The Rooftop Gardening Source

Urban agriculturalists Keith Agoada (Sky Vegetables and Rooftop Gardening Source), Dr. Mike Nichols, Anthony Foo, Ms. Morag Gamble, and Geoff Wilson will be presenting at the this half day conference. Find out more at the Green Roofs Australia Website

The Rooftop Gardening Source will provide you with more information about the speakers and the urban agriculture conference in the coming days.

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Are you a rooftop farming guru interested in spreading the love of growing veggies on the roof? Well now is your chance! We don’t care what your technique is, we just want to hear from you.

Email Keith@skyvegetables.com

From: Japan for Sustainability

A rooftop sweet-potato hydroponics system provided by NTT Facilities Inc., won an Eco-Products Award in the Eco-Services category on November 26, 2007 from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The system grows sweet potatoes without soil by circulating water, mixed with soluble fertilizer containing minerals and other nutrients, through the growing unit.

Compared to conventional rooftop greening systems, this system has advantages in that it is light, does not need nursery soil to be carried up to rooftops, and can automatically control supplies of water and fertilizer. When sweet potato plants give off water vapor from their leaves, they absorb large amounts of heat, lowering the surrounding temperature. According to research by NTT Facilities comparing an area covered with sweet potatoes and a non-vegetated area, the daily temperature varies by only 3 degrees Celsius in the vegetated area, compared to 27 degrees in the non-vegetated area.

This system makes good use of the sweet-potato’s strengths, such as fast growth, high insulation capability, and ease of cultivation. Sweet potatoes are generally supposed to be ready to harvest five months after installing the cultivation units. Since the system doesn’t use soil, it is easily installed on existing buildings. It also provides the enjoyable experience of harvesting the potatoes, as well as an opportunity to learn about related environmental problems.

http://www.japanfs.org/db/1606-e

Israeli architect firm Knafo Klimor won first prize at the 2nd International Architecture Competition for Sustainable Housing. The building features a high tech rooftop vegetable garden. http://www.knafoklimor.co.il/living-steel/10.html

From TreeHuggers

This evidently won “Best of Show” in the Cascadia Region Green Building Council’s Living Building Challenge. It is a “Center for Urban Agriculture,” a building, located on a .72-acre site, that includes fields for growing vegetables and grains, greenhouses, rooftop gardens and even a chicken farm.” According to CEO Washington, The building also would run completely independent of city water, providing its own drinking water partly by collecting rain via the structure’s 31,000-square-foot rooftop rainwater collection area. The water would be treated and recycled on site. And photovoltaic cells would produce nearly 100 percent of the building’s electricity.

“Constantly developing creative and challenging ideas is the best way to uncover innovative solutions to today’s problems,” states CEO Bert Gregory of Mithun in a news release touting the concept. ” And not to worry, potential urban-farm dwellers. Mithun would make room for humans, as well as chickens. The site would provide 318 small studio, one- and two-bedroom affordable apartments (no word on the mitigation of farm smells wafting into your room). The entry level would feature a cafe serving organic foods grown on site. Produce grown at the site would be distributed to local grocers, saving even more energy by reducing transportation miles.”

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/09/mithun_architec.php

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 Rooftop Garden Source was created by urban agriculture enthusiasts looking to provide the world with current events, links, academic articles and professional commentary on the growing rooftop vegetable farming industry.

We recently stumbled upon this sustainable and logical farming method which has been in practice for centuries. We have conducted research and learned that his could without a doubt be applied globally to help fight climate change and hunger amongst a handful of other pressing issues. The potential for rooftop vegetable farming is limitless.

Unfortunately, this concept is not organized on the internet and is relatively unknown outside the urban agriculture community. It is our vision that we can help bring this revolutionary and world saving farming method to the main stream by creating a place on the internet which organizes all rooftop vegetable farming resources.

The Roof Garden Source is a project by the Urban Agriculture firm, Sky Vegetables. More information about Sky Vegetables will be added in the near future.

Thanks and Enjoy

The Sky Vegetables Staff

By Hazim Younis

Recently, Egypt has embarked on a project to increase the amount of greenery on rooftops. This provided a good opportunity for housewives and youth to use their time fruitfully and increase oxygen production in a choking environment.

Due to the rapid expansion of the Egyptian population, and building on cultivated land, there are limited resources for many families living in the major cities. This situation has a negative impact on the general well-being of the families living in poor urban or suburban neighborhoods. Similar conditions can be found in much of the developing world. A solution to a small part of this problem could be providing these families with an easy source of income and healthy nutrition.

This easy-to-do project can be carried out by anyone. All the materials and professional advice needed are found at the Central Laboratory of Agricultural Climate (CLAC). Dr. Usama Al Baheiri, president of CLAC, states that vast areas are not required to carry out the project. However, it is important that all sorts of junk or garbage be removed from the rooftop so that no sunlight is blocked from the plants. The area to be used should have sunlight for at least four to five hours daily to allow enough exposure for the fruits and vegetables to flourish.

http://www.islamonline.net/English/Science/2004/09/article03.shtml

Driven originally by a desire to improve the city environments, the St Petersburg Urban Gardening Club started to transform rooftops into valuable gardening space in 1993. In Russia most people in larger cities live in buildings with huge sturdy rooftops constructed to withstand heavy falls of snow. They also typically have very limited access to land. The scheme aims to give people access to gardens so that they can produce vegetables for their own consumption or to sell in the local market.

There are approximately 15 rooftop gardens and 100 participants in St Petersburg. The European Union (EU) provides funding, while a local organisation, Centre for Citizens Initiatives (CCI), provides consultations and teaching seminars, and furnishes technical and material assistance to urban residents and institutions that create rooftop gardens. Last but not least, community members build and manage the gardens themselves.

A rooftop garden in St Petersburg

Theoretically, any roof surface can be greened - even sloped or curved roofs can support a layer of sod or wild flowers. It depends on how the garden is to be used, what the gardeners want to grow, and how often they will need to access the roof. A flat roof, approximating level ground conditions, is easy to work with.

One of the apartment blocks where the scheme has been introduced is cooperatively owned. Brick-built, with nine storeys, it houses 267 apartments with 540 residents, 60 per cent of whom are pensioners. It produces 200 kilos of food garbage daily in winter and 300 kilos in summer. The house has a flat roof of 1700 square metres, and 600 square metres of cellar. People living in the apartments compost their household waste in the cellar, recycle all other waste where possible, and then use soil on the roofs to grow vegetables.

While individuals own their apartments, the government owns the stairways and the rooftops. Permission is needed to use the rooftop in case of concerns about damage caused to the waterproofing by footfall. A surface has to be constructed to minimise this.

http://www.tve.org/ho/doc.cfm?aid=1400

DAKAR, Senegal — Can roof-top vegetable gardens contribute in any substantial way to the food needs of big cities? In an experiment within FAO’s Special Program for Food Security, hydroponic micro-gardens are being cultivated here to find out.

Aminata Diop, 30, bustles around elevated trays of tomatoes, lettuce, beans and pumpkins growing on the roof of her parents’ house in a suburb of Dakar. The plants grow not in soil but hydroponically — in nutrient-enriched water. The plants are supported by an aggregate of gravel and groundnut shells or grow through holes punched in sheets of styrofoam, which float on the water in the tray.

Ms Diop learned how to set up and tend her micro-garden at a five-day farmers’ training class held by FAO. A one-metre-square box on wooden legs, which costs about US$7 to build, can yield 40 to 50 kilos of tomatoes per year. The seedlings come from the project nursery.

http://www.fao.org/NEWS/2002/020102-e.htm