Food Roof

Tonight we attended a tour of a recently opened community garden called Food Roof, run by a local organization, Urban Harvest.

Great night to be on a roof downtown!

It gave us some great ideas and resources for our future roof top. We’ve managed to keep a few herbs and a lot of mint, but we haven’t attempted anything larger than that yet.

They are testing several types of planting methods- raised beds and traditional rows of plants grown in a special soil-less medium.

Here are some of the varied containers they are testing.

They are running on grants and in kind donations but are hoping to provide produce to local restaurants.

I have bee-envy! We like how they used the railing as a trellis for cherry tomatoes.

I asked the Executive Director what she would do differently. She said she would want to do more of these hydroponic tower gardens. We’re going to do more research on the different versions of these and try one out on our second floor.

They have flowers to support the urban fauna. At first, she said she discouraged the birds until she saw one take out a grasshopper. The birds are welcome, now.  Squirrels haven’t found the garden, yet. We have a solution for that- our old tomato gazebo! We’re not expecting to turn the roof into a farm-scaled production, but having our own fresh veggies would be great.