Un-giving up on the garden

The garden on my roof, also known as Rooty Rooftop, has been, how you say, a great learning experience. Let me bring you up to speed.

First, I built a garden on my roof from scratch:

Then I planted seeds in it. I had high hopes! I planted many glorious things like lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, cauliflower, chard, spinach, et cetera.

And lots of them grew!

And they grew and grew...sort of. You see, the roof is a very windy and miserable place in spite of getting lots of sun. The plants looked to be surviving, but they were paying a price: the spinach and chard were as thick as pennies and they had the texture of scrambled eggs when we tried cooking them up. Most of the other plants just looked generally traumatized all the time.

The wind howled relentlessly.

It wasn't long before everything had gone to seed or died.

It was sad and frustrating. I let it go wild for a while, stopped watering it, and then dug almost all of it up and sent it back to the compost heap.

I then proceeded to completely forget about it for a little while. Sometimes I'm not good with learning experiences.

But then one day I went up there to pick some of the sole survivor - cilantro, which had turned purple but was otherwise still sort of viable - and noticed something amazing: there were little tomatoes on the otherwise completely dead-looking tomato plants.
What a miracle!

So now I am un-giving up on the garden. I've started watering it again and I pulled out all the junk. Lettuce seems to be able to grow up there reasonably well up there so I planted a bunch and am now thinking about Rooty Rooftop as our own private, fresh - if limited selection - salad bar.

I'm learning.