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livingontheland - [Livingontheland] rooftop gardens, was: Farms in Skyscrapers Won't Solve Our Food Problems

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Pumpkin Lady <pumpkingal@clearwire.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] rooftop gardens, was: Farms in Skyscrapers Won't Solve Our Food Problems
  • Date: Wed, 05 May 2010 09:46:07 -0500

Tradingpost wrote:
I'm not even going to ask where you'd put this stinking methane factory, hopefully not in the
>middle of the city unless you want to depopulate it.

Slurries are typically underground, aren't they? If not underground, then in tanks. Slurries for small farm gas production aren't a new idea.


And now cold water on rooftop gardens. Nice story for coffee table magazines or waiting rooms, but impractical.

Tell that to the many people who are already doing it. Do expect them to laugh at you, though.

Who among us has a flat roof with support engineered to hold up that much weight?

Dunno. Mine won't but my house isn't code, then again, I didn't build it. I knew moving in that it was not everything I wanted. The land it is on was what I wanted most. We figured that once we got situated we could improve things. Personally, I'd like to have the house underground and grow on the roof with the roof being flush to the ground. ;-)

And we could go on to compare the high cost of rooftop growing with the cost of simply growing on the ground.

You could, but the whole point is that in a city there is more roof space than open ground space. In most neighborhoods around here in the city they have tiny little 1/8 acre lots and the house fills most of it. The space between houses doesn't get enough light to grow much of anything. You might get a 4 x 20 bed out in the front of the house (or the back, depending on the house orientation), but not much more than that.

Further, who among us has a big enough roof (assuming it was engineered for heavy support in advance) to make even a small dent in our food budget?

My roof is larger than the space I currently garden in the ground, but of course, that's just counting bed space, not walkways. However, I want to use my roof to harvest water, and I don't need the space to grow (that was part of the point of moving). At some point I might want to play with growing something on the roof in pots over a lattice trellis that would shade the roof during the hot part of the day in summer, but that's just an in the back of my mind "wouldn't that be neat?" thing.

What you're saying is that it doesn't work for you so why would you even look at it? Fine, just don't throw the baby out with the bathwater for someone else.

Morgan





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