Adventures in urban food production. A journal of my efforts to grow chiltepin and de arbol peppers on my roof and indoors in Brooklyn NY.

If my containers include styrofoam, am I still organic gardening?

Posted: May 29th, 2009 | Author: mtc | Filed under: growing | No Comments »

I don’t know what I was thinking last year. As I empty some of last year’s containers to pot-up the overwintered chile plants I am surprised to find two or three inches of river stones at the bottom. The rocks alone in last year’s containers weighed 10-15 lbs! So this year I’m branching out and experimenting with loose fill plastic, aka packing peanuts, aka styrofoam as a drainage material. It’s post-consumer recycled, weighs nothing, and is cheap or free. When you consider the GaiaSoil I’m also using, I’ve got styrofoam in two forms in most of this year’s containers. So the question is, does this pose any kind of health risk? To put a finer point on it, am I now doing something other than organic gardening given the use of these man made materials?

Thinking about container weight.

Posted: May 13th, 2009 | Author: mtc | Filed under: growing | No Comments »

Today I started filling containers for the roof to get an idea of how much I’m going to need of various materials. Experimenting with different mixes, comparing weights, and thinking about options. A couple weeks ago I bought a cubic yard of GaiaSoil and am now experimenting with that. The guy from Gaia Institute recommended using six inches of their mix (which is made of a mixture of crumbled styrofoam and compost), a layer of coir-fiber cloth, and then another few inches of compost on top. So that’s more or less what I’m doing, around six inches of each growing medium, plus a couple of inches of drainage rocks. When I was weighing things I realized that much rock weighs about 10 lbs. What if all or part of that was replaced with loose fill packing peanuts? Would the container be too light for the roof? Wow what a concept.