Green roof

I was starting to get worried that my entire rooftop garden was going to end up living in a third floor windowsill. While there's been an awful lot of greenery popping up in indoor seed trays over the past few weeks, up until this morning I hadn't actually seen anything pop through the soil in my 6 rooftop containers.

And then this morning I went out and found at least one tiny bit of green in every planter. I seeded three snow pea plants in each of the 18 and 20 inch pots. I've spotted signs that at least 6 plants have decided to climb there way up to sunlight. I'm not sure these planters can actually sustain as many plants as I've put in them, but I figured there's a chance that not all the seeds will germinate, and I can cull some plants to make room for the faster growers.

I also noticed the first signs of green in the window boxes where I planted a few rows of spinach. Right now there's not a whole lot going on in this area -- just two tiny, tiny plants. But I suspect that one day I'll blink and there'll be a dozen full sized plants hanging out on the rooftop. Once these little guys get going, not much stops them.

The biggest challenge I'm facing right now is figuring out how best to harden off the bunching onions and garlic chives growing in my seed trays. They're getting rather large and I think it's time to put them in the dirt on the rooftop soon -- but it's pretty windy up on the roof, and every time I set the seed tray outside for a few hours, when I bring it back inside the plants have been blown over sideways. A few hours in the windowsill usually sets things straight again, but I might need to provide some sort of wind protection on the rooftop for plants that don't have thick stems.

Good morning bok choy!

It's only been a few days since I planted bok choy in a seed tray, but today I found my first three sprouts poking their way through the soil.

Of course, when you zoom out, things aren't quite as exciting. It'll take a little while before these little guys end up in the stir fry pan. But everybody has to start somewhere.

I'm not seeing a lot of movement in the planters on the rooftop yet, but just in case the snow pea seedlings I dropped in the planters don't make it, I've got a few extras starting out indoors. From what I understand, snow peas don't like to be transplanted, but I picked up a small peat seed tray that allows you to actually break off the entire cube and just plant it in the soil, allowing the tray to become part of the plant food. I bought it before learning that peat is a non-renewable resource, so I don't expect to use this kind of tray again next year, but not using it now would be even more wasteful.

I'll probably give the snow peas on the roof another week or so to make their move before taking any of the indoor kids outdoors. It's a bit cold outside on the rooftop, and quite windy, which could be part of the problem. I might have to look for some sort of material that can be used as a wind break. 

Peppers, spinach and bok choy... oh my!

It may not look like much now, but just you wait.

I started a new seed tray with peppers and bok choy today, and seeded some spinach in two long window box style planters on the rooftop. So far I don't see any movement in the planters with snow peas on the roof, but just in case those don't pop up I have a few going indoors. But peas apparently don't like to be transplanted, so I'm hoping to see some growth in the rooftop planters soon. I planted more seeds in each pot than I need, because I can always cull extra plants, but it's tough to get started too late in the season.

I also plan to start hardening off the onions ans chives in the next few days by putting their seed tray outdoors for a few hours at a time. This will also allow me to move the peppers and bok choy into their coveted windowsill spot once the new kids start to sprout.

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It's been one week since you planted me...

It's amazing how quickly some plants sprout. It's been just over a week since I planted scallion and garlic chives in my seed tray, and the onion side is choc full of healthy green sprouts.

The garlic chives side of the tray, on the other hand, is a bit of a wasteland. It's a bit early for me to decide if this is because it just takes chives longer to sprout than scallions, or if the conditions aren't as good for the little guys. My guess is it's at least partially the former, because every day I see a little more growth from the chives, but just a little.

The biggest problem I'm going to face if this keeps up is that the scallions may be ready to plant outdoors before the garlic chives. If I were just going to pull them out of the tray and plant them in containers on the rooftop, that would be fine. But I want to spend at least a few days hardening them off instead, which means setting the tray outside for a few hours at a time to get the onions used to outdoor conditions gradually.

Next time I'll have to think about making sure all the plants I pop into a seed tray together have similar germination periods so that everybody's ready to go outside at the same time.

Traffic

Google changed its algorithm last month in an effort to provide search results that are more useful. Generally the move has been reported as an effort to reduce the number of so-called "content farm" posts that you'll find in the first page of Google search results. Content farms are basically the sweat shops of the blogosphere, cranking out hundreds or thousands of articles per day to try to grab some search traffic -- often with pretty funny results.

I can't be too hard on content farms though, because they were the inspiration for one of the funniest parody sites on the net. And to be honest, some of the content on sites that are widely considered to be content farms isn't all that bad. You might not find the most in-depth tutorials at sites such as eHow or Mahalo, but you might find exactly what you're looking for -- a place to get started.

Unfortunately when Google changes its algorithm, there are often ripples felt throughout the internet and a number of web sites producing original, informative content experienced a dip in search engine traffic. My sites haven't been exempt.

Liliputing and Mobiputing both experienced a dip in traffic in February when the new algorithm took effect. It's extraordinarily hard to figure out exactly what kind of dip though, because traffic tends to go up and down throughout the year, and Mobiputing is just over a year old -- which means it's hard to compare historic data. I'd say Liliputing might have taken a 10-15% hit though, which makes sense, since around half of that site's visitors come from search engines, primarily Google.

It's a strange business we're in. I'd like to think that I'm writing for my loyal readers, not for random folks who happen to be searching Google for keywords such as "xoom tablet" or "x220," both of which were top sources of traffic for Liliputing this week. But the truth is that I'm doing both. I'm writing for people who keep coming back day after day for news about the latest mobile technology and for people who are researching new computers, smartphone apps, or other topics that I happen to write about -- and who may only make a single visit to one of my sites this year. And the dirty little secret of making money online is that those not-quite-random visitors pay most of the billls.

After all, if you're searching for Dell laptops and you happen to come across my web site and find a review of the Dell Inspiron M101z as well as an add promising 15% off of Dell laptops, the ad is just as relevant as the article -- why wouldn't you click it? But if you keep coming back every day, you'll probably get a sense of where the ads appear on the page and start tuning them out.

So it's Google's world, and those of us who make a living writing on the web are just living in it, and if Google changes its algorithm in a way that causes a serious dip in traffic, so be it.

Fortunately I haven't seen a huge dip in traffic from the latest algorithm, and in general I think Google does a pretty good job of bringing the best results to the top -- so if the company's engineers feel that web pages on other sites deserve to rank more highly than mine, so be it.

That said, Google is clearly not perfect. I've tried copying and pasting lines directly taken from my web sites into Google -- and I often find that web sites that scrape content from my page without permission now rank more highly. For instance, every week I run a roundup of top stories from Mobiputing on Liliputing. Because I'm too lazy to think up a clever name, the weekly post is called "This week in Mobiputing."

A few weeks ago, if you typed "this week in mobiputing" into Google you would get a page filled with links to posts from Liliputing. Now most of the top results are from sites that are scraping my content. In fact, you can tell they're taking articles directly from my RSS feed, because there's a line only included in my feed that says "This week in Mobiputing is a post from Liliputing," It doesn't show up on my web site, but it certainly shows up on scraper sites.

I used to ignore scrapers, because Google did a pretty good job of making sure that nobody really profited from stealing my content and sending cease and desist notices would be a full time job. But it's pretty frustrating to see other sites show up first in Google search results for articles that were copied and pasted from my web sites. I tried sending a few complaints to Google using the company's webmaster tools and AdSense tools, but nothing's happened so I figure it's not worth the effort.

Instead, I'll just continue to try to produce high quality content and hope that readers continue to notice, with or without Google's help.

Incidentally, while overall Google traffic to my web sites is down, traffic from Google News appears to be up a little bit. That could be a sign that Google is doing things right, since much of what I publish on Liliputing and Mobiputing is topical content which might be more relevant today than it is six months from now. 

I wouldn't be surprised to see a dip in traffic this time of year even if Google hadn't come out with a new search algorithm. While interest in mobile devices and apps continues to climb, traffic is always highest around the holidays, back to school shopping season, and around big tech events such as CES, Computex, or pretty much any major Apple announcement. I just wish Google weren't so obviously promoting content scrapers when the company's stated goal had been to penalize content farmers.

Seedlings

It's too early to start planning menus, but I have my first vegetable garden success stories today.

After soaking my snow peas in water for two days and then sandwiching them between several damp paper towels for two more days, several seeds have started sprouting little tails.

Later today I'll probably take these sprouts up to the roof and move them into their permanent homes, since snow peas are tolerant of cold weather.

I also filled a seed tray with soil this weekend and dropped in dozens of bunching onion and garlic chive seeds.

Yesterday afternoon I saw some of the first onion sprouts poking through the soil, and this morning there are even more -- and I spotted my first garlic chive growth.

These guys are all a bit fragile to put outside at this point, but hopefully within another week or two (or maybe three), I'll be able to set them outside.

I'm still waiting for the bok choy and spinach seeds I ordered to arrive, but as soon as they do I'll probably get to work on those as well. I also picked up some cold weather tolerant beans this weekend, but I'll probably wait until closer to April to plant those.

My original plan had been to wait until it starts to get too warm for the snow peas and to plant the beans amongst the snow peas and by the time I was ready to pull out the peas, the beans would be ready to take over. But if these new beans are more cold weather tolerant, I might start a few in their own planters to improve the chance of harvesting snow peas and green beans at the same time.

Planting seeds

It's been a busy day for my little rooftop garden. A friend and I stopped by GreensGrow, an urban farm in North Philadelphia today for a workshop on seed starting. We picked up some very large bags of soil with perlite and vermiculite mixed in, as well as some mushroom compost and then headed down to Home Depot, where I grabbed two more planters for the rooftop and some gravel to line the bottoms to help improve drainage.

Last week I started off with cheap soil that definitely needed a little extra something, so I mixed some of the new soil and compost into the other planters. It should be interesting to see how the veggies in the planters with mixed soil fare compared to the new guys with the slightly pricier stuff.

While the entire setup really didn't cost that much (about $140 for the planters, soil, gravel, compost to get started, and an outdoor rug), I'm hopeful that most of this is a one time cost. If all goes according to plan, I'll be able to grow crops throughout the spring, summer, and fall and then set aside the potting soil for next year, when I'll probably mix in some fresh compost and maybe some other goodies before planting seeds. But the big costs are out of the way -- and eventually I hope to stop even paying for compost, although I haven't decided if we have enough room for a real compost pile behind the house or if I'll try a worm bin in the basement.

Oh yeah, and seeds. But honestly, most seeds are so cheap it's almost embarrassing.

Today I started some of the cold weather crops indoors. I took some of the soil and spread it over a seed tray with 72 pockets, and filled half with garlic chive seeds and the other half with bunching onion seeds. I honestly don't know that I'll have enough room to move them all outdoors once they sprout, but I'm looking forward to finding out in a few weeks.

My other cold weather crop plans are for snow peas and some spinach and bok choy. I'm still waiting for the spinach and bok choy seeds I ordered to arrive.

Based on some advice we got at the seed starting seminar today, I'm trying to pre-sprout some snow pea seeds before sticking them outdoors. There appear to be a number of methods for doing this, but for my first attempt I'm just sticking some pea seeds in a jar for a day or two to see if I can get a root to peek out. If that doesn't work, I may try sticking some seeds between moist paper towels for a few days -- but the trick is finding a place to put the towels that the cats won't get to.

Anyway, snow peas are good with cold weather, so apparently you can plant them straight in the soil even in March (or earlier), but I'm hoping that sprouting them indoors will give them a little extra help to get started.

Setting up my rooftop container garden

Last year I grew a couple of sweet pepper plants on the roof. This year I plan to do better, bringing bok choy, snow peas, scallions, green beans and a few other goodies into the mix. It's still a bit early to put any plants outside, but I'm already starting to prepare my workspace and by mid-March some of the cold weather crops including snow peas and spinach should be ready to plant.

This weekend we picked up a 6' x 8' outdoor rug to throw on the roof and provide a little layer of protection between the planters and the rooftop. We also picked up a few largish planters and a good 160 pounds of cheap potting soil without any chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Believe it or not, the 160 pounds of material wasn't enough to fill the four planters you're looking at. I think I'll need another two or three 40 pound bags, and I'm planning to get a few more planters for additional plants. 

It'd be nice if we had a back yard with actual dirt, but unfortunately we have just a few square feet of concrete behind the house and not much sunlight, so the best option available to us is to lug heavy bags of soil up to the rooftop. But hey, part of the fun of gardening is the exercise, right? 

Anyway, I already snagged some organic snow pea seeds as well as seeds for garlic chives and scallions/bunching onions. I'll probably start the chives and onions indoors in a few weeks and set them outside in April. The snow peas should be good to plant in the ground in mid-March, and later this month I'll lay down some spinach as well before adding bok choy in April.

Right now I'm thinking the large circular planters should be good fro the snow peas and I'll add the scallions and onions around the base. When it starts to get hot out, I'll pull the snow peas and replace them with green beans. The wider planters are for the spinach and bok choy.

Now I'm making myself hungry.