What Are You Eating? Green, Orange, Blue

Nah--we didn't grow these. They're organic acorn squash and pie pumpkin from our local Chicago produce store Stanley's, a lifesaver in the Chicago winter months despite the fact that much on offer is shipped in from California. At 69 cents a pound, we loaded up.



I coat the cut edges with olive oil, sprinkle cinnamon in the cavity, and roast face-down at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or so, which allows for a little carmelization.

We like to top them with steamed collard ribbons tossed in olive oil + white balsamic and scatter a few blueberries from our blueberry picking this summer on top. A little more cinnamon and a few raisins too.



Green collards, orange squash, and blueberries: this delectable antioxidant melange keeps me energized for hours.

What are you eating?

Mass-produced sub-irrigated planter (SIP)

Our friend Bob Hyland at Inside Urban Green does a fine job tracking mass-produced sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) and also the DIY varieties. But when Art came home with this one from Menard's (a midwest big-box hardware store) it looked new to me.

Called the EEZY-GRO, these SIPs are made in Ontario by Apollo Plastics. Art got this one for about $6. The wick shown below draws water sitting in the lower chamber up to the plant roots as needed.
I don't love the look, but that didn't stop me from getting it set up with potting mix and seeding the top with collards from Wild Garden Seed along with some mystery seeds harvested from this year's rooftop crops (I think they're arugula and cress, but will be happily surprised).


By the way, the cloche I'm using here to keep the temperature warm while the seeds sprout was garbage picked at a friend's house as we left a graduation party for her daughter. The cloche was a take-out salad bowl from Olive Garden and it's a beautiful piece of plastic for re-use.

Baking Bread with Peter Reinhart

Cooking, like growing plants, is such a tactile thing. How well either of them are truly dealt with in the online world is an open question.

All by way of saying I found this wide ranging talk given by the bread maker Peter Reinhart to be worth watching. He knows how to tell a story and his enthusiasm for baking bread is contagious.

The Grand Opening of Growing Home's Wood Street Farm

I'm proud to live in a place that's accomplished this:

More On Potatoes

It's still a mystery why my potato box experiment was a failure. Fellow blogger H2 came over with her new flipcam on the day I took the box apart--in search of my advertised 100 lbs of tubers--to shoot this short video.



As the clip ends, we're heading to the roof to see how my SIPs planted with sunchokes, aka Jerusalem artichokes, did. A preview of what we found can be seen in this picture.



I'll post that clip next.

[Updated 11,04.09. I'm not the only one who can't get them to grow in boxes. Rob, at One Straw, had the same poor results.]

Man Humbled By Potato

Without giving it much thought, this spring I decided to try growing potatoes in a box after reading a story in the Seattle Times.

It didn't work. From an initial planting of three pounds of seed potatoes I harvested one and a half pounds of potatoes. That's right, I went backwards. A far cry from the 100 lbs(!) or more mentioned in the article.


After swallowing my pride and setting aside the feeling that I was a fool for wanting to Believe, I came up with a few thoughts on why it didn't work.

The first might be that I planted the wrong variety, i.e. not late season, of potato. Inca Gold are a mid season potato; I've read that you should avoid early season varieties because they only set up one bunch of potatoes. While excavating the potato box, that seems to be what happened in my case. All the vines grew 12-16 inches, set up one cluster of potatoes, then no more. That's still only a partial explanation. I should have a lot more than 1.5 lbs from one "set" of potatoes.

One clue that things weren't going well was a dearth of flowers on the tops of the finished vines. Flowers are a sign that the tubers are setting up, I only remember seeing a couple in mid-August.

It was very cold this summer in Chicago this year, though I don't think that's the answer. I found a couple of slugs inside the potato box, but the potatoes, and vines, didn't look gnawed on. The plants looked healthy, suggesting they had enough water and fertilizer. I've grown tomatoes successfully on the same spot--in the ground, not in a vertical tower--in the past, so I think it gets enough sun. With so many variables, it's hard to know what went wrong.

Honestly, I'm at a loss. I was hoping to at least be able to figure out what happened. Maybe some of our readers will have a clue.

I plan on reusing the soil, a mixture of coir, peat, and vermiculite, in my several of my rooftop SIPs next year.

I'm not sure if I'll try growing potatoes in a box again. I'd like to try something more conventional, like growing them in containers.

Baby I’m Amazed: Growing Food in Sub-Irrigated Planters (SIPs)

Three growing seasons after we started using sub-irrigated planters (SIPs), I’m still astonished by how much food they produce. Because we harvest a lot of what we eat every day during peak season--sometimes five pounds at a time--the extent of the abundance can be obscured. Today I decided to pick just about everything from the roof. Here’s the haul (minus tomatoes):

The chocolate peppers (some still green) are from a single 5-gal bucket set.

We aren’t the only ones using the sub-irrigation method to grow exceptional food. Many online friends are sparking the connection between people and what they eat, some with SIPs, some without. Bob Hyland at Inside Urban Green is a major force in spreading the SIP gospel throughout Brooklyn and on the NY-docked Waterpod.

El at Fast Grow the Weeds gardens in the ground and just plain inspires me. Her post on shell beans prompted me to crack open one of our scarlet runner beans. A shocking pink surprise awaited me.



Chicago’s own Nance Klehm at Spontaneous Vegetation teaches foraging and hosts lots of classes on making traditional foods, drinks, and balms in her Living Kitchen series. GRG pal Martha Bayne volunteers at Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission, where Nance teaches residents about the cycles of nature.

LA’s Erik and Kelly at Homegrown Evolution keep us apprised of urban homestead projects from humanure to home brewing. We like their spirit.

Co-blogger Bruce showed me how to make horchata from a melon that went thump on the roof before it was ripe: just get rid of the rind and whiz all the rest, seeds included, in a blender with a squeeze of line. Yum. Thanks, Bruce!


The kids at Global Buckets are all over the SIP concept. Their theme? Two buckets on a mission to reduce malnutrition. I'm raising my horchata to that.

Growing can be playful too. Our scarlet runner beans made some serious progress up the twine-wrapped PVC arches this summer and are still going strong. The Rooftop Garden Project in Montreal gave us the idea. Check out this video of their city-wide project. Why can't Chicago do that?



I'd encourage you to take the time to browse these helpful and inspirational sites. Here are a few more worth looking at:
Not Dabbling in Normal
GardenWeb Container Gardening
Yahoo Edible Container Gardening Group

If you decide to try SIP growing, know that we've had extraordinarily positive feedback from people who've tried it. Start with one. Then show someone else how to do it.