Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

It’s snowing in New Jersey today, but that’s not keeping us from thinking about and looking forward to another season with our rooftop garden.

We’ve got a new item to add to our garden wishlist:

What’s that, you ask? A Plant Cam! It’s a rugged, weatherproof digital camera that takes pictures of your garden at regular intervals. It stitches the photos together into a video, so that you have a neat little recording of your growing season. (You can imagine other uses for this too: capturing scenes of wildlife, construction projects, etc.)

Wingscapes has developed several versions of these cameras, including  motion-activated cameras for bird watching. You can see a number of photos and videos on their website. We’d like to see what birds and bugs are visiting our green roof too!

Until we have a Plant Cam installed, we’ll keep taking our own pictures and posting them to our Flickr stream. Come take a look at our garden and green roof over the past couple of years.

Images: Wingscapes

Although it will be a few months yet before we can get our hands back into our rooftop garden, we’ve been thinking about ways to improve our operations in 2011.

We have a water source on our rooftop that we use to water our garden, but we haven’t ventured into the world of rain barrels. 2011 might be the year, especially after discovering the beautifully designed Pure Raindrop and Raindrop Mini by Bas van der Veer:

The Pure Raindrop rain barrel has a watering can built in that fills up automatically and makes plant watering easy. When the watering can is empty, open the tap at the bottom of the Raindrop and refill it!

Here’s the Pure Raindrop exhibited at the Trend Garden in Appeltern, The Netherlands:

For urban and small space dwellers, van der Veer developed the Raindrop Mini, and it is just as beautiful as the original design:

It was designed specifically for use on balconies and in small gardens, and it comes in a variety of colors (shown here with the designer):

Did you know rain barrels could be so sleek?! Neither did we.

Images: Bas van der Veer
via Inhabitat

At Dodge, we have a staff “Green Team” which meets monthly to discuss and improve our green practices. We focus on a variety of areas, including how to green our Poetry Festival, how to choose office supplies, what we can learn from urban gardening, and what we call “Whole Person” measures, addressing our physical and mental health needs, so that we can be productive employees.

One of the new initiatives of the Green Team for 2011 is to compost. Although we’ve been composting our food on a small scale for awhile, one of our colleagues has always taken the waste home to her own compost pile. Now we’ve got this terrific new tool, a Nature Mill composter, for helping us compost our food scraps quickly and turning it into soil that we can use for our rooftop garden.

We can lift the top lid and throw food waste in there anytime, and an automatic motor mixes, heats and aerates it, eventually turning it into soil, which it deposits into a lower chamber with a pull out bin.

What we like about the composter is how quickly it breaks down the waste into compost and that it composts dairy, meat and fish, in addition to the more traditional items like fruit, vegetables and coffee grounds. And, of course, no worms or bugs necessary!

We’re just getting the hang of this – trying to get familiar with what we should be putting in it, remembering to put our lunch waste in it every day – and we look forward to using the soil for our garden this spring and summer. We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

Do you compost at home? Have any composting tricks to share with readers?

And, how green is your workplace – does your office have eco-friendly practices? We’d like to hear! Please let us know in the comments below.

You can learn more about Nature Mill composters from their website.

Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

We’re only weeks away from getting our hands in the dirt and planting our rooftop garden—we’ve already cleaned it up and have starter plants of lettuces, dill and radishes in our kitchen. We’re also working with the Freylinghuysen Arboretum to source native and local plants and to help us plan for three seasons of planting.

We took advantage of the warm weather last week to clean up our planters.

Our lavender and chives are thriving already.

And so are our strawberries!

This compost bin is a very happy addition to our gardening arsenal. We have a smaller compost bin in our staff kitchen which we empty into our rooftop bin frequently. In addition to our food scraps, the Dodge Foundation uses compostable plates, cups and napkins which we can tear up and stick in our bin.

Right now, the rest of our green roof is growing beautifully. The color of the sedum is spectacular.

I’ll share more pictures as this year’s garden grows. In the meantime, if you want to take a look at last year’s garden and green roof photos, you can find them on Flickr.

While we’re on the topic of green roofs and gardens, below is an interesting video from the Guardian on green roofs in Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK which I saw on Twitter via our friends at grist. (Follow grist on Twitter).

Here’s a clever idea for small space gardening from Re-nest using recycled soda bottles:

From CRAFT, you might find these best easy garden tips helpful:

And The Crochet Dude helps you plant your garden in an easy grid:

Excited to get your hands in the dirt? What are you planting this year?

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7-10
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Molly de Aguiar, Program Associate

Tomorrow we’re cleaning up (composting!) the remnants of our garden, and we’ll be talking as a group about the lessons we learned from our first year of urban gardening as well as planning for what we’d like to accomplish next year.

For me personally, it was such a treat to watch the green roof grow this year, to pick fresh strawberries and cherry tomatoes at lunchtime, and to see the bees and butterflies come to our flowers. And there’s nothing so restorative during the busy work day than to eat lunch in the sunshine,  surrounded by the trees, flowers and grass—one floor up!

Here’s a look back at our green roof this first year in our new offices, starting with what it looked like before it was planted (November 2008) to the present. Pretty remarkable, don’t you think?

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Dodge has announced its new guidelines. Please visit our website for full details.

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