks earlier than otherwise on our roof. A head start on good eating.

Hot May in Chicago: Spring Greens Report

Heat changes everything about spring growing. When nice steady cool temps are replaced by spikes in the 90s, cool-weather greens wilt and sag unhappily and flavor starts to distort. These Burpee organic lettuces were stunning though.

Check out this chart of highs and lows in Chicago for May 2012. Yikes. We broke a record on Memorial Day with 97 degrees and had many more days far hotter than normal. Unsettling.

Amish Snap Peas from Seed Savers Exchange 

Got these seeds germinating in the unheated greenhouse in February. The nighttime cold/daytime greenhouse heat of trapped sun cracked 'em right open. We've had a beautiful harvest.

Braising greens (Hudson Valley Seed Library)

gone to seed

Aztec Spinach

First year for this beautiful leaf with a nutty flavor. Bruce was over for a salad last week and swore it was lambs quarters. They have a lot in common. Plus, does this doesn't look anything like...

...this photo of the seeds I ordered?

Perpetual spinach-chard

This yummy green gets leathery when the weather gets hot, but it's a spring standby at our house. Here's what Bountiful Gardens says:

Description: (1869) Rare, fine old European strain of Swiss Chard. Smaller smooth dark-green leaves, small mid-ribs. Frost and bolt resistant, needs water in a dry spell. We saw whole fields under cultivation in England.

Agretti 

Officially one of my favorite greens. This year we're eating, not growing seeds, and does this ever pick nicely. Pinching off delectable end bits triggers a double branch to form. 

These chrysanthemum greens taste like an evergreen tree smells,

and they're budding up to white flowers. They make any salad sparkle.

Mmm. With the hot temps my cutting board

won't be filled with these much longer.

 

Malabar Spinach 

Just started eating these substantial spinach-y leaves (thanks to Debbie who swapped me some seeds). They've been languishing on the roof in their little cups. Today I pulled bolted greens out of three yellow SIPs, removed the fertilizer, and planted these. Cornell says:

The leaves from this heat-loving vine have a mild flavor and are used like spinach in salads and cooking. Extremely frost-sensitive. It creeps when temperatures are cool, but leaps when the mercury hits 90 F.

 

We hope the Malabar leaps up our arched trellis this summer...

Near 80 Degrees F in Chicago March 14, 2012?

This 7-day forecast for Chicago freaks me out, I said to Art yesterday. A whole lot of very warm highs and now-very-low lows. Those temps are about a month early.

And he said: You're complaining about an extended growing season?

Hmmm. He had a point.

Hurry hurry off to Bruce's to pick up the 3-inch seedlings (above) he's been tending under lights. An almost-too-warm-for-cool-weather-greens world awaits them. I put them in front of the open windows in south sun to buck up a little. 


Today, on a day that feels like May, I recharged an Earthbox from last year, removing the top layer of potting mix and fertilizer and refreshing both....


...in order to plant the sprouted pea seeds I started in some compost Feb 20 (check out those healthy roots).

 

People always ask what fertilizer we use

for spring plantings. This one.

In our second adopted Earthbox, lettuces.

Here they are, looking a little droopy in the hot sun, but they should perk up.

Are we ready for this year's weather? Who knows where's it's heading. Art screwed in the windbreaks on the cool-weather greens run to guard against infant-greens ravaging spring winds. Just in case.

Lunch break:

salad from the raised bed (top picture)

Taken out of context, 78 degrees on the roof made for a beautiful day.

Snap Peas and Lettuces Abound on Our Roof

 

These Amish snap peas from Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) are producing lots of tender peapods for tossing into the freshest salads possible. Shown are lettuces Carmona, Jester, and Joker, all from Wild Garden Seed. Despite the extreme early-season temperatures here in Chicago--97 for a couple days now--the lettuces remain sweet and tender.

The SSE package says the peapod yield runs for six weeks if kept picked.

No problem!

 The lettuces are growing in a 5-gallon SIP

And the peas in an Earthbox

May 26 Chicago: 44 Degrees, 24 mph Winds

Can't recall spring temperatures ever fluctuating this much. After a few temperate days last week, during which I thought it would be OK to plant some SIPs on the roof (erroneously, as you'll see below), today's just raw. Windy, cold, and raw. But I love the radishes up there, pulled a couple days ago from the raised bed. They're Hudson Valley Seed Library Radical Radish Mix and they're sweet.

Here's a tenacious white borage plant pushing up through a crack 

in the cement out front. Our bees love these blooms.

I pulled it to plant in the front window boxes, where we get full south sun and like to have herbs of all sorts, most started this year by Bruce under lights. Talk about through the wars--when I picked up the herb starts last week it was warm, hot even. Then came the winds and the cold and currently many of the basils are raggedy.

We're hopeful they'll perk up

 Also seeded some nasturtium, cosmos, and poppies

in the herb boxes

Yesterday we picked up these robust-looking tomato starts from Bruce, who's been keeping them through all this rough weather. I promptly placed them inside on the second floor, with southern exposure.

While I was up there I clipped some more food from these portable microgardens. Who loves this weather?

 Cool-weather greens

Now to the roof. My ill-advised early planting of a couple pepper starts resulted in their being sheared off by the wind last week. Even though I thought I'd sheltered them effectively by placing them against the greenhouse wall. Clearly they should have been inside. I'll get some more starts in these SIPs once things calm down.

Note the tied-up Jimmy Nardello pepper 

in the foreground. It's hanging on.

Now this I'm not proud of, another weather-beaten example, but it does speak to the resilience of some plants, in this case the lovely patio tomato gifted us by Debbie. Though it won't win any beauty pageant, it's got flowers. Stay tuned.

The peas are up...and flowering.

Here's a beat-up tomatillo whose Earthbox mate got snapped in half last week, and a hot pepper. They make me think of the lyrics to NY NY: if you can make it here, you'll make it anywhere.

Tatsoi from Hudson Valley has been a superb producer, offering a bounty of daily greens for salads. I love this green, round and beautifully formed.

We might be able to plant tomatoes and eggplant this weekend, a full 10 days later than last year. We'll see what Saturday brings.

Every Little Thing Gonna Be All Right: Early July Roof Garden

Happens every year. I find myself up on the roof, looking around and singing Bob Marley, in a kind of daze at the magic of it all.

Peas flourishing

Seed pods forming on the baby bok choy

The exquisite beauty of an eggplant fleur

Melons putting out tendrils

Strawberry tomatoes with their pleats

Amish paste, pointy

Black Sea Man, new to us this year

SIPs in the sunshine

Eggplant udumalapet emerging

Honey in the hive

Herbs on the street, boundless in the heat

Sharing the first tomato
Tomatillos hanging in their papery lanterns

French climbing beans, reaching

Seeing red!

And despite the sad photos below of plant starts unplanted, a little early blossom end rot, and my nonexistent blog posts...

... I've decided this Sharon Astyk essay and Bob Marley have something in common: Don't worry, 'bout a thing...