Harvest 2012: Provider Beans and Little Bells

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.

First Tomato 2012

Call it June 23. I didn't pick it right away. Stupice, of course, a favorite of ours.

55 days. Lycopersicon esculentum. Plant produces high yields of 2 ½" diameter red tomatoes. This early producing variety was does well in Northern regions. The potato leaf plant produces tomatoes in clusters all season long. It has excellent tomato flavor. A variety from Czechoslovakia. Indeterminate.

Why We Grow Tomatoes 2012

 Kellogg's breakfast tomato from SSE

(a West Virginia heirloom apparently having nothing to do with the cereal company)

After focusing on work only for the entire month of May I finally started planting tomatoes around the first of June and haven't stopped since.  Look at that photo, an incredible single plant growing in a sub-irrigated container (SIP) on our roof in Chicago, begging to be picked. Hold that image as we move through the summer months.

Did I say it was hot on the roof? Temps at or near 90 for four days translated to this on the growing deck:

We moved food production to the roof because of burgeoning shade on the ground. With these temps we may have to introduce shade on the roof. Most people seem unaware of the bizarre weather--is it because they don't grow food?  I can tell some people think I'm BEING NEGATIVE. My planting notes reminded me we had an utterly strange string of hot weather in March, including about nine days in the 80s and one near 90. Facts are facts. Happily, the weather broke this morning. But before it did, this gardener's friend put up a nice umbrella for me to plant under.

But let's back up. Bruce tended and befriended the tomato, eggplant, and pepper seedlings. He did a fine job and this year's crop is extraordinarily beautiful.

Look at that biomass from a handful of seeds.

As usual, we added perlite to our potting mix from previous years to lighten it up.

All the usual fertilizers and lime for tomatoes.

We've retrofitted most of the SIPs from the original damp-mix-filled wicking cup (large hole in center) to the wicking tapes.

After a backbreaking bunch of planting, Art raised the soil bin six inches off the ground, easing the load on my lower back. A miracle.

Many new varieties set for this year, and I'm optimistic it'll be a solid season. The white tubing is Art's auto-water system, essential in this hot weather.

The bees love it when we water, gathering round the moving stream and crawling into the holes to drink when the flow stops.

I pulled the peapods and lettuces, which grew like crazy and then spun out in the heat, from the two earthboxes and laid in more fertilizer. Bush beans at left, a tomato and tomatillo (thanks, Bruce) sharing the EB at right.

I'm not finished yet but getting closer. Already tasting the pingtung long eggplant,Jimmy Nardello peppers, and BLTs.

This is why we grow tomatoes

Giant Tomato Flashback

Aug 16  2007

Or is this like the effect of holding a fish out in front of you to increase its apparent size relative to you?

July 2010: 100 Degrees+ on the Chicago Roof Farm

I walked to the bank after lunch and the thermometer read 100. It's blazing hot on the roof, a gift to the vegetables, though the bees' water trough was dry.



I'm grateful for the larger SIPs we set up for the tomatoes and eggplants--the water reservoir is at least four times that of the 5-gal SIPs. Here's a beautiful cluster of an unknown variety. Anyone have an idea?

In the wake of our failed spring tomato starts and the subsequent rush to locate heirloom varieties in the neighborhood and get them planted, my labeling system apparently collapsed, or at least several labels flew off their buckets. Hence the mystery of the beautiful pleated bundle above.

Other rooftop puzzles include this beauty, possibly an Italian grape, a gift from Debbie, Kara's mom.


Here are a few I can identify:

Black Prince,
from green to orange to dusky dark.

Brandywine Pink.

Cherokee purple.

Black velvet.

Given the bounty, we're not too worried about exact identification (that's a fib--we really do like to know).

The melons already need twice daily watering in this heat.

And I had to put a cloche on the red giant mustard seeds I started this morning. Otherwise the seeds dry out too quickly in the heat and can't germinate.

The baby bok choy and Debbie's heat-tolerant lettuce we planted just last week are flourishing.

The Armenian cukes are (cross fingers) powdery mildew free and happily climbing Art's trellis. I'd never started cukes in June--always in cooler, wetter May, which may be why they've always been decimated by powdery-mildew.


Bruce has been pickling vegetables. He brought over a sampler to have with our lunch. I hope he blogs about it soon.

Delectable pickled zucchini, onions, and eggplant
(the latter from his garage roof).

He cut up some of our tomatoes.

I made these flatbreads, somehow convinced that baking them on a cast iron griddle on top of the stove would be less hot than in the oven (it wasn't).

Art started building a sandwich on the flatbread with Bruce's pickled onion and avocado.

A cool lunch on a hot day.

First Fruit: Tomato, Eggplant, Peppers from the Roof + Vertical Views

Plucking the first fruit off the vine is an experience like no other. What started as a minuscule seed in February-March (thanks Bruce!) has matured under the warmth of indoor light and brought--blinking, I always imagine--out into the sun to harden off before being planted in the incredibly supportive SIP environment.

When you see the first summer harvest on your cutting board, you know another season of good eating is underway.

Eggplant pingtung long + udumalapet (at left)
and tomato Black Sea Man

The heirloom Black Sea Man start came from a local nursery in the wake of our early tomato troubles.

These eggplant taste like cream to me and cook in moments. I halve them lengthwise and lay face-down in a hot cast-iron skillet with a little hot peanut oil over medium-high heat. Let them sear a few minutes and then flip and briefly cover and cook until soft. The pingtung long don't even need a cover.

A drizzle of olive oil, S&P, and there you have it: lunch. I also sliced and fried a couple of the peppers just below. They're hotter this year at this early stage than they were last year.

Santa Fe grande peppers
and summer greens

(I moved the cool-weather greens to a shady part of the roof to extend their production.)

I do love those Santa fe grande peppers--sturdy growth and endless fruits, pretty colors (yellow to flaming red) and variable Scoville heat.

Money shot of the Sea Man:
grey winter dreams come true

You don't need a roof full of soil to do this or a fancy vertical garden system. And you don't need to spend a lot of money either. I stand with our pals at Homegrown Evolution on this (and not just because they linked to us, but hey thanks!): vertical farming is alluring in all sorts of ways...but impractical for many and currently not the most economical way to grow.

As Erik at Homegrown says:

A SIP is as close to "plant and forget about it" as you can get with vegetables. In short, perfect for schools where maintenance is always an issue.

Thanks in part to Bob Hyland's Center for Urban Greenscaping (CuGreen) students in Brooklyn took home their school SIPs for summer vacation.

The SIP home base is the PS 102 garden but due to limited access over the summer recess, it is not the best place to be. That is why the SIPs are growing fresh vegetables at the homes of parents and teachers over the summer.

Here's the truth: you can grow all kinds of food without any trellising at all: bush beans, determinate tomatoes, eggplants, and most peppers. Still, I find trellis vegetables some of the most beautiful because of their twining habit and the way they hang off a vertical plane. So maybe that's part of the allure.

Art made this vertical extension on our cool-weather greens run (which I promised him would never be used for climbing things and therefore wouldn't require a climbing frame...thanks, love). He re-used some wood, bought a couple of 2X3s, and found the small grids at Salvation Army. They appear to be from the endless stream of Ikea junk that ends up on the sidewalk, in the garbage, or at resale shops.

No problemo, we take what we can find. The green grids are from an auction years ago. You could also used old refrigerator shelving as climbing structure. Soon the thin-skinned and deliciously cooling Armenian cukes will be scrambling upward.

Regardless of whether your vegetables are climbing or just squatting in their SIPs, early summer delivers magic.

Almost any garden,
if you see it at just the right moment,
can be confused with paradise.
--Henry Mitchell

Bad News on the Tomato Seedlings

H2 came over and took some photos of the seedlings I started.






Not sure what's wrong with (some of) the tomatoes, but it doesn't look good.





About half of them are affected by some kind of lesion. Mold? Blight? Wilt? Mystery Funk? Take a look at Cornell's Tomato Leaf Symptoms Diagnostic Chart and let us know what you think. I'm leaning toward Bacterial Canker. If you want a second opinion, head over to the Texas A&M tomato problem solver.

About half of the tomatoes have been hit with this. After seeing how these diseases can wipe out full grown plants, we took plenty of precautions , e.g. bleaching old containers prior to using them, to prevent any kind of contamination from affecting our tomato seedlings. Somehow that wasn't enough. Right now only half of them show signs of being damaged, I'm hoping that the other half will stay healthy, but who knows.

A special note to those of you I was starting tomatoes for: While you might want to come look at our seedlings before writing them off, having a Plan B is a good idea. Here are a few other places that sell interesting varieties of tomato seedlings:

Green City Market Farmer's Market (every Wed and Saturday)

Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse Sale (May 15,16, and 19)

Grand Street Gardens

Lincoln Park High School Farmer's Market (every Sat.)


Some good news. The eggplants are going strong.


Peppers - anemic, but some new growth. They should make it.

Why We Grow in Sub Irrigated Planters (SIPs)

August 6 harvest
I could never grow this in my relatively large Chicago courtyard with composted soil.
There's no sun there.

Tomato Caspian Pink
Victory Seeds

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.