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Roofing.

(edited)

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That's how the day started. The view from my rooftop. The air was crisp and clean, the sun was having a blast.

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Right that moment I decided to take care of my rooftop garden - finally, I must say. Most of the pots looked like this:

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And that's not how they're supposed to look like. I mean, the horse radish is doing good, which is awesome. It was very hard to get a few roots and I'm absolutely glad that they're hanging in there. In this pot, it's mixed with some arugula - basically Ellie's combo. She loves both.

So I got to work. I didn't find my favorite tool, so it was just a half-broken shovel helping me out.

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This spider was not amused that I broke her web. I gave her a free photo session to make up for it, but she still turned her back on me afterwards. Nothing I could do.

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And of course, I drew blood. I mean, that's like "gardening 101 with Beelzael" - when you garden, you draw blood. Preferably in the most stupid way possible. I cut my foot a little at a corner. Didn't hurt too much, so I ignored it. Next thing I know the side of the foot is covered in blood. Well, no biggie. It dried up quickly.

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I think I woke this little bugger up. There were several within the dirt, under the roots of all the weed and grass and all that. He started to gnaw on one of the few seed-grown-onions that I have, so I relocated them into the real garden. He has a lot more options down there.

I'm pleased with the result. It took me 1,5h in total, but the boxes look clean again and all the plants that are important to me have a lot more space. I think I'll have to transplant the rosemary bushed, though. They're not growing anymore, I guess they took up all the space available for roots.

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This is how it looked before:

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And this after:

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As you can see, there's a lot more plants on my drying racks. I use that technique to thoroughly kill the weed that I don't want, before throwing it on the compost. Most plants would just keep growing on the compost if I didn't dry them up before. Plants here are poised to take over everything as soon as one turns around for a minute.

And yes, the racks are placed on old beer cases. AmBev pulled Brahma out of Ecuador and just left the restaurants with thousands of cases. The restaurant I had back then had around 20 cases. I try to re-use them as much as I can.

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I tried to be very careful around this little pea vine. It must have grown from another plant that was in the pot before, as I haven't sown any in a while. But I'll be happy to get those out of their shells!

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I gave my onions a little more space. Those, I only grow for the greens. Since I had those pots left over, I cleaned them out, mixed the dirt and now hope that the onions will thrive again. I do love some onion greens in my guacamole and salads.

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While I'm writing this, the beautiful day turned into a beautiful thunderstorm. Perfect timing! My plants will love that. And so this story ends! What are your pots like these days? Do you have legit ones, or improvised, recycled ones like I?

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4 comments

I love onion greens - I'm better at that than growing the bulbs haha.

The view from your rooftop is awesome! And great recyling of those containers.

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They're old frying old containers. There are plenty more in the restaurant below - I don't have enough earth to fill them all :-D

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I would get all obsessed by wrapping them in something cute, like hessian maybe, or putting say six in a 3x2 config and pallet wood cladding it or something - that' smy obsessive 'aesthetic harmony' nature though!

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Your rooftop garden looks really good after your time spent working it. I am using some very cheap plastic pots. Plan to reuse them as much as possible until I can't use them any more though. We do have a couple of plastic recycle bins we do not use. PLan to fill them up and plant something in those as well.

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Plastic is indeed a lot cheaper. And one doesn't cry for hours when they break, not like the clay ones that are so much more beautiful, but heavy and prone to break and cost dearly :-D

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Repurposing stuff for the garden is an excellent idea and very eco friendly. Maybe you can try grow sweet potatoes in the beer crates, they should be deep enough, plus you can eat the leaves as the grow, they grow a lot!! For the peas, apparently if you nip the ends off, the branch grows more shoots further down giving you a bushier plant. Good luck with yours, the pods looks like they're coming along nicely

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I was thinking about the local sweet potatoes, camote. They're purple - but the rest is the same. But I think I'll put them in the garden at the bakery. There's a lot of ground to cover there, and Danny, the chef, loves to use unusual stuff for his dishes, so he'd be thrilled by a camote plant to harvest leaves off :-D

That's interesting about the peas. I'll try that next time I sew some.

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(edited)

You do love some onion greens in your?....life, hands, hair, fried rice? It seems you've caught the atRiverflows disease:)

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Everything. When there's nothing, then it's everything. I thought that was obvious. 😝
Will edit, thank you for pointing it out!

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I know what you really mean is eff off you pedantic little bitch:) I'm a pedant. I know it. I can't help it. Plus I've done a lot of proofreading in my time so I just can't help noticing harmless little errors.

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