Growing food in winter is the ultimate challenge in colder regions, and lately everyone (even the White House) is doing it. One of the first comments about local food from detractors is, “but what do you eat in winter?” Well, I am here to report that kale, bok choy, radishes, carrots, and beets are still on the menu, as well as the arugula and spinach growing in our cold frame.

The cold frame was a no-brainer to add onto our raised beds; we literally drilled holes in some plexi-glass that we bought at our local hardware store and connected the pieces to the side of one of the beds using door hinges. They work fine for low-growing plants, as we have about seven inches of space between the soil and the lid. A thick layer of mulch and warm compost will keep the temperature up inside the growing space. However, if you want to have more options and grow longer into the winter, you could buy curved metal piping and cover it with Reemay fabric, making your very own hoop house.

The White House recorded their recent conversion of the First Garden — which has generated 1000 pounds of vegetables since the spring — into a winter garden, using just this technique. They are even growing a cover crop of rye to add nutrients back to the soil. Check out this new video, which features USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan and White House Food Initiative Coordinator Sam Kass:

Making this video was also an opportunity to announce the USDA’s pilot program (part of Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food) to encourage farmers to use high tunnels, or hoop houses, to inspire year-round growth and bolster local food systems. Growing in all four seasons is possible, and its great to see the USDA throw their weight behind this initiative in support.

Meanwhile, seed catalogs have begun to show up in my mailbox, and I’ve been thinking that seeds make great gifts this holiday season!

Two weeks ago, I noticed that two of my tomato plants had late blight. I was up on the roof, weeding, pulling off yellowing leaves from all the excess rain, and harvesting some early tomatoes when I noticed leaves with yellow and brown spots on them. I’d read the article in the New York Times about the blight, and so I sent out the photo on the left to Twitter, asking my followers, “is this the blight?” The answer, sadly, was yes. So I pulled one plant up, before it could spread to the others, and took all the leaves off the other plant which was confined to a corner, hoping to let it’s three giant tomatoes ripen.

Unfortunately, rooftops are not immune from the soil disease that ravages spuds and tomatoes — I bought my seedlings from two small nurseries upstate, which had grown them locally. But it is possible that contamination had already spread to my tomatoes from the nurseries’ neighbors who bought their plants at big box stores like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, which sold plants in soil from an Alabama facility that carried the blight. Ironically, it is new growers’ enthusiasm that might have exacerbated the disease through increased consumer demand. And while a record number of people are growing some of their own produce this year, excess rain in the northeast has created the perfect conditions for the blight to flourish — but it is small organic farmers that are taking a punch.

Last week I spoke to some of the farmers at the Union Square farmer’s market. Three of my favorite sustainable farms are not spraying, even though it means a losses of up to $25,000. It’s a depressing worse case scenario. Amy Hepworth, the farmer at Hepworth Farms (my CSA) and Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics, both places from whom I normally get beautiful tomatoes for eating and canning, have sustained big losses this year. Another of my favorites farms, known for their tomatoes, has decided to spray to save their harvest — for the first time in 14 years. It’s hard to tell farmers not to spray. As M.K. Wyle wrote on Civil Eats last week, its painful to watch all of that work be destroyed in one fell swoop.

So what can be done, and is this just the farmer’s gambit? On my rooftop, I’ve planted salad greens and kale in the place of my missing tomatoes. But for small farms, most of which grow diverse crops and often don’t qualify for disaster insurance, such a loss could put them further into debt and make their ability to grow in the future uncertain. It is possible that had plants been grown from seed nearby, and soil stayed in its region, we wouldn’t see the blight spreading like it is through the northeast. So should small farms bear the brunt of the burden alone?

Governor Paterson doesn’t think so. He requested recently that the USDA designate 17 New York counties as agricultural disaster areas. If these counties get this designation, low-interest loans will be made available based on the extent of the losses.

But loans aren’t ideal. I’m glad that the option is there, but how about better supports in Washington for diversified growers, who support a healthier population and healthier soil? Loans are more like a band-aid, after the fact. Growers of cotton, soy, wheat, corn and other non-perishable commodities are protected because they are the biggest producers, and as such have the most detailed crop histories, lobbies, and of course that longer shelf life.

Getting crop insurance is based on data sets and tables which are essentially a history of a certain crop’s performance. According to Scott Marlow, of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, there is precious little information being gathered on USDA-designated “specialty crops” (around 10 million acres planted according to the 2007 census, a fraction of the total 310 million acres planted in the US), like tomatoes, and so it’s harder for these farmers to get coverage. It is also harder for them to get loans, which are often based on crop insurance.

Furthermore, planting restrictions put in place by the federal government aim to keep specialty crops at that 10 million acres so as to control prices. If a farmer shifts from commodity crops to specialty crops, they lose the payments on their land. All of this means that a farmer has to feel really passionate about diversified growing, because they are managing their own risk most of the time. And the growth of the local food movement gets stifled by these realities, too.

But I would argue that the farmers growing perishable fruits and vegetables are our insurance policy against future preventable disease; that, in fact, our health is rooted in this issue.

I may be able to withstand losses in my little plot, (an experiment in growing, really) but small farmers cannot. Let’s change the inherant unfairness in our system that favors big over small farms by pushing the goverment to re-evaluate these policies. Indeed, the future of local food is at stake.

This post is part of a series called Roof Garden Rookies, which explores my attempt, as an amateur gardener, to grow a garden on the rooftop of my building in lower Manhattan. Check out my roof garden in a recent feature in the New York Times.

Cukes are twisting and turning their way up the stakes as I’m training them to, and green tomatoes and baby eggplants abound. With nearly three weeks of rain behind us (which made the broccoli and the beans happy, but not so much the squash) the garden is verdant and overflowing its boxes.

And six weeks after planting, the garden is sharing more and more of her bounty.

Yesterday, I harvested a Stupice and a Green Zebra tomato, as well as a little Sungold which I popped right into my mouth (same goes for the strawberries, which are so few I consider them a gardener’s snack), two zucchinis: one small and one large, and a couple turnips for dinner last night.

It is not uncommon for a neighbor to peek up onto the roof while I’m popping off dead flowers, either to say hello, take in the fresh air, have a picnic, or all three. I can tell the garden has added to our collective quality of life as a building; it simply dresses up the roof and makes us want to spend time up there, admiring the unobstructed views of the empire state building, amid the flowers blooming their heads off and the vegetable-potential high above the noisy bars and men riding bikes pimped out with boom boxes in the Lower East Side. The bamboo fencing adds to the serenity, that is until a bird of prey swoops over head while I’m eating dinner with a friend at our makeshift table (a new planter, yet to be filled, turned on its side) and manages to snatch up a white pigeon in midair, and then glide back, ostensibly to its lair, to dine as well. Nature, in New York City!

We’ve also had visits from beneficial insects, like the ladybug on the dill flowers to the left, and the bee parade that comes every morning. We have not been without aphids, and some leaf-eaters, too, but the damage has been marginal.

Along with the just-picked lettuces I’ve been nibbling (as have the neighbors, who proudly tell me in the hallway), the sorrel was bushy and ready for eating. I’d never prepared it before, so Yann and I looked online for a recipe for the easiest soup I’ve ever made (or watched being made), sorrel soup, which is great for the big stringy leaves that aren’t as fun to chew on raw. The recipe was so simple that I kept offering to go up to the bed of herbs and snip some thyme, chives or basil. “Are you sure?” I asked Yann. “Yes,” he insisted. “Just wait, the sorrel has a lot of flavor.”

I washed the bundle of sorrel, the significant leaves of four, first-year plants, and snapped off their stems. Then he placed them in a pot with a splash of olive oil, salt and pepper, and turned on the heat. The leaves sauteed while he diced potatoes and I watched. The pot was opened moments later for the potatoes, which were tossed in, along with six cups of water. When the potatoes were soft the heat was turned off, then the contents were pureed, and served over a dollup of creme fraiche. There is nothing like eating fresh from the garden, in the garden, so it was back up to the roof. He wasn’t wrong about the soup, it was delicious.

Sorrel Soup

(serves four)

Approximately 2 cups of sorrel leaves, cleaned, stems trimmed
2 big russet potatoes
olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
6 cups of water
creme fraiche to dress

This post is part of a series called Roof Garden Rookies, which explores my attempt, as an amateur gardener, to grow a garden on the rooftop of my building in lower Manhattan. My roof garden was recently featured in the New York Times.

Last week I wrote about the process of building raised beds for my rooftop garden. The next step was clear: ready the soil and onto planting.

First thing was first, we started with 1000 pound of soil from the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a potting soil mix that includes vermicompost, coconut-based coir (a sustainable replacement for peat), perlite, green sand and black rock phosphate.  Once we got each of the 20-pound bags up the stairs, we began to fill the beds and quickly realized that we’d need another 500 pounds.

Eight of the beds were prepared with Garden Tone, an organic soil preparation for vegetables, as well as mushroom compost, a byproduct of mushroom growing that is full of minerals, as well as seabird guano for slow release fertilization.

Then, the fun part: making a planting plan, gathering the seedlings, and getting dirty!

Many of the seedlings I planted were either from Silver Heights Farm at the Greenmarket, which carries a large variety of heirloom seedlings, or they were grown from seed by me or by Kerry Trueman of Retrovore.com. Many of my seeds came from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, a local seed library that works with heirloom plants that grow well in our area.

Some of the seedlings I planted out included: Tollies sweet pepers, habenero peppers, three types of eggplants, eight types of tomatoes, bush and climbing beans, strawberries and blueberries, an heirloom melon called the Delice de la Table, two types of cucumbers, two types of zucchini, a Musque de Provence, green and white pattypan, butternut, and blue hubbard squashes, beets, carrots, turnips, lettuces, piracicaba broccoli, a variety of flowers and a bed full of herbs.

For each plant, I consulted my book (Tanya Denckla’s The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic, among others) to make sure I was planting companions and not foes, then I laid out my plants, leaving room for marigolds and other flowers in the beds, dug a hole for each, adding mycorrhizal fungi to help prevent transplant loss and a moisture crystal to keep moisture at the roots, and then tucked in my new green friends.

The acidic bed required Holly Tone, a preparation for evergreens — lovers of acidic soil. In addition, I supplemented garden sulpher around the base of the blueberries and euonymous vines I planted there.

With the addition of a composter for kitchen and garden scraps, and a few more flower plantings, the garden is off to a great start. After two weeks, I am happy to report a few tasty salads and strawberries, along with some developing zucchinis, tomatoes and beans! I can’t wait for the day when I harvest a whole dinner. Now, all we need up there is a table, and I’ll be outside all summer.

Photos: Yann Mabille, close look at the beds, one planted side, and me, exhausted after a day of planting

This post is part of a series called Roof Garden Rookies, which explores my attempt, as an amateur gardener, to grow a garden on the rooftop of my building in lower Manhattan.

For the past two weeks, some of the building’s residents and myself have been on the roof non-stop, getting the garden ready for its debut this weekend at our annual shareholder’s meeting. We hauled lumber, soil, plants and other materials, up 6 flights of stairs (no elevator!), to create a living space on our brand-spanking new roof. First thing was first, we needed to build the raised beds.

We chose cedar for its ability to withstand rot for longer than other woods, and because we found a deal on 1″ x 8″ planks upstate, 1/3 of the price of the cedar in the city. We had considered plastic planters, but it seemed the potential to leech chemicals was too great, and besides, they weren’t as nice looking.

A little bit of math, and I figured out how many boards we’d need. Luckily, Lowe’s made cuts for us, saving us time and a sawdust sandwich. In addition to 1″ x 1″ posts for mending the corners of the bed together, we also picked up some hardware: 1 5/8 inch stainless steel square head deck screws, which will not rust outside and go into the wood like butter!

With these boards, we built 16 ” high rectangular beds. For the bases of the beds, we were fortunate to have kept slats from our roof deck in a woodpile in the backyard. We pillaged that pile (simultaneously destroying a pigeon brothel that had formed over the year), cut the lengths we needed and connected the cedar boxes we’d made to their bases.

Our plan was to build fifteen beds, six large planters at 6 ft x 2 ft, three smaller planters at 4 ft x 2 ft, and six even smaller planters, which ended up being window boxes at 8″ x 5 ft. In order to distribute their weight on the roof (an engineer assessed our weight allowance at 60 lbs/square foot) we placed the beds in a “u” shape around the perimeter, and the window boxes would follow formation, hanging from the parapet.

Our next challenge was to prepare the main beds for soil. Essential to this process is creating drainage in the bottom of the bed so that heavy rains can easily find their way out of the planters. We started by placing screens over the widely spaced bottom slats (also notice the metal mending brackets, used to prevent bowing), and then filling the beds with drainage material: packing peanuts.

On the ground, most beds would use rocks for drainage. But since weight was an issue for our beds on the roof, Kerry Trueman, expert from Retrovore who has been helping us on all aspects of the garden, suggested using packing peanuts. And why not? they won’t be touching the soil or plant roots, so no possibility for leeching. They are 95% air, and would otherwise end up in a land fill. Sounded perfect. Only problem was, I didn’t want to buy them new.

Luckily, I reached out to my network of New York friends (Thank you Kerry, Janine, Jenni, Leah, Erin and Yann!) and was able to mobilize peanuts, mostly from their various workplaces, which I want to name check here because they do great work: Eat Well Guide, Recycle the City, and The Mill.

Following the peanuts, a quick addition of landscape barrier fabric helped to keep them from flying away (so did the addition of bamboo fencing, which serves as a great wind break), all stapled into place and ready for soil. Look out next week for my planting report, and more photos of what is growing up on the roof!

Our plan includes a roof garden made up of fruit, vegetables and native flowers that can serve as an oasis in the city for me and my neighbors. I started my seedlings under the kitchen table in my apartment a few weeks ago in order to give my plants a head start on the growing season. For my indoor growing, I used the system the team of seasoned growers at retrovore.com put together (shown in the video below, hosted by Retrovore’s Kerry Trueman) to start my squash, swiss chard, sunflowers, tomatoes, broccoli and Brussel sprouts. (Check out their site for a lot of other great books and help for people new to gardening.)

The system is simple: aluminum trays, capillary matting for sustaining moisture, potting soil, cowpots (a great alternative to peat), a container for water, and then the lighting set up, which gets only slightly more elaborate, but it is still easy and inexpensive to get everything you need at Home Depot or Lowe’s (or even a local hardware store that carries pipe and industrial lights). Check out the video, and you will be growing in no time:

Starting a rooftop garden requires tenacity and a good plan. Tenacity because there are more hurdles to climb in order to plant your roof, including assessing weight limits and reading the fine print of tax abatements.  If you are like me and live in a multiple-resident building, you’ve also got to present your neighbors with the pros and cons, and hope they’ll be so excited by the former that they agree about allocation of funds for your project.  Meanwhile, you have to devise a plan.

In the plan, both infrastructure and timing must be accounted for.  As a newbie gardener, I’d been nervously awaiting my seeds, and excitedly preparing to get my hands dirty.  But first, it was important to know how to proceed with 1000 square feet of roof space.

I started by consulting books and the wisdom of gardeners like the folks at Retrovore, and my other food fighter friends – in sum, an eager team of gardening enthusiasts (we’re bringing back community!).  Together we came up with some preparatory planning to create a lush, edible landscape that takes into consideration the unique planting opportunities and the difficulties presented by the roof.

For one thing, the rooftop is unprotected, and is thus windy.  To shelter our raised beds, we will need to construct a windbreak of evergreens along the sidewalls, which should be both aesthetic and purposeful.  (50 feet of young Canadian Hemlocks, $156) Fortunately, beds for these evergreens can be built from the pile of free, recovered wood currently hanging around in the back of the building. Score! But for growing edibles, planters have to be constructed from untreated wood. I’ve found a great source for salvaged, untreated wood at Build It Green in Queens, where wood starts at 15 cents per foot.

One of the benefits of being so high up is the access the plants will have to lots of direct sunlight.  This means good growing but also a need for strategic watering, like a drip irrigation system set on a timer. Watering close to the surface will help prevent water waste, and a timer will ensure we are watering in the early morning when the temperature on wilt-worthy summer days is cool. A rain censor is an added bonus, stopping the flow after a rain.  Irrigation is one of the more expensive aspects of the garden budget, at an estimated $350, but considering my status as a green gardener who doesn’t want to kill everything, I think its a wise investment.

Another important consideration is soil.  You don’t want to haul any old dirt you find up to your roof for your garden. And if you are planting directly in the ground, please get your dirt tested.  Luckily in New York we have the Lower East Side Ecology Center, which produces compost from New Yorker’s table scraps and makes a potting soil (featuring perlite, green sand, black rock phosphate, vermicompost and coconut coir – a sustainable alternative to peat moss), which they sell to the public, and deliver! Cost for soil that can be a permanent support for our garden for years to come: $500 for 1000lbs.

The garden may seem expensive to some, at our estimate of $2000.  But we are starting from scratch, and have decided as a collective to make an investment in energy efficiency, and in the creation of a living space, where we can save money by eating what we grow.  It is my hope that Councilman David Yassky’s Green Roof Tax Abatement (an extension of the J-51 abatement) passes, allowing us to recoup 90% of our costs. But at worst, we know we are making a great investment.

Stay tuned for the next post in the Roof Garden Rookies series, where I will be talking about starting my seeds.

The last couple sunny days have gotten me itching to buy seeds.  The skilled gardeners I know (of which I am decidedly not, having barely grown an herb garden that now looks like brittle sticks in dirt) have told me to get started with my highlighter and my catalogs – order before it gets to late and the best seeds are gone.  So I became a member of the Hudson Valley Seed Library ($20) and got ten complimentary packets of their heirlooms, most of which come from this area.

With Monsanto and their ilk gobbling up all the seed companies in the last decade, its important to remember to support the little guys – like another small company in Missouri, Baker Creek Seed Company.

From The People Who Feed Us:

At sixteen years of age, Jere Gettle joined Seed Savers Exchange and never
looked back. With his interest in gardening (and collecting) as the catalyst, he
started Baker Creek Seed Company And he still looking for ways to get the
word out about the value of heirloom seeds.

Now his operation distributes nearly 100,000 catalogs yearly, hosts a gardening
forum-I Dig My Garden, and has put together what is generally acknowledged as
one of the best seed collections around.

Jere gives a good explanation here of why heirlooms matter. The diversity of
plants is a strength that Baker Creek promotes mightily. As host to several events
at his southwestern Missouri location every year, Jere is a outspoken advocate
for real food through old-school seeds. He loves this stuff.

Check out the engaging documentary they made of Jere Gettle (and the many other wonderful documentaries on their site, www.thepeoplewhofeedus.com)

Growing up in suburban Oklahoma in the 1980s, I was three generations away from my farming ancestors but ate more prepackaged food than greens. Having spent the last decade improving my diet, I can now say I am ready to try my hand at growing some of my own food – on my rooftop in Manhattan.

Beginning this spring, I am planning to install (with the help of great neighbors and garden-savvy friends) a roof garden with raised beds for growing crops. I will record my experience on Civil Eats, in a series titled “Roof Garden Rookies,” because I am literally starting out green. I hope that this series breaks down the process into easy to swallow bites, and that readers feel empowered to try to grow some of their own food too.

Aside from the word from my garden-savvy friends, books have helped me start to get my head around this exciting but scary task:

• Eliot Coleman – The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener
• R. J. Ruppenthal – Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting and Sprouting
• Tanya L. K. Denckla – The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food
• Linda Yang – The City Gardener’s Handbook: From Balcony to Backyard

The first step before we get started was to have an engineer establish how much weight our rooftop can handle.  We are lucky to have recently rebuilt our rooftop, including new joists.  However, to stay on the safe side, our raised beds must be filled with special lighter-weight soil and must be easily drained to maintain 60 pounds per square inch or less (this includes wintertime with a layer of snow on top).

My next step was to begin to plan what I’d like to grow.  To begin, its good to take note of your hardiness zone.  According to the National Gardening Association, New York City is in zone 6B, but because we are container and raised bed gardening on a rooftop, I have been advised to go to the next zone, 6A, with an average minimum temperature of between -5 and -10 degrees F.  It also doesn’t hurt to take a look at The Farmer’s Almanac, which gives advice on when to get your seedlings planted, so you can then plan either the growing of the seedlings in seed starting trays or when and where to acquire them.  I’m going to try to start most of my seedlings myself, which means I need to get started!  The Almanac is suggesting that I get seedlings in the ground for many of the the crops I want to grow by late March – early April.  As for what I’d like to grow, I first came up with a list of things I like to eat.  From that list, I’m going to try my hand at tomatoes, a few different lettuces, herbs, chard, carrots, beets, squash, celery root, cauliflower, bush beans, kale and maybe blueberries.  I will be placing my seed order this week, and then soon, starting my seeds inside my apartment.

Upcoming, the series will discuss tools and seed starting, building raised beds, preparing the soil, designing a roof garden structure, maintenance, and will break down the mistakes and (hopefully) successes, so that next year’s version is even better.  Keep an eye out, and I’m looking forward to your suggestions, comments and questions.

Photo: A blank slate – our roof at present.