Rooftop Garden Report — Memorial Day Weekend

This weekend marks the beginning of summer in the garden; tonight’s full moon is an important milestone on the planting calendar.  15 more crates of herbs have been added in the last month, among them dandelion greens, sylvetta arugula, cutting celery, purslane, french breakfast radishes . . .   All of these have started sprouting up and growing, and I’ve been harvesting the radishes already for two weeks, with successive plantings timed for continuous harvesting.  These beautiful little gems are used on our vegetable antipasto appetizer.

Just for fun as well, I’ve planted about 25 Red Gold potato plants — more for entertainment and educational purposes really rather than for any notion of bulk consumption.  The cooks and service staff have been fascinated by their beauty and their progress over the last few weeks.  Between the re-planting and subdividing of perennials and the recent seeding of new crops, the garden is now up to 50 containers and still growing.

In these photos you can see that the rosemary bushes have made a successful transition from their winter home inside the cold frame to living outdoors again.† The enormous lavender bush in bloom is also a veteran from last year’s garden, as well as the thyme, mint, chives, lovage, horseradish and lots of volunteer purslane, too!

Before the weather gets too hot to turn on our restaurant AC units, I have relied upon captured rainwater and a few short sprays of the garden hose in the early evening.† But now that summer is upon us, the condensed water produced by the AC units will provide enough drip irrigation for the entire season.