Rooftop Gardening

After finding myself with a very sunny but drab and boring back patio, which is in fact the roof of the first floor kitchen, I decided to try my hand at rooftop gardening.

First, I started out by planting seeds –

then I moved them all outside to tables where they could be watered easily –

I became very impatient but then, finally, things started popping up! –

So I started recycling strange containers into planters and began transplanting things –

Look carefully to find ‘upscaled’ chicken cages, feeders and drinkers, as well as clay rabbit feed and water bowls and wooden boxes used by rabbit mommies for building their nests in – I had a blast hunting in the jampacked storage room for all these treasures! I hauled them all up, bit by bit, and then had fun times moving things around –

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and things started looking pretty nice –

You might think this is a swing, but in fact it’s a support belt worn by the man who climbs the date palm trees… more on that later! And if you look beyond the fence of the patio, you can see the grape arbor we built in the back yard from bamboo harvested from the canal alongside the house –

This is granddaughter Nada (means “Dew”) enjoying a rose in my garden, I made many cuttings from the one below me in the backyard –

This is sugarcane I planted from the root stubs of a few stalks –

and these are baby papaya trees I started from the seeds of a papaya a neighbor gave us –

these are the same sugarcane plants, along the fence with the banana trees, and you can see the line of papaya trees, where Mohamed planted them, too –

these are the papaya trees a little closer up –

I love it here, the weather is gorgeous and the view is beautiful from every window, but it’s especially peaceful sitting under the gazebo –