Rooftop garden

Gidget's Garden can be a little sun starved during certain times of the year so while growing year round in San Diego is possible, we had to find a solution to not having enough sun in our front garden. Luckily we have a flat roofed garage that gets full sun year round so we started a garden up there in April. At first we started with just a small portion of the garage and now we are in the midst of expanding our space up there. 

The rooftop when a garden up here was just an idea

The first part of the rooftop garden

We supported the garage from underneath and then added weather proofed plywood to the top of the roof. Next we built a couple of small planter boxes. All of this was done because of our friends at Sonny San Diego.

And then we added EarthBoxes in the rest of the space

EarthBoxes or another type of self watering container makes the most sense for us on the roof because they are fairly lightweight and the self watering system reduces the overall water on the roof.

Happy girls right after the initial roof project was done

We've been gardening on the roof since April and we are having great success. The full sun and the breeze up there make for mostly happy plants. I am surprised that we have as many pests up there as we do on the ground though. I don't know why but I thought the rooftop would have less pests. We still have leaf hoppers, caterpillars, ants, and aphids up there and as of this morning, we can add monster grasshoppers to that list too.

Monster grasshopper eating my beans on roof

The expanded rooftop space

Now we have almost 4 times as much space on the roof and we will put all of the EarthBoxes we have up here so we can continue to have a productive garden all the way through winter. We even planted more tomatoes here last week. They should do well in even in the fall season because of our warm weather and the full sun.

We have lots of work to do now to fill up our new space

"Where are we putting the rooftop chickens?"