A new breed of farmer is growing and in a surprising place, the city. This article from San Francisco about today’s Urban Farmers offers a few wonderful reasons why people are growing their own fruits and vegetables, canning their harvest, and raising bees. This goes beyond the “Victory Garden” concept, giving city dwellers a chance to reconnect with the earth, and it is a great stress reducer as well… something also helpful in the city. In New York and Chicagorooftops have been being converted into gardens at a growing pace for the last 5-10 years. There is one extraordinary project in Brooklyn where a 6,000 square foot rooftop garden was started, you can read abut it here.
Last year there was a 35% increase in green roofs installed, although some may have had cactus or other plants and not food. Imagine, that comes to somewhere between six to ten million square feet of gardens that were started on roofs. Now that is one way to start cooling off our cities, and slowing global warming.
So whether you have a yard, just a balcony or maybe even only a ledge it is possible to grow something that you can enjoy the taste of before too long. What a new sense of appreciation we gain about what goes into getting food to our table when we have taken the effort to grow something ourselves.
Consider it, maybe a small garden is a big step in your living a bit more sustainably. If you already have a city garden tell us about it to inspire more people to do the same.
