Urban gardens everywhere

Spring means new growth — even on rooftops

By Culinate staff

May 24, 2010

It might not feel like spring yet if you live in snowy Montana — or, heck, here in cold and rainy Portland, Oregon — but the green stuff is coming up pretty much everywhere else. And gardeners are going with it, even when green spaces are hard to come by.

The Brooklyn Grange group is planting an enormous edible garden atop a rooftop in Queens, New York. Salon posted a slide show of 11 pioneers in urban farming, including Los Angeles Guerrilla Gardening and Minneapolis’ Backyard Harvest. Cathy Erway compiled her own roundup of urban-farming activists on her blog, Not Eating Out in NY. And the New York Times reported on the latest in space-saving urban farming — the growing-vegetables-upside-down trend — and paid tribute to one of the original urban-farming activists, John Ameroso.

As Salon noted, “Whether they’re training entrepreneurs, teaching kids to grow organic kale, or producing food from plots no bigger than your living room, the urban approach to farming is about feeding, not being fed.”