Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

I hate to explain the obvious but manure doesn't start out in slurry tanks. 
CAFOs stink for miles around.

As for the rooftop growing, I thought it was too obvious to go into detail. 
It may be an interesting hobby for the few with roofs already engineered for 
the weight. But as a real food production alternative for the other 99.9% 
it's about the dumbest thing they could try. Even if they have a flat roof, 
even if it doesn't cave in and destroy the house, the total cost will be so 
high that any food they get from it will cost ten times what they could get 
it for at Whole Foods or farmers markets. Not to mention retrofitting a roof 
to support it could cost as much as a new house.

You end with
>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.

FYI I know a little about growing costs as a market grower myself.

DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME. You can destroy your home, and probably city 
codes won't allow it anyway even if you can afford the high cost of growing 
food on the roof. And getting up and down from the roof may be dangerous for 
those not used to working on roofs.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net


*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 5/5/2010 at 9:46 AM Pumpkin Lady wrote:

>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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