This post is part of a series called Roof Garden Rookies, which explores my attempt, as an amateur gardener, to grow a garden on the rooftop of my building in lower Manhattan. Check out my roof garden in a recent feature in the New York Times.

Cukes are twisting and turning their way up the stakes as I’m training them to, and green tomatoes and baby eggplants abound. With nearly three weeks of rain behind us (which made the broccoli and the beans happy, but not so much the squash) the garden is verdant and overflowing its boxes.

And six weeks after planting, the garden is sharing more and more of her bounty.

Yesterday, I harvested a Stupice and a Green Zebra tomato, as well as a little Sungold which I popped right into my mouth (same goes for the strawberries, which are so few I consider them a gardener’s snack), two zucchinis: one small and one large, and a couple turnips for dinner last night.

It is not uncommon for a neighbor to peek up onto the roof while I’m popping off dead flowers, either to say hello, take in the fresh air, have a picnic, or all three. I can tell the garden has added to our collective quality of life as a building; it simply dresses up the roof and makes us want to spend time up there, admiring the unobstructed views of the empire state building, amid the flowers blooming their heads off and the vegetable-potential high above the noisy bars and men riding bikes pimped out with boom boxes in the Lower East Side. The bamboo fencing adds to the serenity, that is until a bird of prey swoops over head while I’m eating dinner with a friend at our makeshift table (a new planter, yet to be filled, turned on its side) and manages to snatch up a white pigeon in midair, and then glide back, ostensibly to its lair, to dine as well. Nature, in New York City!

We’ve also had visits from beneficial insects, like the ladybug on the dill flowers to the left, and the bee parade that comes every morning. We have not been without aphids, and some leaf-eaters, too, but the damage has been marginal.

Along with the just-picked lettuces I’ve been nibbling (as have the neighbors, who proudly tell me in the hallway), the sorrel was bushy and ready for eating. I’d never prepared it before, so Yann and I looked online for a recipe for the easiest soup I’ve ever made (or watched being made), sorrel soup, which is great for the big stringy leaves that aren’t as fun to chew on raw. The recipe was so simple that I kept offering to go up to the bed of herbs and snip some thyme, chives or basil. “Are you sure?” I asked Yann. “Yes,” he insisted. “Just wait, the sorrel has a lot of flavor.”

I washed the bundle of sorrel, the significant leaves of four, first-year plants, and snapped off their stems. Then he placed them in a pot with a splash of olive oil, salt and pepper, and turned on the heat. The leaves sauteed while he diced potatoes and I watched. The pot was opened moments later for the potatoes, which were tossed in, along with six cups of water. When the potatoes were soft the heat was turned off, then the contents were pureed, and served over a dollup of creme fraiche. There is nothing like eating fresh from the garden, in the garden, so it was back up to the roof. He wasn’t wrong about the soup, it was delicious.

Sorrel Soup

(serves four)

Approximately 2 cups of sorrel leaves, cleaned, stems trimmed
2 big russet potatoes
olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
6 cups of water
creme fraiche to dress

Starting a rooftop garden requires tenacity and a good plan. Tenacity because there are more hurdles to climb in order to plant your roof, including assessing weight limits and reading the fine print of tax abatements.  If you are like me and live in a multiple-resident building, you’ve also got to present your neighbors with the pros and cons, and hope they’ll be so excited by the former that they agree about allocation of funds for your project.  Meanwhile, you have to devise a plan.

In the plan, both infrastructure and timing must be accounted for.  As a newbie gardener, I’d been nervously awaiting my seeds, and excitedly preparing to get my hands dirty.  But first, it was important to know how to proceed with 1000 square feet of roof space.

I started by consulting books and the wisdom of gardeners like the folks at Retrovore, and my other food fighter friends – in sum, an eager team of gardening enthusiasts (we’re bringing back community!).  Together we came up with some preparatory planning to create a lush, edible landscape that takes into consideration the unique planting opportunities and the difficulties presented by the roof.

For one thing, the rooftop is unprotected, and is thus windy.  To shelter our raised beds, we will need to construct a windbreak of evergreens along the sidewalls, which should be both aesthetic and purposeful.  (50 feet of young Canadian Hemlocks, $156) Fortunately, beds for these evergreens can be built from the pile of free, recovered wood currently hanging around in the back of the building. Score! But for growing edibles, planters have to be constructed from untreated wood. I’ve found a great source for salvaged, untreated wood at Build It Green in Queens, where wood starts at 15 cents per foot.

One of the benefits of being so high up is the access the plants will have to lots of direct sunlight.  This means good growing but also a need for strategic watering, like a drip irrigation system set on a timer. Watering close to the surface will help prevent water waste, and a timer will ensure we are watering in the early morning when the temperature on wilt-worthy summer days is cool. A rain censor is an added bonus, stopping the flow after a rain.  Irrigation is one of the more expensive aspects of the garden budget, at an estimated $350, but considering my status as a green gardener who doesn’t want to kill everything, I think its a wise investment.

Another important consideration is soil.  You don’t want to haul any old dirt you find up to your roof for your garden. And if you are planting directly in the ground, please get your dirt tested.  Luckily in New York we have the Lower East Side Ecology Center, which produces compost from New Yorker’s table scraps and makes a potting soil (featuring perlite, green sand, black rock phosphate, vermicompost and coconut coir – a sustainable alternative to peat moss), which they sell to the public, and deliver! Cost for soil that can be a permanent support for our garden for years to come: $500 for 1000lbs.

The garden may seem expensive to some, at our estimate of $2000.  But we are starting from scratch, and have decided as a collective to make an investment in energy efficiency, and in the creation of a living space, where we can save money by eating what we grow.  It is my hope that Councilman David Yassky’s Green Roof Tax Abatement (an extension of the J-51 abatement) passes, allowing us to recoup 90% of our costs. But at worst, we know we are making a great investment.

Stay tuned for the next post in the Roof Garden Rookies series, where I will be talking about starting my seeds.

On a sunny afternoon last week, the day before a winter rainstorm rolled into San Francisco, I hit the streets with a bagful of “seedballs”—little dry balls of compacted clay, compost and seeds (in this case, native wildflowers). Whenever I happened upon an abandoned lot or a scrubby patch of soil around a tree in the sidewalk, I tossed in a seedball and hoped the next day’s rains would be heavy enough to dissolve the clay, stir in the compost and effectively plant the seeds. With every toss, a voice that could only have been Thomas Jefferson’s proudly rang out, “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” but no one else seemed to hear it, or even to notice what I was doing, which was a little disappointing. I wasn’t out to get arrested, but I suppose I had hoped people would be paying more attention to the goings-on of their neighborhood and would question me littering in their yards.

That might have been vain, but it’s not far from the real reason people like me guerilla garden: to grab attention. Guerilla gardeners plant in public spaces, sometimes illicitly, in order to challenge passerby to notice and engage in their environment. While always political, guerilla gardening is rarely confrontational: tossing seedballs, we gardeners believe, is more productive than breaking windows. The media stereotype of the guerilla gardener as a radical anarchist reclaiming the commons is, like all stereotypes, untrue in practice. David Tracey, author of Guerilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the gardeners he’s met cover the demographic spread of “young and old, renters and homeowners [and] different social classes.” What unites them is a commitment to improving their local community.

For example: In 2002, elderly residents of a garbage-ridden street in one of San Francisco’s roughest neighborhoods were fed up with waiting for someone else to fix their problems, so they went out and planted flowers in a traffic median. People noticed, a few joined in, and before long the median was lush with plants, crime was down and the Quesada Gardens Initiative, a community group, had been founded. Alemany Farm, a four-acre urban farm in San Francisco that employs youth from a neighboring housing project, has a similar story. The Verde Partnership Garden in Richmond, CA started when a group of Laotian refugees took a weekend and turned a trash-filled lot into family plots for growing the food they had known back home. There are countless more examples, and they’re certainly not all in California; every major city has hungry or civic-minded residents who’ve tried to make up for their neighborhood’s failings by guerilla gardening.

Right now is a particularly good time to be guerilla gardening. Spring is coming, the soil is fresh and there’s ample rain, in some parts of the country, to water your projects. But there’s another reason I say it’s a good time, and it’s a political reason. Aaron French has made the case on Civil Eats that the government’s “shovel-ready” stimulus projects should include growing food in areas where both jobs and real food are rare. He’s absolutely right, but the idea isn’t catching on; as he points out, Van Jones, the Oakland activist and President of Green for All, didn’t mention food once in a recent presentation on green jobs before congress. Food isn’t sufficiently on the radar of environmentalists, of social justice advocates, of city planners or of politicians. Those of us who recognize the need for community food projects have to chart out the territory for them before we can expect any financial or logistical backing to roll in.

In this economy, moreover, food and hunger organizations lack the funding to start new gardens in the communities that need them most. Allow me to channel Obama for a moment: This year, there’s only one place hope exists, and that’s in we the people, in our collective will. It’s time we stepped in, arms laden with seeds and shovels and buckets of clean soil. If we can’t write checks, we can organize ourselves, we can dig into our neighbor’s backyards (preferably with their permission) and we can sow those seeds of hope. Never underestimate the power of active, engaged citizens – bolstered by a sunny spring afternoon – to turn an improbable project into inescapable evidence that our will and our ability to get things done are still this country’s greatest assets.

The next time you’re out walking in your neighborhood or you’re standing in your backdoor and you see unplanted land (whether its yours or not), imagine what you can grow this spring. Think of the plants that do well in your area, or are suited to guerilla gardening: peas, beans, sunflowers, squash, tomatoes, collards, kale, radishes, even just native flowers (which usually don’t need to be watered). If you’re worried about toxins, plant something that’s good for the soil, like fava beans, and don’t bother eating them. Invite your friends over to make seedballs. Plant an empty lot with flowers, and when they bloom, write the owner and ask if you and the neighbors can cultivate food. Put out containers on the sidewalk in front of your house and plant them with herbs. Let the vines of pea plants climb up your railings. Plant your roof. Plant traffic medians. Plant the front yards of foreclosed houses. Replant the landscaping at strip malls. Hop fences, if you have to, or hang flowerpots on them. Start carrying seeds in your pockets. Start right this moment.

The practice of designing and redesigning for sustainable community development, however, still lags far behind. We are just beginning to understand what makes some communities thrive while others struggle.

For a community to thrive in a complex environment, it must strike a delicate balance between planning proactively and remaining alert to emergent, unexpected changes. This dance of prediction and adaptation is a hallmark of the human response to the complex dynamic environments in which we live and work. The capacity of an individual or community to plan or initiate action is known as the exercise of agency.

Without agency, communities and indeed civilizations can be swept away by the challenge of change. As explored in the works of writers such as Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond, societies who lose the ability to perceive emergent change and adapt are likely to fail.

Brian Walker describes resilience as the capacity of a system to undergo change and still retain its basic function and structure, an ability that is partly manifest through the proper functioning of agency. A lack of agency leads directly to a lack of resilience.

Agency through Food Choices
Food is the natural system that individuals and communities interact with most often and most viscerally. As such, agency over our food systems can be a powerful locus of community resilience.

Particularly in the industrialized world, food choices have largely passed out of individual or community control. One indicator of community agency is the presence of urban agriculture. At present, 15% of the world’s food needs are met through urban production, but for the most part, industrialized countries have been fully integrated into a global food system. [1]

Despite this fading of urban agriculture in developed nations, the potential is very large. For example, a pilot study in Vancouver, Canada estimated that 32% of the land area in a 3.4 acre residential city block was suitable for growing edible crops. [2]

The Cuban Experience
The experience of the city of Havana, Cuba demonstrates how effective urban agriculture can be at providing for local needs. The fall of the Soviet bloc was a massive emergent event that threatened the Cuban economy with ruin. Before the collapse of the Soviet block Cuba had regulations against many urban agricultural activities and there was a broad social taboo against growing one’s own food.

The fall of the Society Bloc led to a 75% decline in imports to Cuba, including a 50% drop in fertilizer imports. Fortunately, within the populace there was a remainder of knowledge on how to grow food locally; and in a surprising move the central government decided to give agency to the local populace to produce their own food for use and resale. Laws were relaxed and scientists helped develop intensive urban growing methods. The 5000 or so urban gardens of Havana now produce as much as 16kg of produce per square meter. [3]

The Cuban citizenry was successful at enacting agency over their food security in part because most of the urban dwellers retained knowledge of rural living, including knowledge of local crops. North Americans do not carry such knowledge to the same degree and face other barriers, including prohibitive bylaws; the difficulty of preparing the plot initially, animal and human predation; and difficult soil and microclimate conditions.

Urban Farming Entrepreneurship
The need to overcome these barriers has led to the rise of a new sort of entrepreneur; part landscaper, part farmer, part educator. Two such organizations are Your Backyard Farmer of Portland, Oregon in the U.S. and City Farm Boy of Vancouver, Canada. These small businesses provide the set-up and labour needed to create an urban garden plot, and then maintain the crop as it grows.

Both organizations are driven by broader values of food resilience; City Farm Boy was founded to promote urban agriculture, farming and gardening as a viable and environmentally positive way to enhance landscapes and lifestyles. The founder of City Farm Boy sells excess at a local farmer’s market; he is certainly the most “local” local food grower at the market! Your Backyard farmer tends similar plots, educates residents on how to tend their own plots, and also grows for local restaurants. Both organizations have found that their customers become more engaged and gain greater agency over their own food choices as time passes. Customers begin to take part in seed selection, learn how to tend and harvest crops, and learn how to prepare new foods.

Agency and Resilience
In Walker’s article “Resilience Thinking,” he discusses how sea otters function as a keystone species, determining the regime of the near-shore ecosystems that they inhabit. If we apply the idea of “keystone species” to communities, we might say that food security represents one such keystone. The loss of local food security locks individuals and communities into a system that is environmentally damaging, socially unsustainable and physically unhealthy.

One of the ways that natural systems thrive in the face of change is through redundancy; if one species falls there is often another niche species ready to take its place. Within communities, we need the same variety of niche ideas and technologies. The Cuban example shows how a niche, in this case urban growing, can flower in a time of crisis to support community survival.

The food system is emerging as a bellwether of environmental practice. Early adopters act as “advertisers” of the new and novel. They work with farmer/educators to build knowledge and agency. Perhaps this is a key to enhancing the ability of communities to adapt in the face of rapid, turbulent change. We anticipate and plan, understanding that there will always be an element of surprise over which we have no control. Local resilience can help us weather such storms.

Originally published by People and Place. P&P publisher Ecotrust believes that our fundamental challenge is a broader understanding of the intimate relationship between the human condition and the health of all living systems.
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[1] Katz, S. (2006) The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements. Vermont: Chelsea green Publishing.

[2] Levenston, M., J. Blecha, K. Schendel, & J. Houston. (2001). City farmer uses the latest aerial photos to find out how much food is grown in the city of Vancouver.

[3] Altieri, M. et al. (1999). The Greening of the “barrios”: Urban agriculture for food security in Cuba. Agriculture and Human Values 16: 131-140.