Chicago absolutely fried earlier this summer, stopping much of the growth on all plants. But the weather's moderated and the harvest has been up and running in full force for the last several weeks. Even the second wave of tomatoes is coming in strong (after the first flowering was lost to nighttime heat), but more on that in another post.
Striking Chicago teachers wear red:
please support them
This summer we're singing the praises of these Provider bush beans from Bountiful Gardens. They've thrived in the heat and regardless how long they get (you always miss a few when picking) they're reliably tender. Other beans seem to set up their seeds earlier, so that this time of year the purple and yellow bush beans are more seed than good eating. Honestly this is my new favorite variety.
Provider bush beans
Picking lunch from the roof is one of the great joys of growing. Steamed Provider greenie beans with rooftop tomatoes and golden beets from the farmers market. That's a pretty typical summer lunch for us, with herbs and other seasonings.
Waiting for protein
Melons, eggplant, Jimmy Nardello and Little Bells sweet peppers plus a handful of tomats. Grab a knife and a fry pan and...lunch.
Love those Little Bells, from Wild Garden Seed. Check 'em out at the link: nice squat plants with small sweet peppers. They love growing in SIPs and this picture shows part of their color range.
Great pepper for northern climes with short seasons. Before fall's killing frost, we clip whole plants with remaining fruits attached, trim leaves and hang in a cool place. Fruit will continue to ripen on the stem for weeks.
Hello again after too long. We've been drying our potting mix--more on those autumnal duties soon. But today, meet GRG reader Jerry from Central Texas...
We love when readers write to tell us how SIPs work where they live, and this report beautifully illustrates the water-sparing action of sub irrigation.
I became interested in SIPs because the idea of using less water appealed to me. With traditional container gardening it would be necessary to water a couple of times a day in a climate such as the one I live in. This year we have had 80 days of over 100 degrees and because of that very frequent watering would be necessary with other types of vegetable gardens.
Pity the peppers up front...weak, yellowing, and probably thirsty.
The ones in the foreground, in the raised beds, were planted the same day in early Sept. as the ones in the SIPs behind them. The 2 plants in the SIPs were about 3 times as large and had more peppers per plant. Also, I watered the plants in the raised bed at least twice as frequently. Here in central Texas we have had only one measurable rain since I planted the peppers.
Another aspect that I like about SIPs is that weeding is not necessary. Even though I mulch my raised beds I sometimes have very severe weeding problems. With the SIPs I only had to pull one blade of grass.
This...
...or this?
After this initial try with the SIPs I can see that they are the way to go in a climate such as we have here.
Jerry notes he's raising worms and wonders if he can use the vermicompost in SIPs. The answer is yes, if in limited fashion. Both Bruce and I have added a couple cups of worm castings to our SIPs with good results, so go for it. And thanks, Jerry, for checking in.
It would be an understatement to say the roof garden was tested by the weather this summer, especially the weeklong string of 100+ degree F days, bringing temps to near 120 degrees F up on the roof. But the tomatillos thrived, getting big and fat (note coin for scale).
I now think the heat drove our tomatoes to near extinction, but we'll post separately on that.
Today we're featuring roof-grown food in SIPs that thrived in 2011's extreme Chicago weather
Tomatillos By the way, I learned something about why our tomatillos are so sweet from this site.
It's a key ingredient of Mexican salsa verde when harvested immature. When ripe, it turns from pale green to golden and the flavor is sweeter.
Aha! Harvested immature for salsa. Too late for that and no wonder they're sweet enough for our raw fruit in the morning. Tomatillos grew like crazy in an earthbox and are now turning yellow. Time to harvest them all.
Eggplant Eggplant have been producing steadily all summer, these pingtung long and Listada among them, apparently unfazed by the extraordinary heat.
Of the three kinds, I'll admit a preference for the long ones based on their incredible ease of preparation: slice lengthwise, saute in coconut oil two minutes a side over medium-high heat, and enjoy. Or chop and add herbs. Or miso. Or etc.
Peppers I guess it's no secret peppers love heat. Some of our sweet peppers bear a circular brown spot at their tips, testament to the large hail that came over the July 4 weekend.
Jimmy Nardello, hugely prolific
Carmen, excellent raw
or stuffed (last year w/refried beans and cheese)
Rooster Spur,
hot as the dickens
Little Bells, torn from the mother plant
by extreme wind
Melon We're this/close to chilling and putting a knife to these...
This little icebox watermelon
is growing through its climbing grid
L to R: Rainbow sherbet, Golden midget, and not sure
Japanese icebox watermelon,
seeds from Debbie and Little Green Girl in a seed swap
Yard-long beans
A fun variety we received via Debbie and Little Green Girl in our seed swap way back in February when it was ten below. These babies steam up nice and tender. They're flavorful...and a hoot to watch grow.
The jasmine, too, loves its SIP and is climbing our arch, scenting the roof garden beautifully.
The old Wilco tune comes to mind when I ponder my connection to growing food. I started when I was 8, my first radishes igniting a slow-burn fuse on a lifetime love.
(BTW, what was up with the draperies back then?)
Why worried? Because I am always in love with what we grow and, more specifically, with eating it. But again this year the tomatoes aren't right and it feels personal. More precisely, some tomatoes on our roof are just fine and others are sickly. I have 50 years of experience. What's the problem? (Clearly that's rhetorical until I post details.)
For now let's focus on Saturday breakfast from all the food that's thriving on the roof, despite hail, inches and inches of rain, high winds, and that week of 100-degree temps.
Jimmy Nardello peppers, a Santa Fe Grande pepper for heat, the pingtung long and Listada eggplants and Matina tomatoes. Plus a whole bunch of chopped basil from the six varieties out front.
Here's a rain/wind-ripped branch of peppers called Little Bells. We've had roughly 11 inches of rain in 11 days, with bucketfuls falling all at once. And wind.
We chopped these sweet peppers for the melange. The power keeps going out too, twice in one week (make that three times--it just went down again). Last night's power went mostly-but-not-all out: weirdly down to 41 volts, enough to kill air conditioner, computer, and fridge, leaving us in cocktail-hour light, which would have been fun, but it was hot and who wants to open the freezer at that point for ice. I'm lucky to live with a nice guy equipped with a voltage meter.
Eggplant slices go into the cast iron pan, already slick with a hot film of coconut oil. Toward the end, I'll sprinkle the tomato halves with kosher salt and lay them face-down into the hot cast iron to warm.
A nice miso sauce on top and that's a breakfast I love.
Maybe I shouldn't worry so much...about wobbly electrical grids and confounding weather, wondering if we could feed ourselves in the face of shortages. But I do.
Spring is fraught with anticipation and then--boom!--everything seems to happen at once. Yesterday I walked over to Bruce's to pick up some plant starts. Are they ever glorious.
Tomatoes
Peppers
Carl guards them on deck
The coop is looking mighty with its racoon-proofing
Today we were up before the heatwave so Art could make saw cuts in all our SIPs to get them ready for the fabric wicking we now prefer over the soil-packed drink cups.
Windowsill portable micro-gardens thriving in the southern exposure. They needed water today after our 90-degree temps yesterday (and could I just say, WTF?--it's May!).
Also got a couple Tomatillos Two-Color Fiesta from Renne's Garden (seeds from last year) into our adopted earthbox.
Here's an example. New friend Brad (below) saw this blog and said: I want to do that. Lacking tools, he emailed Bruce to see if he'd share some for drilling out a few SIPs. Brad wasn't sure where Bruce lived but gave it a shot.
And it turns out they live a scant five blocks apart. Here's Bruce and Brad, with his newly produced five-gallon SIPs (buckets secured from Whole Foods), standing in front of the partly shingled chicken coop.
I met Brad when I arrived to start transplanting the 200+ seedlings that needed to go into larger pots, among them a diverse selection of basil (below), pepper, and eggplant.
He generously volunteered to assist (muchas gracias), and we quickly established a groove, forking up seedlings, labeling grow cups, and re-establishing plants for their final four-week stint under the indoor grow lights. Click this photo to see a trio of extra-vital pepper seedlings, thanks to Bruce planting three seeds for every one requested.
He hedged his bets and as a result we have many extras to share.
Talk turned to SIP growing, a hot pepper called Lucifer's Dream (thanks for the seeds, Debbie), seedling sharing, new-friend Brad's southern-exposure deck, old-friend Brad's rooftop cold frames. And homebrew, a project both Brads are immersed in.
Is there a summer tomato-tasting, homebrew toasting in our future? Most excellently, yes.
In this way and many others, growing food not only infects us but connects us.
Summer 2010 was the antithesis of Summer 2009, the latter cool, rainy, and overcast. This year's Chicago growing season can best be described as a blast furnace. Could it be that we need to think about lightly shading plants to shield them from the sun?
Check out the black funk on these black velvet tomatoes. Click to enlarge. Seriously sad to cut down the plant, since it produced early and often this summer. We picked every one of the last beautiful fruits, which had no signs of disease. And then we removed the old fertilizer, added some new, and seeded the tomato SIP with collards. There, that's better. Our tomatoes started producing nearly two weeks early this year, but didn't have the stay power of other more moderate weather years.
I wonder if the heat stressed them so badly that it set them up for disease, because we surely have a lot of funky looking tomato foliage. Interestingly, I visited Bruce's roof garden (six blocks away) and his greenery is suffering from the same plant-destroying whatever. Further, my brother the in-ground organic gardener in suburban Chicago told me his heirloom tomatoes did not do well at all.
Still, there were some productive periods. I brought in a few pounds of produce every other day, enough to keep us happily fed (one of these years I'll start recording the weight like these folks do). The eggplant listada, from Seed Savers, was a robust producer, and nicely disease resistant. So was this Franchi tomato start from Debbie, a sort of Christmas tree loaded with flavorful small tomatoes. The Peppers Santa Fe Grande, another Seed Savers selection, always do well, and this year's heat didn't faze them. Here's a real downer. The Armenian cukes that Art built a new trellis for were devastated by powdery mildew, despite being planted in late June. One lonely cuke... This year we also planted summer squash in late June, trying to outwit the powdery mildew. I seeded some mustard alongside in one of our adopted earthboxes. But not so fast...click pic to see the powdery mildew in all its glory today (one nice squash too). We grew a melon called Golden Midget this year. I don't think the foliage is supposed to be golden though. Mildew again? Still, we got a beautiful melon, sweet as can be. Here's a pepper I planted very late--mid-July maybe--since it didn't get planted in May-June. I have no idea what it is (Bruce, any help?). Looks like a yellow banana type. This is planted in the Canadian SIP sold by our big-box Menard's store for $5. And here's a self-harvested Mickey Lee melon. I found it cracked on the roof on morning after it apparently cut loose from its vine on the melon trellis one windy night. Pried it open to reveal a gorgeous interior, sweet enough for dessert. You can always hope for more, better, and less disease, but this day's gathering looks bountiful. A fun upside to summer: Our new growing pals and co-bloggers Debbie and her Little Green Girl Kara visited the roof. Here Kara tries one of the purple tomatillos (or is she just faking it?). They generously brought us The World's Tiniest Tomato! (in addition to a bounty of others) from their garden. Debbie's heat-tolerant lettuce seeds are flourishing on the roof... And remember Brooke and Amy, who came this spring to learn about SIPs and help me try the new wicking fabric method? Their rooster spur peppers (left) loved this summer's extreme heat.
More good news: in September they'll be showing a group of children at the Fremont Public Library District, where they are librarians, how to make Bob Hyland's pop bottle planters. Each participant will plant a young lettuce plant and also direct-seed some of the cool-weather greens seeds saved from our roof. Way to go, you two! Most-fascinating-plant-to-grow-for-the-first-time award goes to...okra. Beautiful hibiscus-like flowers and noble fruit. This plant is about 7 feet tall. Remember the Olive Garden salad bowl SIP? This one's still growing salad, using seeds we harvested from plants started by Bruce in February, set out in March, and gone to seed last month. Nice mustard greens and wrinkled crinkled crumpled cress. We also direct-seeded some SIPs that had run their course. The tatsoi and collard seeds sprang to life, though it took several attempts because the heat on the roof dried out the soil the first few times. Growing food is filled with uncertainty: you can't control the weather or pests or spores that move invisibly on the breeze. There are ups, there are downs. On balance, though, it still seems remarkable that we can eat so well from the roof of a building in downtown Chicago. If the title of this post stumps you...listen:
