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Rooftop gardens bear fruit
Groups seek to refine Montreal's landscape

Rooftop gardens bear fruit: Groups seek to refine Montreal's landscape
The Gazette (Montreal)
Sun 02 Oct 2005
Page: A1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: MICHELLE LALONDE
Source: The Gazette

Stand on any flat rooftop in the densely populated neighbourhoods of Montreal and you will be struck by two things.

First, Montreal is drop-dead gorgeous from most rooftops.

Second, from this vantage point, even our crowded, row-house neighbourhoods are strikingly spacious and peaceful. Aside from a few wooden terraces, you'll see nothing but hundreds of flat, gravel-covered rooftops. A suspended wasteland.

Now imagine this grey wasteland transformed into a green patchwork quilt of rooftop gardens. Imagine plants and bushes yielding vegetables, fruits, herbs, berries and herbal medicines for the residents below.

Imagine tube-shaped planters lush with greenery and edible flowers winding around Montreal's trademark spiral staircases.

Imagine all those empty, concrete balconies yielding tomatoes, basil, peppers and lettuce.

It's called "urban agriculture" and it is by no means new as a notion - what is new is a movement to make rooftop gardening a widespread reality in Montreal.

For the past four years, two local non-profit organizations have been experimenting with a new kind of rooftop gardening. The idea is to make rooftop or balcony gardening easy, cheap and attractive to your average Montrealer.

Alternatives, a group that works against poverty, and Santropol Roulant, a meals-on-wheels service, have established several rooftop gardens, which provide fresh produce for Santropol Roulant's meal program.

"What we are trying to do is adjust gardening to the urban lifestyle," said Alex Hill, an environmental engineer who coordinates the Rooftop Garden Project.

"Maybe in the future they will laugh at the fact that our generation felt we were too crowded in cities to have gardens, when we had all this unused space on our rooftops. Maybe it will be as normal to have a rooftop garden as it is to have an indoor toilet now."

That's a plausible scenario, according to McGill University's Vikram Bhatt, author of Making the Edible Landscape; A Study of Urban Agriculture in Montreal. "I think it will be the next big thing," he said.

In his book, Bhatt remembers his Urban Wasteland Project from the early 1970s. A group of researchers calling themselves the Minimum Cost Housing Group planted a huge garden on a 1,000-square-metre rooftop in the McGill ghetto. The book praises Montreal's remarkable network of community gardens, those sought-after plots on unused, municipally-owned land throughout the city where about 8,000 urban gardeners exercise Canada's favourite hobby. Montreal's community garden program is the largest of its kind in North America.

And local businesses like Mountain Equipment Co-op's Montreal outlet are leading the way in modelling the advantages of "green roofs," customized roofs equipped with a special membrane and a layer of soil to plant grasses in. This provides great insulation, saves on heating and cooling costs and combats air pollution and greenhouse-gas effects.

While both the Urban Wasteland Project and green roofs were groundbreaking initiatives, they are both expensive options that have not been widely imitated. Because of the sheer weight of water-logged soil on rooftops, especially in winter, both required expensive reinforcements to avoid damaging the roof's structure.

Santropol and Alternatives, on the other hand, are pushing a new form of rooftop gardening that is inexpensive, lightweight and has a higher yield compared with traditional gardening. Their method offers many of the insulative advantages of green roofs, plus the delights of harvesting real food. They have been developing workshops, start-up kits and instruction manuals, and handing them out at low cost to residents to encourage them to set up their own rooftop or balcony gardens.

This spring, the project sold all of its 50 start-up kits, at $20 a pop, to newbie rooftop gardeners. Next year, they hope to sell 500.

The demonstration garden on the roof of a Universite du Quebec building at the corner of Villeneuve and Henri Julien Sts. in the Plateau is actually a collection of various types of containers. These portable containers hold the plants in plastic pots, nutrient-enriched water, and very little soil, or substrate.

This fall, the garden's ample harvest included four varieties of lettuce, six varieties of tomatoes, ground cherries, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, basil, swiss chard, parsley, thyme, chives, strawberries, red cabbage, rhubarb, Jerusalem artichokes, sunflowers, climbing beans, as well as several types of edible flowers. There were also a number of insecticidal and anti-fungal plants, to ward off pests and other problems.

Since 95 per cent of what the containers hold is water, after the harvest, the gardeners only have to dump the water, save the substrate for re-use and store the containers for the winter. Because the containers are light and easily movable, the technique is attractive to renters and homeowners alike.

The typical container - and Hill and company are experimenting with many variations - is a plastic Rubbermaid-style storage bin, with several round holes cut in the lid to fit plastic flower pots. The pots have holes punctured in their bases so that the roots of the plants can grow through. A porous wick leads these roots to the nutrient-rich water below in the bin.

Although the garden borrows hydroponic techniques, Hill prefers to call it "soil free" gardening. It is a much simplified version of hydroponics, in that it doesn't require a complicated system of pumps to aerate the water and get it to the plants. Because the plants are suspended over water, with first the wick and then their roots trailing down into the pool below, the roots get oxygen from the gap.

The system uses about one-tenth of the water used in regular gardening, where much water is lost through evaporation or quickly drains through the dirt to the water table. Because the water sits in the container, the plants don't need to be watered every day. The water needs to be replenished only every couple of weeks. The steady water supply and careful control of nutrients geared to each species means that the plants are about four times as productive as those grown in soil.

The team also is experimenting with pipe-like containers that can wind down spiral staircases, and more aesthetically pleasing containers for residents who see their roofs and balconies as extensions of their homes, and as spaces for entertaining guests.

Since most Montreal roofs are designed to hold about 20 to 40 pounds per square foot in order to weather heavy snowfalls, they can certainly support these lightweight containers of water and plants in summer months.

Apartment buildings are normally designed with some sort of roof access, although tenants may have to negotiate with landlords for permission and safety structures. Most homeowners with rooftop gardening dreams would have to invest in an outdoor staircase, or a trap door.

Still, Hill notes, it's cheaper than reinforcing a roof for conventional gardening, and less trouble than moving to the suburbs if what you are really craving is not a suburban lifestyle, but simply, a garden."

Hill sees a future where a variation of the kits his team is developing will be mass-produced and sold in hardware stores. The current generation of start-up kit consists of a plastic storage bin cut to fit five flower pots, the pots themselves with their bottoms pre-punctured, a bit of substrate on which the plants grow, nutrients to add to the water, a piece of rope for a wick and tubing for drainage and overflow control, and of course, a manual.

The team is evaluating how last summer's gardeners did with these kits and will continue to modify them to improve output, aesthetics and ease of use.

While he knows the concept will not appeal to everyone, he hopes to see 20 to 30 per cent of Montreal buildings with gardens on their rooftops and balconies within the next decade or so. Condo builders, he predicts, will offer garden space on the roof to the first 10 buyers who express an interest. The rooftop garden could become a sought-after attribute that will help sell inner-city real estate, he suggests.

Apart from the sheer enjoyment of fresh, homegrown produce, Hill says it's important for city folk to get reconnected to where their food comes from.

"It gets to the heart of what is not sustainable in our cities, and one thing that is certainly not (sustainable) is driving our food in and out of the country across long distances all year round. When people have a hands-on experience with agriculture, when their families and children get involved in gardening, they naturally gravitate toward more nutritious (and organic) foods. There is a high degree of personal satisfaction with connecting to the ecological cycles."

Hill says city gardening is also about "food security."

In times of crisis, whether it be economic, military or natural, people need to know how to grow their own food. "You need to have, in your society, at least one in every 20 people who understands how to produce food. You have to be prepared."

Edible Landscape author Bhatt commends the Santropol/Alternatives initiative as a natural evolution from what his team was doing with its rooftop garden project in the 1970s. He has studied urban agricultural in developing countries, where it is done for sustenance and income, and not just pleasure, and notes that the movement is gaining popularity all over the world.

"I'm not saying everybody can be self-sufficient, but we can reduce our consumption patterns, which are so intensely energy based. In our climate we can't (garden) year round, but we can do an awful lot more than we are doing."

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Submitted by mthom on Tue, 23/05/2006 - 5:00pm.