Metropolitan Gardening

  A lec Baxt discusses soil amendments for growing vegetables in the rooftop environment. Particularly we explore his experimental use of "Bio-Char" which may be a ground breaking idea for mixing with roof light to potentially create a nutritious and fertile growing medium. Alec is the Founding Farmer of Farming up.org in Brooklyn, NYC There is another longer video of this interview forthcoming that delves deeper into the details of the subject.

T he Bowery Mission has began a Rooftop Farming Project to augment their kitchen's vegetable source. This garden was just planted this last few weeks and uses a light weight soil with mulch in plastic beds with gravel. The goals of the roof top farm are to provide mission residents an opportunity to develop care for the plants and an understanding  of the responsibility that it takes to grow food. Self sufficiency and and sustainability are the vision. In the coming weeks we hope to get more information on the materials and development of the garden. Our visit included a tour of the Bowery Mission facilities and a history of the venerable and respected institution. The staff was kind and had opened it's doors to participate in the street fair for the Festival of Ideas for the New City .

D usty Gedge is the punk rock of green roofs. He's put green roofs on Barclays Tower in London and the Komodo Dragon House at London Zoo. He is a leader in the UK in the promotion and development of green roofs... and perhaps the emerging go to consultant for euro policy and planning on the matter.    and ... and... and... he juggles. Dusty sent us this link to a training film on green roofs to share - GREAT INTRODUCTION TO GREEN ROOFS! Metropolitan Gardening caught up with Dusty while he was in Istanbul doing a wildlife adventure and asked Mr. Gedge a few questions recently. MG:What made you think to integrate juggling and green roof training? Dusty: not sure about but juggling is a system and we are interested in eco system services - there is an analogy there - i think! MG:Do you have any patents? What innovations you have seen over the years? Dusty: Don't have patents as I not very commercially minded! Innovations - there aren't really any innovations - this is

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm | A Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint Brooklyn Because of a continuing adoration for rooftop farming the topic inevitably gets airtime- recently an engineer friend brought up the weight of snow to  in a discussion about rooftop farming, green building and the ever increasing burden of code. Additionally the weight of the produce, planting tools ect might be considered - anyone have links to structural engineering and rooftop gardening?