Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pumpkin Lady <pumpkingal@clearwire.net>]

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