As you may remember form our bee post we were initially concerned about building a garden on a seemingly lifeless rooftop.   Short of installing honeybee hives or purchasing ladybugs via the internet cultivating insect populations in your garden in a little trickier then putting seed in the ground.  Fortunately, as you trust in the seed to sprout, you can trust bugs to find you almost anywhere if you provide them a good home.  (As anyone who has witness spontaneous aphid infestation on their windowsill tomatoes can attest to)

So where do they come from anyway?  There were most likely already all kinds of eggs in our organic soil mix, we definitely saw some earthworms when assembling the planters.  These were the foundations of our little ecosystem and as the plants grow up and the bugs fly in it becomes more complex every day.  

So what have we seen?

And of course we can’t forget our friends under the soil– 

So I guess its obvious why we’d be growing vegetables (we eat them, right?) But with such a small economy of space, such little dirt to ration and so few planters… why give space to anything thats not edible?

Even though we can’t eat most of them, we need flowers in our vegetable garden and around the BFP block because we need bugs!  Actually, to be more specific we need to attract pollinators.  We could have a thousand plants producing a million flowers but without bees and other insects to pollinate them most will have a pretty hard time turning into vegetables. Flowers would be helpfull in any garden but our situation is especially dire because we have to attract life to a formerly barren landscape.  So, the plan is to grow some flowers that pollinators cannot resist, even some that might traditionally be considerd weeds (milkweed, applemint).

Even if your agenda is not to grow food creating a habitat for beneficial insects is a great thing in itself. With pollinator populations around the world declining both for well understood and still mysterious reasons (colony collapse) every flower helps! Besides interplanting flowers in our roof garden containers we will spread them around the BFP complex (the alley, the tree pit) both for beauty and bees.

Additionally, to keep tabs on the local pollinator population, we’ll be training as “mobile bee watchers” with the citizen scientist Great Pollinator Project - if you are interested in joining us for the training, theres one Tuesday May 25th 6-8pm at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (sign up for the list here).

Last week we picked our first veggies and herbs. Our mini harvest consisted of some radishes, delicious mesclun, peppermint and chive blossoms.  We are looking forward to more lettuce and radishes in the next week and soon some basil.  While we wait we will be busy making more SIP containers fro our fast growing seedlings.   We will be taking some of our extra babies to the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm to swap with other local gardeners.

We started growing for the BFP garden from seed back in March in a BFP workspace using some  mini tabletop greenhouses designed by Laura (just coat hangers and plastic clipped to a bin lid).  Our seeds were mostly sprouted in paper rolls about 4 inches deep and set inside halved milk jugs to keep them moist. We decide to begin the BFP garden this way because it is economical  (we have a ton of milk jugs from the cafe, and paper bags) and ensures our seedlings are are not full of unwanted chemicals and such. It was also a fun opportunity to learn what the different seedlings look like.

With a few excepions we selected plant varieties that we believe will do well in containers* including smaller heirlooms and specialty hybrids created for container gardens. We also chose vegetables with a range of  harvest times so we will  have something to pick as soon as May through the end of September.

April 15 the was the zone 6 last frost date so we were able to move our first seedlings outside the following weekend.  The early crops including peas, radishes, lettuce, baby kale and chards are now installed up on the roof.  Meanwhile our young tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and beans are hardening off while we waiting for more consistent warm weather before planting them in the containers where they will mature.

*Ok, so a  few vegetables requested by BFP staff are plants that we would not normally attempt to grow in a container… But, what the heck?, it will be fun to see what happens with these Cucurbita monsters.

The Brooklyn Fire Proof Garden Project is an experiment in urban gardening happening as a part of a larger environmental initiative taking place this year at BFP. Why an experiment? While the industrial zone where our BFP facilities are located provide great opportunities for the creative use of space, they also offer a fair share of difficulties for gardeners (not unlike those faced by many urban gardeners). But since there are techniques for growing plants that can work in almost every circumstance, we will take these challenges as an opportunity to explore alternative methods for vegetable gardening in the less than ideal urban environment.

It is sometimes difficult to establish a traditional garden, either for lack of ground space (how many of us have garden apartments?), lack of sunlight near tall buildings, or polluted soil due to past industrial activity (while we heartily commend soil remediation projects, we also understand that for most folks that might be too time consuming or expensive to deploy). Gardening in public spaces like sidewalk tree beds in the industrial zone is a noble activity, but can be heartbreaking for the gardener when your plants are damaged by careless or malicious pedestrian activities. If you are trying to grow food, this becomes even more challenging, as most of your ripe fruits and vegetables will probably be sampled by passersby before you can harvest them.

For all of those reasons we are going to garden on the roof. We are container gardening instead of growing in a raised bed/ greenroof garden. Why? Greenroofing, while commendable, is another way of gardening that is probably inaccessible to most urban residents, particularly renters who cannot make permanent modifications on their buildings, not to mention the possible cost of retrofitting the structure of a building to support the weight of a full greenroof. So, while in the rosy future we would hope that all the rooftops would look like this, its just not a possibility for most of us right now.

Growing in containers keeps our materials cost low, as most of our planters will be made of bins, bottles, buckets and plastic crates salvaged from the trash and recycling. It also keeps the garden conveniently scalable as we acquire more recycled materials to make our planters (and more crops through the season). And, just in case you need to move it (for optimal sun/wind protection, roof repairs, etc), a compartmentalized garden is more adaptable.

We’ll be blogging about our successes and failures with this project over the season— to contact us write to garden@brooklynfireproof.com

View the BFP Garden Project Flickr Set

Come sun yourself in the alley!  Sit among the flowers and have a beer.  Speaking of which, its supposed to be really nice this weekend, perfect for Country Brunch!

The beginnings of our next salads...

We’ll be blogging more very soon… stay tuned. In the meantime check out our garden project Flickr set.