Today’s project was cleaning up the roof.
We have self-watering pots from Ikea which work pretty well for peppers because it gets hot up there. Last year, however, we barely remembered to go up and water (self-watering, ha), so the peppers underperformed. As you can see, we are hoping to be on top of things this year.
The peppers and volunteer tomatoes are doing pretty well on the roof this year. It gets nice and hot up there. We need to come up with a more attractive and durable cold frame set up next year — the wind shreds the old brittle plastic and makes a mess.
The hops are flowering and climbing all over the parapet, they seem to more than double in size every year! Next year will they cover the whole house? We promised to ship my cousin’s husband a box of hops once they’re ready (in exchange for the Meyer Lemons we got from them this spring in Berkeley). It’s almost time! It’s going to be a very full, and very fragrant, box.
Down on terra firma, I checked on my lettuce seedlings and it seems a few have fallen victim to a frisky digger (Bizzy? a cat?), so I’ve spread some more seed, put out Sluggo, and put our little vegetable tent over them.
bell and hot peppers on the roof
On May first we went to the Spring Seattle Tilth sale and bought the starts we hadn’t grown ourselves — Little Finger eggplant, sweet peppers (Beaver Dam and Hungarian), hot peppers (Thai, king of the north, long cayenne), crookneck squash and New England pie pumpkins, a couple tomatoes (Red Fig and Sungold), summer and winter savory, sweet corn, chinook and cascade hops, moroccan mint, red shiso, cipollini onions, and a male and female kiwi plant from one of the nursery stands.
A week later we went to the WNPS spring native plant sale for the first time. Our big score was a flat of 4″ pots of Deer ferns. Usually ferns are in gallon pots, which makes them pretty expensive, so this was a great deal –18 ferns for $4 each. We also scored aVaccinium membranaceum, the native blueberry (technically, “Black Huckleberry”) I brought from the Capitol Hill house and is hard to find. The guy next to me took the second-to-last one, so I could only get one of the five I needed.
I planted the natives from the sale in the front and back, along with 32 Lupinus albicaulisthat I had started from seed last fall.
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