My Green roof — Spring 2018 update

It works! The structure is holding up pretty well! I have plenty of stuff to eat and a lot to tell!

My green roof is so full of life - April 2018

Cabbage, Lettuce and some garlic in the left

I moved the composting boxes to another place, that has more direct sunlight

And I also have some extra vases, this one with spinach growing in my very own compost!

Onions, spinach and lettuce in the back

Potatoes and a project for a big pumpkin in the middle

More spinach and lettuce, and a (still) small tomato plant in the upper right corner

Brocolli

Big lettuce!

Just picked some onions for dinner! :)

February 2018 — An incredible amount of cabbages per square meter

I have a few vases with more lettuce in one of my balconies. The soil of these is nearly 100% home made (out of my compost). I threw in some seeds, and here’s the result:

What’s today’s lunch? LETTUCE!

Last summer

Last summer was pretty hot, and my garden suffered from it. I was expecting a big crop of tomatoes, but that didn’t happened because of the heat and direct sunlight. However, I got a few surprises:

That’s a 3.5 kg pumpkin!

A large amount of peppers

More peppers and a few burned tomatoes :(

For this summer I will introduce some shade in the garden, so I can grow tomatoes and other vegetables during the hot days that are coming. Here’s a very badly drawn diagram of the plan.

This is the best mockup ever!

And here are the first steps of the implementation:

Cut cut cut cut!

Vertical wood stands screwed to the box to hold the shade

Also during the winter I did an estimate of how much weight I have in the roof. Turns out that today I have nearly 800 liters of compost / soil inside the box. With each liter of wet soil with a weight of 0.65 kg, the dimensions of the box and estimated structure weight, I calculated that I have about 200 kg per square meter, what is acceptable according to the building technical information.

My awesome spreadsheet to compute the garden weight

I am happy with my green roof!