Rooftop Gardening
Originally posted by Bennett Hall, Willamette Week, April 13, 1994 as " Urban Space Explorers: When they ran out of space, one family moved up"
Space: In America's increasingly overcrowded cities, it is fast becoming the final frontier. And in one of the most densely populated areas of Portland, Ole and Maitri Ersson are pioneering the future.
The couple moved three years ago from Cambridge, Massachusetts, so Ole could attend Oregon Health Sciences University. Their first priority was to locate housing near a good school--the oldest of their three children was about to enter the first grade.
What they found, right across the street from Buckman Elementary School in inner Southeast Portland, was a boarded-up halfway house that had been abandoned after one the tenants died in a bedroom fire. Besides smoke and water damage from the blaze, there were 30 broken windows, a couple of smashed-in doors and vomit all over one wall.
But where neighbors saw an eyesore, the Erssons saw an opportunity. They bought the place for a good price and set to work fixing it up. They quickly transformed the two-story, three-bedroom derelict into an airy, comfortable home.
Having reclaimed the house, they started in on the yard. And in no time flat, they were pushing the envelope of urban space exploration.
Typical of the neighborhood, it's a cramped lot--40 by 100 feet, with the house and detached garage taking up a good 35 percent of the space. But the Erssons have made the most of it.
"We garden every square inch of the place," Ole says.
That sounds like an exaggeration. Actually, it's an understatement.
The tiny front yard explodes with Maitri's many-hued flowers. Marigolds, nasturtiums, geraniums, lobelias, daisies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, dahlias, penstemons, petunias, begonias, snapdragons, sweet williams, day lilies, delphiniums, hollyhocks--they crowd the font walk, form a screen between sidewalk and street, line the front steps in little pots and fringe the porch in hanging baskets.
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The driveway, twin strips of concrete running back to the garage, is shoehorned between the house and the retaining wall that marks the south side of the property. The narrow passageway would give most American cars a bad case of claustrophobia, but the Erssons don't use it for parking. To them, it's arable land.
Calendula flowers fill wooden planters made from old ammo crates at the base of the retaining wall, and strawberries rub elbows with an English laurel hedge on the slim border of soil above. Gladioli, sweet peas, primroses, forget-me-nots, lemon mint and few volunteer tomatoes line the wall of the house opposite.
Down the middle of the driveway, between the concrete strips, the family has planted ornamental gourds. Last year the gourd vines sprawled all over the place, but this year the Erssons have put in a wire fence and trained the plants to grow upward, leaving a little walking room on either side. "We decided we didn't want to sacrifice the whole driveway," Ole says.
The backyard is devoted to food crops, primarily greens: chard, spinach, beet greens and a half-dozen varieties of kale. "We try to have enough greens laid in the fall to last all winter," Ole says.
Besides the greens there are carrots, strawberries, bush and pole beans, green peas, summer squash and tomatoes laid out in neat, rectangular beds divided by brick stepping stones. "Instead of using raised beds we use sunken beds," Ole says, "and then our walkway is raised, so we can just irrigate." A small herb garden, bordered with pungent-smelling marigolds to ward off insects, takes up one corner of the yard. Protecting the north fence is a veritable palisade of raspberries, which the Erssons plan to extend along the east fence next year.
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The family's drive to reclaim wasted space has even expanded beyond their own property. After clearing away "bucket after bucket" of trash from a narrow strip of unused land at the back of two lots adjoining their own, the Erssons began cultivating garlic, potatoes and fava beans on the small "annex". That reclamation project, however, has hit a snag. Even though the change was a vast improvement aesthetically, the absentee owner of on of the properties, a small apartment complex, has expressed concerns about potential liability problems. Undaunted, the Erssons have turned those beds over to one of the apartment dwellers, providing him with seeds and advice to keep the garden going.
As amazing as these accomplishments are, however, they are only the beginning of the Ersson's space program. Now that they've exploited every square inch of their yard (and portions of their neighbors'), they've found yet another place to garden: their roof. "Most people don't use their rooftops," Ole points out, warming to a discussion of the project's possibilities. "It's the one untapped resource in the city."
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Using the frame of pressure-treated two-by-fours for support, Ole has mounted eight 5-gallon plastic buckets along the ridge of his steeply pitched roof. The buckets are planted in pumpkins--not so much for food as for shade.
"Our goal is to have most of the roof covered by vines eventually," Ole explains. "Having a cover of leaves would significantly decrease the heat absorbed by the house."
The south wall also soaks up a lot of rays, but Ole has a solution for that problem, too: grapes, or possibly kiwis. "We want to have vines at each end growing up the leaves."
Although Maitri won't come up until her husband makes the roof a little less precarious to walk around on, Ole is very excited about the prospects for vertical gardening. "You come up here and you get a totally different perspective on things." he says. He's toying with the he idea of using a plastic canopy to turn the roof into a greenhouse for winter crops, taking advantage of the heat rising from the house and possibly even capturing the growth-enhancing carbon dioxide produced as an exhaust gas by the furnace.
Maitri hopes some of her neighbors will profit by her family's example. "Lawns are nice," she says, "so green and pleasant to look at, but they're such a waste." High-efficiency gardening, she believes, is the shape of things to come, and it's up to urban pioneers like her and her husband to make it happen.
It's a future, says Ole, "that we'll create.​​​
FUELS FOR LOVE
by Benett Hall
Fueling the Ersson's inner-city family farm is a substantial compost pile framed by castoff wooden freight pallets scavenged from the nearby Produce Row warehouse district. "The secret to compost," Ole confides, "is to have a proper balance of nitrogen and carbon."
To maintain that balance and keep the compost aerated, the Erssons alternate dense, nitrogen-rich layers of table scraps with high-carbon strata made up of leaf and wood chips, waste products that are delivered free by local landscapers.
To keep watering costs down, they capture the gray water from their washing machine in a 55-gallon steel drum for use in irrigation, sticking to simple, unscented detergents to protect their plants. (Last year they balanced the alkali in the wastewater by adding small amounts of their own urine, but they've since abandoned the practice as unnecessary.) They also divert rainwater from their gutters into their yard to save water and cut down the load on the city storm sewers, a strategy Ole believes could solve the problem of sewage spilling into the Willamete and Columbia rivers during wet weather.
And with true pioneer self-reliance, the Erssons replant many of their crops from their own store of seeds. "So many of them are not very good that you get from the stores," Ole complains. So, once plants go to seeds in the fall, the Erssons hang them upside down in the basement over containers that catch the seeds as they fall out. The family estimates a 95 percent germination rate from its private stock.
All this efficiency pays off for the Erssons in lower food bills. "I buy a bag of potatoes at the grocery store about every two weeks," says Maitri, as well as a few other staples such as grain for making bread. But with all the fresh produce coming out of the garden, she estimates that she feeds her family of five a nutritious vegetarian diet for about $30 a week