Kirk,
Last year I followed a friend's suggestion a friend's of growing potatoes
"in a cage". I planted some potatoes in the soil and put a wire cage around
each plant. As the potato plants grew, I added leaf mold to the cage. I could
then simply remove the cage, pull back the leaf mold and the potatoes would be
had w/o digging/bruising.
I noticed that the plants I grew in the ground, w/o cages, were healthier
than the caged plants. They also had less insect damage to their leaves. I had
to water the caged plants. Harvesting was easier, but the caged plants produced
noticeably smaller potatoes.
I know this is not exactly what you are asking about, but I can't help but
wonder if the difference between the caged and the soil-grown potato plants
came down to plant nutrition; living soil vs. artificial growth medium.
The caged potatoes were planted in soil, and the leaf mold had some
nutrients to offer. I don't think it compares to the living, compost-enriched
soil my "dirt potatoes" were grown in. I think that straw would also come up
short of living soil.
Tom
----- Original Message -----
From: Kirk McLoren
To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 6:22 AM
Subject: [Biofuel] straw cultured potato
ever see potatoes grown in a foot of straw? They claimed no digging to
harvest tubers.
Since the roots go down do they decide to fruit in the first foot of root?
Probably since next years potato comes from the fruit.
Kirk
Keith Addison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The effects of greening rooftops are quite well known, there are
enough examples for quite a clear picture to have emerged, showing a
wide range of benefits and no apparent downside.
The idea of greening rooftops could hit the big time any time, like
the local food movement that's sweeping the world (and the media)
right now. The foundation for that was already there, with the CSAs,
city farms, local markets, community gardens of the last 30 years,
then the Slow Food movement and so on. The work had been done, it was
just waiting to happen. Greening rooftops could also be just waiting
to happen. There's obviously a lot of synergy with the local food
boom.
The Journey to Forever garden at our first hq at the Beach House on
Lantau Island in Hong Kong got me thinking a lot about rooftop
gardens. We grew pumpkins and stuff in big baskets up old bamboo
ladders onto the cement roofs of two outbuildings there that were
hellish hot inside during summer, definitely a good thing to do. The
whole garden was built on cement, or through it. I removed the cement
for the sq foot beds and so on, but there was eight feet of sea sand
mixed with builders rubble underneath (pre-plastic, 1960s rubble).
Only one person ever asked where we got the soil. We made it, 12"
deep, on top of the sand. Our tomatoes were 12 feet tall and very
productive, everything was productive - we grew potatoes and sweet
potatoes in bathtubs, and sweet potatoes on top of bare cement (one
was 2 ft long). Large variety of crops. A whole ecology moved in,
birds and bees and bugs that you don't find on beaches, frogs,
butterflies, we found a small watersnake living in our pond (another
bathtub).
That small space produced a lot of great food!
http://journeytoforever.org/garden.html
Organic gardening: Journey to Forever organic garden
http://journeytoforever.org/garden_con.html
No ground? Use containers
Etc.
It wasn't that different from a rooftop garden.
For anything more than an outhouse you need to know what loads roofs
can take and so on, how much wet soil weighs, figure out water supply
and drainage. But if it's built for people to walk on you should be
able to green it effectively in one way or another.
I'd like to have more and better resources at Journey to Forever on
rooftop gardening. I'll do a search when I get the time. Any
suggestions welcome.
Best
Keith
>A grass roof would be evaporatively cooled. Need less air
>conditioning. Average attic in summer is a sauna.
>
>Zeke Yewdall wrote:
>
> >
> > I don't see cows being kept on rooftops. Cow-sized staircases would just
> > consume too much space! But I do see small dairy operations within easy
> > walking distance of city centres.
> >
> > Dawie
> >
>
>LOL. Probably not cows. But a goat could. And chickens. Milk and
>eggs. They eat the scraps from the rooftop garden and turn it back
>into protein for the humans and fertilizer for the garden. We need to
>start seeing our roofs as something other than wasteland helping
>generate a heat island and view it as a land area that we could use
>for food and energy production.
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