A Harvest from our Roof Top Garden!

Amarant with green leafWe’re thrilled to see our little roof top garden is doing so well with this hot Spring weather. The radish and beet greens are big and leafy and the purslane and amaranth shoots are about 2 or 3″ high and perfect for serving in our Theo’s Roof Top Garden Salad! We are harvesting a little bit each day, enough for about ten salads, and then selling out each evening. Along with the purslane and amaranth shoots, the salad also features beet greens, baby radishes and their greens, mint and basil from our garden. We also use pea shoots, which come from across the street from Penticton High School where the students of the Greenhouse Club are learning about agriculture and careers in food security by planting, tending, harvesting and selling their greens. Go Pen Hi! ( Full Disclosure, I am an ex Pen Hi Grad 1980) The salad is tossed with small chunks of Macedonian Creamy Feta cheese and organic tomatoes which we are purchasing until our own organic tomatoes are ready. It’s all finished with a little red wine vinegar and olive oil. Thank you beautiful Okanagan weather. Thank you Linda for your delicious vision of transforming our flat roof into a bountiful garden!

Linda tending our roof top garden.

Linda giving some love to the roof top garden.

 

0Z7A4314

Theo’s Rooftop Garden Salad!

Planting Begins in our New Rooftop Garden

Today Linda planted the first crop of the year, a variety of radishes.

Our garden is located on the roof of Theo’s Restaurant, above the lounge area and utilizes 30  18″ x 24″ recycled food trays as portable containers that can be moved around for the most appropriate sunlight. There is also another area where sunflowers and vegetables grow in a series of recycled 13 litre buckets which once held Feta cheese. We have drilled holes in the bottom of the bucket, put in a plastic wick, and placed them on a trough of water so that each of the buckets draws up as much water as it needs, it uses less water, and it’s also a lot easier to fill the trough than to water each bucket! Water that drains from the suspended beds trickles into the trough.

Here’s a link to a video by Larry Hall on how to make your own bucket system. We use a different system but inspired by what we discovered on youtube!

Looking forward to eating radishes mid May!