2011 Summary

Before moving on to what's new for 2012, I wanted to summarize how things went in 2011. The rooftop provides more sun and heat so the rooftop was a big success and produced better results than the traditional (in the ground) garden with the exception of cherry tomatoes which do fine in the ground. That said, because my access is via an extension ladder, a moderate investment to improve the irrigation system this year was in order. 

The is no question that the rooftop is a great place to grow vegetable and that it resulted in much more produce than the traditional garden- easily 50% more. I had planted two tomatoes in the traditional garden, one in the topsy-turvey one in the ground. Neither did particularly well because of the low light conditions  and produced a handful of tomatoes - rather sad really. However, the cherry tomatoes do absolutely fine trained up the fence so I will continue to do them in the ground. My assumption is that the bigger the tomato, pepper or what have you, the more light energy is required. The other interesting fact is that the rooftop tomato vines didn't get as tall - they seemed to put more energy into producing fruit than leaves. Two possible reason for this might be a) due to the higher light conditions, less vine is required to capture the necessary energy and/or b) the plant size was constrained by the bucket size. I'm no botanist so am only guessing at the root cause ;-).

Also, this year I am dropping one tomato variety from the roster. The "pink lady" although very pretty and popular with some of the neighbourhood kids was very bland in my view and I'm the boss-of-the-rooftop so it's gone! I'm also not growing ring-of-fire peppers, while fantastic and very hot, we still have so many in the freezer that we won't need anymore hot pepper for a couple of years.

One other plant/container related adjustment. The peppers, while very tasty and quite productive, were strangely shaped - sort of squat. I'm only guessing that they need larger containers for more root space. My free, food grade containers (thanks Loblaw's bakery) only come in one size so I have doubled them up this year and cut the bottom out of the inner one to give an extra 4" of root space. We'll see how it works...again another experiment.

Last year was our first year so we did things as simply and inexpensively as possible since it was an experiment. The self-watering containers were great, the water reservoir cut down on trip to the roof kudos again to the two young brothers at Global Buckets for an excellent web-site and their hard work on a great cause! The siphon mechanism between the self-watering container and the extra water buckets were problematic. I don't know why, but from time to time a siphon would lose it's prime and therefore its source of extra water. It may be because the clear siphon tubes were somewhat porous and prone to evaporation. This was a problem if we were away for 10 days and resulted in bottom end rot on one tomato plant. This is the main reason for the new and improved irrigation system for 2012 (more on this later).

Martin and I planned the new irrigation system and completed it before I found this link for a Rooftop Garden In Montreal but it's so great I wanted to share it with you anyway.

I'm excited about another year up on the roof and if you see me waving at you from up there, remember it could be because the ladder is gone with the wind!