A ROOFTOP OASIS

Enlarge Image Image Gallery LEFT: Wooden pallets leveled a sloping portion of the roof. The author used everything from peanut butter tubs to Japanese miso kegs for plant containers. MIDDLE: No garden is complete without flowers! RIGHT: Pot grown peppers did especially well. (PHOTOS SUPPLIED BY THE AUTHOR)

"On the roof it's peaceful as can be/And there the world below can't bother me. "
(From "Up On The Roof," by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, © 19

by Bob Kleszics

Spring had arrived — robins, crocuses, mud, the whole bit. But while other gardeners were planting (and joyfully anticipating future harvests), I was lamenting the sad fate that had befallen me: Because I'd recently moved from my suburban home to a city apartment, I had become a gardener without a garden.

By the middle of April, though, I'd found a salve for my sorrow . . . and, surprisingly enough, I found it on the roof of the food coop where I work. A 7' X 18' section over an addition to the building sloped slightly to the west, with an unobstructed southern exposure in the afternoon. "Aha," said I to my frustrated gardener self. "All I have to do is offset the slope somehow . . . fill a few of these plastic, five-gallon peanut butter tubs with dirt . . . and presto, instant garden!"

Well, as things turned out, there was just a tad more to it than that.

After making sure the roof was sound enough to hold the extra weight — about half a ton for what I had in mind — I leveled the surface by building up the sloping portion with four wooden pallets and some scrap lumber. Then I scrounged together a random collection of no-cost planting containers: The aforementioned peanut butter tubs, some three-gallon Japanese miso kegs, a wooden cantaloupe crate, and a variety of other recycled receptacles.

I knew that water retention is important for container-grown plants — especially when they're exposed to as much heat as the crops in my hot-tin-roof garden would face — so I was careful to use only plastic (or plastic-lined wooden) containers. (Clay or fiber pots would have dried out too quickly.) Also, for the same reason, I drilled only two or three drain holes in each receptacle. And I decided to use pure compost as the growing medium, because humus holds moisture much better than run-of-the-mill dirt or commercial potting soil.

Fortunately, the small city where I live composts its leaves and grass clippings, and lets anyone mine the resulting black gold, gratis. So I loaded the back of my station wagon with drain-hole-drilled containers, filled them at the municipal compost pile, traveled back to the co-op, lugged the heavy pots up two sets of stairs and out a second-story window, and positioned them in my garden-to-be — and then repeated the whole laborious process several times, shuttling back and forth (and down and up) until some twenty-odd casks of compost were in place.