>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
I have two small wooden barrels outside the kitchen with potatoes growing in them. They're about 25 litres, straight-sided old barrels with no bottoms, with potatoes planted at the bottom, just dumped on the ground with some straw and leaves and old compost over them, with more added as the stems grew higher. Now one is full, the other nearly full. The plants look great. I'll have two barrels of potatoes. Our potato beds (about 50 metres first crop) are planted on part of the poultry rotation, the seed potatoes laid on the ground and covered, and then more mulch, straw, leaves, "weed" cuts from the banks and so on added on top as the plants grow, until it makes a deep bed. We always get good harvests this way, and the potatoes improve the soil further. It seems it doesn't work with all varieties. Some varieties produce long rhizomes (which bear potatoes) and others have short rhizomes around the seed potato. For deep-mulch potatoes use the long rhizome types. According to the Organic Gardening Discussion List, Yellow Fin, Red Pontiac and all fingerling varieties have extended rhizome formation. All the varieties we've used in Japan have long rhizomes and perform well. Best Keith >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. > _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
