Past Season Recap: Part I

I thought I should give you all a recap of what our garden was like this past summer. In March I started approximately 60 seedlings in our spare bedroom. Most of them made it to be transplanted (huge success in itself). Then in April we started to finish the rooftop patio/garden. This consisted of our deck my husband built, the window we crawl out of to get to it, and a lot of containers ranging from recycling bins, old grease containers and real planters.

Our dog Pepsi was not a fan of jumping in and out of the window as you can tell from the picture. She would wait for us to pick her up and bring her back inside...what a baby!

When we first got started I had some flowers planted, mesclun greens, strawberries, 3 zucchini plants in containers (to the right in the picture), marigolds, blue potatoes, bush beans (in long window boxes), and pickling cucumbers (smaller window box). These were all in containers around the perimeter of the deck.

Then on the back section, my husband Marc had left a 1' wide by 13' long opening in the deck. We sank more recycling bins into it, drilled them to the studs, put holes in the bottoms and filled them up with dirt. This was going to be our "permanent" garden bed.

In the permanent bed we had our Roma tomatoes, sweet peppers, spinach, 3 more pickling cukes in the area closest the house (for shade), basil and some more marigolds (I had heard they kept unwanted bugs away). This rounded out our rooftop garden. I then had the brilliant idea to use our old seltzer bottles as a drip irrigation system to all the plants pots. This was a little time consuming; drilling holes into the caps, cutting off the tops and then burying them, all 20 of them. But I was determined not to waste any water that I would be lugging up to the second floor.

This project, along with our second attempt at a composter and our hand-made rain barrel was done in mid-May. It was then time to wait until the veggies started producing!