About Rooftopvegplot
If you want to find out about growing delicious, organic veg on your balcony or roof terrace, this is the site you've been looking for. My name is Wendy Shillam. My aim is to provide practical, accurate, tried and tested growing advice for anyone wishing to grow vegetables in containers, beautifully. Over the past three years I have been growing on a fifth floor flat roof in Central London. This site documents the development of that garden and provides seasonal advice and comment. I am a writer, so my blogs will I hope provide a pleasurable read, whether you are sitting in the armchair dreaming(go to the BLOG pages), or up to your elbows in compost and you need immediate answers(go to the QandA, or click on the KNOWHOW or PLANT OF THE MONTH links at the side of this article.
About Me
I've called myself a gardener ever since I took over an allottment in the hot summer of 1976 near my student digs in Bristol. Despite having to carry every drop of water from my fourth floor flat, I found that I was able to nurture potatoes, one cauliflower and a whole crop of mysterious tomato-like weeds that went straight onto the compost heap. This caused much consternation to my flatmate's boyfriend, who had, unbeknown to me sprinkled a few cannabis seeds amongst the runner beans. That allotment, despite its drawbacks, convinced me to grow my own vegetables wherever I found myself. I even grew salads on the deck of an old fishing boat we decided to do up one summer. But it was not until I took a lease on an Elizabethan cottage in Hampshire in 2009 that I was really able to indulge my veg growing. This cottage had a beautiful mature garden surrounded by warm red Wealden brick walls. It had a watering system in place and, joy of joys it had a small derelict greenhouse.
That summer I grew my first tomatoes and chillies in the greenhouse and slowly edged into the mature garden with broad beans, potatoes, sweet corn and courgettes.
The cottage went with a high powered job. When I decided to resign and move back to London, my major regret was that I would lose this lovely garden. But sitting in our rooftop flower garden in London, a space that I had always considered too small for anything but a strawberry pot, I had a revelation. My roof top was not, in fact, that much smaller than the productive area of ground that I'd tended in Petersfield. I began to wonder whether I could maintain my rooftop sitting space, but instead of surrounding ourselves with flowers, I thought about surround ourselves with vegetables.
During the autumn and winter of 2011 I read widely about raised beds, potager, urban farming, hydroponics and container veg. I scoured the Internet for useful information. I visited the few rooftop gardens that I could find. I read seed catalogues, I sketched, I estimated and I dreamed...
I dreamed of being able to pick a salad straight out of the garden and imagined eating it as we sat in the garden. I dreamed of something akin to a French woman's potager, something close to the monastery plots of medieval monks, or the walled gardens of a Persian paradise.
Me and my coffee cup. Yes I stop for a break now and then too!
This website documents my attempts to make the dream come true. The first summer, 2012 was the wettest on record. The second summer, 2013 was the hottest! But regardless of climate I have sown, potted up, planted out, fed, watered and tended an extraordinary variety of vegetables together with a few fruit. Faced with the challenge of growing most crops in 150mm soil, I have learnt more about vegetable gardening in the last two years than I had learnt in the fifty years of gardening that preceded them. I discovered that the books are often wrong. I couldn't find sensible instructions for soil depths or planting spacing. I couldn't find out how late I could sow seeds in autumn and still get a crop, or why my lettuce went to seed in June, but not in August.
High summer on the plot. Peas, lettuces and runner beans all flourishing. And there is still space to sit and enjoy.
Growing in the centre of a city means less frost that we might expect. Temperatures rarely go below -2• up here. But because my garden is closer to heaven (five floors up to be precise) it is sunnier and airier than an allotment would be, and very different to the dingy Victorian gardens that many city dwellers have to contend with.
By placing trellises and pergolas against my Mary Poppins landscape of slate roofs and chimney stacks I have helped the plants in their quest to reach for the sky. Growing up trellises has increased the size of my productive area, as well as creating shelter for the plants and shade for sitting out. It can get hot up there.
Now
I can't say that we have quite reached nirvana yet, but I think this summer I certainly can report that my dreams are starting to be realised. I can't remember the last time I bought a green vegetable - probably April 2011 (I'm writing this in December 2013) and though we don't grow enough root crops to take us through the year, I've only just finished the last of this summer's new potatoes. But self sufficiency is only part of the dream. The enjoyment of being out in the air, getting the hands dirty and the lungs expanded, is part of the joy.
Launch of the blog January 2014
By now, I feel that there will be enough basic information on the site to allow me to concentrate on writing a
gardeners diary. This will perhaps entertain more than inform. But at the same time the sidebar articles about
PLANTS and
KNOWHOW will be regularly updated with any new and useful information I come across.
I'm also starting a question and answer section, where we will pose questions and I will attempt to answer them. How often have you listened to Gardeners Question Time answers and thought their urban/container/modern veg gardening answers a little lacking? That is because the panelists are hugely knowledgeable, but their experience comes from large scale public gardens, show gardens or as landscape designers.
I will be offering some answers of my own, based on my very specialised knowledge and experience. And I hope others out there will contribute as much with the answers as with the questions.
This blog will, I hope inspire other city dwellers who, like me, have less land than ambition to grow.
The Bare Bones
The Plot in November 2012
My experimental plot is a flat roof above my house in central London. The plot is approximately 17’x19’ or 5m x 6m and situated on the fifth floor. The quality of light is good up here, and there is some protection from winds. The terrace is walled on the south and north side and open on the east and west side. I have fixed a trellis fence on the east side to reduce the chilling northeast winds. However, the prevailing winds come from the west side, which is still open because that is also where the afternoon sun comes from!
The plot in May 2013, before I installed the trellises and before everything grew so much that you could not see the layout of the beds!
Where the beds are adjacent to walls I have constructed various trellises. I use freestanding wigwams as well. In 2013 I added three new trellises that create an arboured entrance to the plot.Once space has been taken out for the staircase access, chimney-breasts, the shed and a roof-light, I am reduced to five large raised beds, which each hold about six inches (150mm) depth of soil. The beds vary slightly in size, but are each about 6’ x 2’ or 1800mm x 600mm. Wider raised beds are sometimes recommended, but I find this size quite wide enough for reaching into. I never need to stand on the beds, but I do dig them over after harvesting.
Scattered around the formal raised beds, I have a placed collection of pots. These containers provide a deeper growing medium for plants like potatoes and carrots, as well as containing rampant plants, like mint, in check. A lime tree, also in a pot, can be moved inside during the winter.
In the southern alcove, between two chimney-breasts there is a seat, and an arbour, which provides a summer dining area and doubles as a planting bench for over wintering semi-tender pot-plants. It is a great location for hardening off in spring.
The plot in November 2012
In 2011 I installed a timber framed grow-house, which I have located against one of the south-west facing brick walls. This contains salads and over wintering plants during the cold season and is used for tomatoes and peppers during the summer months. It has double skinned polycarbonate panels, which give an extra layer of protection against frost in the winter, but not quite so much light in the hot season. The back panel has been removed, so that plants inside can take advantage of the storage heater effect of the brick wall. This aspect is very sunny and I have to shade the grow-house in summer. The roof is fitted with an automatic venting device.
The whole roof top veg plot is fitted with a watering system which will automatically water pretty well every crop.
Between the beds are square timber decking panels, which mean that if I decide to change the layout in the future, re-arrangements will be relatively simple. The substrate is heavy-duty asphalt.Under the northern wall a large timber cabin trunk contains my compost bin. I compost as much kitchen waste and vegetable waste as possible.
As well as this I have a south-west facing window-sill on the floor below, in my studio under the roof light. Here I over winter tender plants, grow salads and have a nursery for seedlings.
My original sketch plan
