Rooftop Gardening - the Sage continues

[Ian James Gordon]

The blog title was supposed to read the saga continues, but sage communicates the message with an added zing I think.

Anyway, after my meanderings I got off my posterior and did my research into roof gardens. In Japan the notion of a roof garden is very narrow; there's usually some raked sand and pebbles somewhere and it should be so pretty that it could find a niche on the roof of the Hilton Hotel. The price tag for this is everything you would expect; a Japanese company (Toho-Leo) will put a rooftop garden on your apartment for around 30,000 yen per square metre.

Another green entrepreneur, Iimura Kazuki, is helping people to farm a roof in Omote Sando, for between 170 and 250 dollars a month for a few raised beds. The article below shows you everything you need to know about this. I dunno sounds like awfully expensive salads to me, since that outlay is just the rent, not including the operating costs associated with growing anything. I guess if you have money to burn it's ok. But you know farming used to be something that poor people could do to climb out of poverty. So while I say kudos to Iimura-san for bringing some green into Central Tokyo he's not doing something I wish to emulate.

http://tokyogreenspace.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/omotesando-farm/

My friend Taylor and I are thinking a lot more ambitiously than anything you'll find in Tokyo. We don't want a rooftop garden. We want to build a rooftop ecology. We don't want to chop down cedar trees to make raised beds on roofs, we want to use any old used container we can find. I'd argue that recycling used containers is greener. We don't want something manicured that's simply a drain on resources, we want something that solves problems and works for its supper. We don't want something high end and unaffordable. We want something that can be created and deployed on any reasonably strong roof in Tokyo. We don't want a space for meditation and reflection. We want spaces that look like a living Rube Goldberg Machine out of the show Pythagoras Switch. It wouldn't be pretty but it would be insanely cool.

So now, we're visiting community recycling centres and looking for a roof...

[Ian James Gordon]

Hi Duco,

Yes, I saw the Sky Vegetables project. It's pretty much the same thing but high capital and high tech. It's also simpler. Taylor and I are starting with ultra low-cost easy-DIY systems in the hope that it will be accessible to just about everyone and thus spread like wildfire. We also envisage building the system up over time, finding a waste stream, reducing it, making some money, finding another waste stream, reducing it, making some money. If we can generate cash that way we'll be able to build it up using internal cash resources.

[Duco Delgorge]

Related to this, when I was at Slow Money gathering in Santa Fe recently, I saw a presentation on Sky Vegetables. It seems there is a growing trend to grow vegetables on the roofs of city buildings...that's about as close to the market as you can get. Link follows: http://www.skyvegetables.com/