2017 - New Rooftop Garden

Author’s Note (2023): although newer Year in Review posts for the rooftop don’t exist, this is the current location I garden in and latest Crops posts have been grown here.

This photo is of our late summer rooftop garden, a space we moved into part-way through the growing season. All I could grow this year was whatever could fit in small second-hand containers, capable of being hauled in a moving van. Pretty much the randomness you see here. We packed up what little we had from our condo patio and spread it across our new wooden deck.

Before:

Our old condo patio at was a micro 40sq ft (4.5 x 8 ft) and you best believe I crammed everything I could in there. This was all I could "garden" before our big move, which was really just hardening off indoor plants and popping in a few annual flowers as one last hoorah!

After

The new rooftop deck: when you're used to planting in a micro patio, suddenly having much more outdoor space was both overwhelming and underwhelming. That is, the lushness easily achieved with cramped quarters was now dispersed around a wide deck and I felt like I had grown nothing that season.

I was so used to gardening on a small scale that I was still habituated to planting in little pots and growing crops I knew had shallow roots: mostly herbs and leafy greens. But as I thought about my garden, and its new ability to have permanence, I'm now thinking about perennials that could grow back year after year (something I never had: I always had to "restart" my garden), and about larger scale food production.

A main goal for 2018 is to simply grow more food, and to eventually over the years, increase our reliance on the garden for edible greens for our daily meals. Because our rooftop no longer faces the public sidewalk, we now have total privacy in what we grow and so I've shifted away from ornamental fury and would love to give more space to edibles, native plants, and pollinator flowers that may not be as showy as a carefully bred annual flower but provide more substance than peacock feathers. But, at the heart, I'm still an artist and love colour so there's still a place for ornamental blooms and landscaping, but perhaps they won't have as much importance in our new garden.

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