The Nat's Squash

Hey Nat - here's your butternut squash. You should come visit it some time ;-).

Butternut Squash

Ultra Girl places 1st in Toronto Tomato Olympics

I harvested my first two tomatoes this morning, two ultra girls from separate plants. It was too tempting so I cut a slice and taste one - it's a small to medium sized fruit with low acid and mild flavour. The best tomato I have tasted since the rooftop harvest ended last year!

First Ultra Girls and Sheppard Pepper

In addition, I counted 9 yellow peppers on one of the plants. It's hard to believe because it has barely more than 9 leaves! I'm expecting a bumper crop.

Fruit laden and beginning to ripen - yellow peppers

Some plants seemed to have suffered during our prolonged heat wave. One brandywine plant blossoms all looked fried. I thought it could be either lack of nutrients, lack of pollination, or heat stroke. The pollination doesn't seem to be the problem though since most other plants have been pollinated. I can't deal with the heat stroke - other than to provide ample water. So I added eggs shells and fertilizer to everything last week. The struggling brandywine now has new blossoms on it so we'll see what transpires. All the other tomato varietals are doing well with lots of fruit and blossoms.

You go (Ultra) Girl!

The new irrigation system has been put to the test over the last week with the temperatures reaching 36.3 C on Friday afternoon. We went up to the rooftop Saturday once the heat wave had subsided and according to my cheapo handheld water meter (which is nonetheless quite useful) all of the buckets had adequate water supply. The plants are growing well with loads of blossoms as well as fruit coming on several. I harvested more cucumber and zucchini and it looks like the first tomato is likely to be and Ultra Girl... you go girl!

First cucumber and zucchini :-)

I harvested my first cucumber (delicious) and zucchini (haven't tasted it yet). More of these to come as there are lots of blossoms. It's nice to have a cucumber that has some flavour!

Patiently waiting

It's quite tantalizing because we've had dinner in the back yard several evenings and we can see the leafy green growth peeking at us from the rooftop. We've had a heat wave in Toronto this week mid 30s with humidex into the 40s and I'm happy to report that the irrigation system has proven itself - it's great not to have to go up to the roof in that heat merely to top up the water (thank you Martin!). I went up this morning and everything looks fantastic, lot's of green leafy growth on the tomatoes and the ones I replanted last weekend are settling in very well.

Tomatoes at varying sizes - largest are Ultra Girl then Principe Borghese

Brandywines

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Zucchini and cucumbers will likely be ready in the next few days.

1 Cucumber, many blossoms

3 Zucchini, more blossoms

You say courgette, I say zucchini...

Last year my mother in-law had to ask Martin what a zucchini was. I find it interesting that in Canada we have adopted the Italian word while the English have adopted the French word. Regardless of what you call it, these plants are splendid when in bloom and produce a pretty yummy end product too!

Zucchini vying for first-past-the-post position

You can't even see the 2" seedling!

This week included some replanting for two reasons. First, I had planted San Marzano seeds too late (March rather than January) so the seedlings were still only 2" tall. Martin thinks I'm ruthless but I had to replace them with 6" tall Romas. Secondly,  two early girls where cut off at the knees either due to high winds or getting knocked by the roofers.  The Early Girls, which were coming along quite well, have been replanted from plants that I bought in 4 pack so I planted the two spares that I still had on hand.

Reach for the top you Cucumbers

The cucumber is coming along well and I have put an old tomato cage and some netting to encourage it to climb up. I honestly haven't had much luck with cucumbers before so am still experimenting. It's not a great picture ( I took it with my iPhone) but there are several blossoms and some wee cucumbers coming.

Lastly, we were pretty disappointed by the cancellation of the Radiohead concert last night and due to the collapse of the stage which resulted in a lost life and several injuries- very sad.

The new irrigation system

At the end of July 2011 we added to the irrigation system to make it easier to get water up to the roof. I had been hauling the hose up there approximately every 4 days. We put a y-connector to our existing hose and put a run of hose up to a bucket with a valve. The valve is a toilet float modified by Martin for use on the roof.

Float Bucket

From this bucket we then distributed to a couple of centralized buckets from which we connected the siphon tubes to the grow buckets. We had some problems with the siphons losing their prime though and this resulted in dry buckets a couple of times when we were gone for an extended period (more than 1 week). So this year we added a permanent irrigation system instead of siphons. This should have two benefits, 1) I won't have to go up to the top as often merely to fill water buckets and check the siphons and 2) if we're away for more than a week, we can be sure that the buckets won't go dry due to siphon failure as a couple did last year.

This entailed adding thru-hulls to each grow bucket so they could be connected to irrigation hoses that connect to to float bucket which sets the overall level of the water across all buckets.

Thru-hull

Buckets connected to irrigation system

In addition, we added styrofoam under the buckets to protect the roof surface and to facilitate leveling. The buckets closer to the edge of the roof are on 2" styrofoam while those farther from the edge are on 1/2", given the slant of the roof, this works out just right.




So this is the practical plumbing stuff that I hope will lead to another year of delicious vegetables.

Thanks to Martin for his superb plumbing skills and patience ;-). And both Martin and my niece Nat who were most helpful in drilling, cutting, filling, planting and hauling buckets. You will both benefit from the end results!

Most of the planting happened last weekend (May 26th) with the exception of the San Marzano's which I started from seed and I thought I'd give them a little more time to acclimatize to full spectrum sunlight.

San Marzano (and other) Seedlings

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!