The plastic bag is filled with willow woodchips mixed with pleurotus ostreatus spawn. It took 4 weeks for the mycellium to overgrow the woodchips. The 5th week, the mushrooms started to come out the fissures in the plastic bag.
During 5 days and 5 nights I took a picture of the growing mushrooms, every 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the flashes didn’t went off several times, which gives some jumps in the steady growth pace.
But the whole is a nice example of a natural time bending process, 5 days and nights compressed in 30 seconds.
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/pleurotus/mushroom.flv height=315 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/pleurotus/pleurotus.jpg /]
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/bee-varroa.flv height=262 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/bee-varroa.jpg /]
During a check of the hives, I found this young workerbee just next to the flighthole. The t° being below 10°, I guess she was hit by the cold. She seemed more dead than alive, and I decided to take her inside for an inspection under the microscope. While filming, a varroamite fell out of her thorax-fur. The young bee got more lively again, due to the warmth of the microscope lights. I put her in front of the flighthole, and she nicely walked into the hive again. I destroyed the dirty varroa mite.
Varroa is still a huge problem for hive#01. Some 30 mites a week are dropping down, even after a treatment with Thymovar. I’ll have to look into another solution if I don’t want to lose the colony. The 4 other colonies (2 at so-on’s and 2 at okno’s Open Green) are healthy.
Tagine recipies with vegetables from the season – some of them straight from our city rooftop garden:
take 2 tagine cookers, a 31cm one and a 25cm one. Soak them for some moments in water.
Ingredients for the smallest tagine pot, in chronological order: virgin olive oil, ginger powder, cardemom pods, sliced onions, sliced parsnip, potatoes, pepper, seasalt, thyme and suffuse with a little bit of water. Turn the fire low, check the moistness regularly.
Put following ingredients in chronological order in the bigger pot : virgin olive oil, freshly picked sage (whole twigs), thyme, seasalt and black pepper, sliced onions, garden beans, 10 garlic cloves, 10 fresh dates, homemade honey, brussels sprouts, beetroot and suffuse with a bit of water. Turn the fire low and stir once in a while.
The 8th of march 2010 we started to setup a permaculture rooftopgarden on the 6th floor of a parking in the center of Brussels. It was a very cold day, -6° , cloudy and snowy. The next day we got some icy sun but all of us were freezing, working outside! At the end of the second day, the basic structure of the garden was in place. To follow the evolution of the edible forest rooftopgarden you can check the ‘Open Green’ category in http://padma.okno.be – in this video-repository you get a lot of descriptions and annotations on the how and why and the evolution of the garden.
Following video is a timelapse account of the 2 setup days, with a framerate of 1 image/second. The length of the video is 49 minutes but it spans 2 days of work!
Why garden on rooftops in the city?
Gardening on rooftops in ever-increasingly dense and sprawling cities is an original way to take back unused and sterile spaces like rooftops, patios and balconies and to transform them into livable spaces that are lush, productive and purifying. In addition to embellishing the urban landscape with food-producing gardens at the tops of buildings and producing fresh food, these new spaces for the community enable us to reduce the ecological footprint of the houses and institutions of which we are an integral part. Recovering and decontaminating water, cultivating organic food, composting organic waste as well as ?ltering and cooling down air are all part of a mindset to make our established landscape more sustainable. Therefore, in the current context of environmental degradation, over-consumption and junk food culture, taking care of ourselves and our environment enables us to take a step down the path to healthy cities and communities.
Rooftop gardening means taking up an inspiring, ecological and productive activity, and developing new links with the food chain, the seasons, the environment and the community. This utopia’s vision is to turn the city into a garden and its inhabitants into gardeners.
Guide to setting up your own edible rooftop garden: http://rooftopgardens.ca
