The Rooftop Gardening Source

On 5/28, NPR’s popular radio show, “On Point with Tom Ashbrook” dedicated an hour to the current food crisis facing the United States and the World. The program’s featured guest is best selling author of “The End of Oil”, Paul Roberts. Roberts has a new book in stores next week titled “The End of Food.” This book provides fantastic insight into the broken food industry. It has received rave reviews from the media; including author Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilema) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature). lAlso making a guest appearance on the program is Founder and President of Sky Vegetables and The Rooftop Gardening Source, Keith Agoada. Sky Vegetables was featured on the last 20 minutes of the show as a possible solution to the deteriorating industry. We encourage you to listen to the Podcast of the show, found on NPR’s On Point website

Helen may be the women that launched a thousand warships ships , but it was Amyitis, the wife of King Nebuchadnezzar II, that motivated the construction of a rooftop garden worthy of being named one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. During his 43 year reign of Mesopotamia which began in 605 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar built a lavish array of rooftop gardens to bring joy to his wife who longed for the green mountainous scenery of her homeland.

It is difficult to imagine the green, lush masterpiece under the backdrop of a dry mountainous landscape and under the shadow of the biblical Tower of Babel. The gardens were approximately 400 feet wide by 400 feet long and more than 80 feet high. The most technically astounding aspect of the gardens must have been irrigated by the Euphrates river because Babylon rarely received rain. Scientists offer that the garden was watered through a “chain pump” system which was powered by a handle continually turned by workers below.

The architectural masterpiece of Babylon was a rooftop garden built to be a grand spectacle. We can only hope that the empires of the 21^st century can be motivated to create such vast rooftop garden to sustain the growing number of hungry mouths cramming into urban spaces.

- By Joseph Agoada, Chairman of Two Wheeled Foundation, Inc., recycling bicycles for global development and climate change mitigation. www.twowheeledfoundation.org

The “field,” which is 20 meters wide and 250 meters long, consists of 300 plots that cover 6 square meters each. The project became possible after the Odakyu Line was relocated underground, freeing up a new “rooftop” space.

Agris Seijo is no run-of-the-mill vegetable garden. Members of the urban gardening club pay an annual fee of 136,500 yen, for which they are given access to showers, a clubhouse with a lounge, gardening tools imported from Britain and rubber boots manufactured by a French outdoor goods brand. Fertilizer and other chemicals are also on hand.

Members can attend a variety of vegetable-themed lectures on topics as diverse as: baking cakes and confections with vegetables, and the art of vegetable carving. Those too busy to make it to the garden for an extended period of time can pay extra to get someone to tend their crops. An all-inclusive special membership package, which covers this service, costs 525,000 yen annually.

Tomoyasu Moriguchi, 42, an official at Odakyu Land Flora Corp., the company that manages Agris Seijo, said: “We hope to offer a wide range of services on the vegetable theme. Our goal is to create a new type of gardening culture.”

When it comes to urban gardening, Osaka’s busy Minami district is a step ahead. Namba Parks, a major shopping and business complex that opened next to Nankai Electric Railway’s Namba Station, has a terrace-style garden, “Parks Garden,” that reaches from the second to the ninth floors. Tucked away at one end is “Urban Farm,” a small vegetable garden that contains 20 plots, each measuring 6 square meters.

The annual rental fee is 50,400 yen, which provides access to shower facilities and gardening tools. When it opened in 2003, there were 1,100 applicants for the 20 plots. The company does not advertise, but that didn’t stop more than 150 people from putting their names down for vacated plots earlier this year as membership is renewed annually.

Almost all the “farmers” are novices. Masahiro Nishibane, 34, a Parks Garden official, helps with the cultivation planning and growing. Pesticides are not allowed. Nishibane said: “It is possible to grow vegetables right here in the middle of a bustling city. I want people to have fun with this.”

http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2007/06/kitchen_gardens_1.html

The roof garden has been created and landscaped using special drainage systems. The garden features a main lawn area with clipped box parterres, these are filled with tarragon, chinese chives, oregano and other culinary herbs. The garden also boasts a row of espalier trained apple trees which are all old local varieties such as ‘Keswick Codlin’ (1793) and ‘Ladies Finger of Lancaster’ (1824).

Shrub roses fill the garden with scent, whilst further shrubs and herbaceous plants add to the colourful display around the main garden area. The sheltered rooftop garden affords an unrivalled view across the Lake to Gummers How.

http://www.lakesidehotel.co.uk/lake-district/hotel/garden/rooftop-garden.html

This the rooftop container garden at the Headquarters of WXHQ 105.9 LPFM in Newport , Rhode Island. This garden is a working educational garden to promote sustainable agriculture and Green living. The seedlings have made great progress in our unusually warm early fall weather. The rainbow Chard and Kale are booming, no signs of Broccoli heads yet but the plants are consuming 2 gallons of rainwater per day. The Great American Rain Barrels are performing beyond expectation, collecting 120 gallons of rainwater per storm. The copper downspout modification eliminates overshoot of the roof runoff. This project is made possible by the generous support of Earthbox, the Great American Rain Barrel Company, Seeds of Change (organic seed company), Bliss Natural Grocer and Simmons Farm.

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http://www.google.com/base/a/1537490/D10902677995838814500

The architecture department at McGill University in Montreal joined forces with Canadian-based Roof-Top Gardens to create a garden on the concrete steps of the university’s Burnside Building.

The advantages to the project are many. Aside from the money and energy being saved by not importing fruits and vegetables, the garden is being used for a charitable cause as well. The Meals On Wheels program run by the Montreal-based community organization Santropol Roulant, which brings meals to home-bound elderly people, receives about one-third of its vegetables from the Roof-Top Garden during the summer. Additionally, students and faculty at the university feel that the garden brings a sense of nature to the very urban environment.

http://media.www.mcgilltribune.com/media/

A new program in an Indian slum aims to create a “culinary park network” on rooftops, as well as teach residents healthy cooking and proper nutrition. The program, established in Hyderabad, the capital city of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Is based on the work of Erik Sumanis, co-director of the “Base of the Pyramid Protocol” at Cornell University, the goal of which is to improve nutrition standards for the poor.

The 23 women in the program will seek to create numerous organic farms to grow vegetables, which will result in the cleanup of trash, as well as decrease dependency on importing fruits and vegetables from other villages, which is both more expensive and difficult to keep fresh.The 100-acre slum has roughly 100,000 residents. The project is being funded by The Solae Company, which distributes soy foods and invests in researching the health benefits of soy protein.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120460488471909759.html

Canopy created this prime example of a small scale roof garden in Washington, DC. This project is located at the famous Tabard Inn. The owner was interested in a green roof which also would possess the benefits of providing herbs, flowers and food. Canopy constructed this garden using wooden boxes to provide a traditional “herb garden” feel. Specifically, the boxes have different soil depths and are used to grow low bush blueberries, chives, thyme, rosemary, basil, sage, lemon verbena and climbing roses. The roof was completed in the fall of 2007.

http://www.Greenroofcanopy.com