Using Green Roofs to Grow Food
Last week members of Coolearth visited Ryerson’s Rye’s HomeGrown, a roof top farm located on an Engineering building in downtown Toronto.
The roof top farm was implemented in 2011 after an existing green roof became a pile of weeds and scrub. The students and administrators at Ryerson saw this as an opportunity to make something from nothing, and have built themselves a roof top farm which grows over 5,000 pounds of vegetables a year!
The Edible Rooftop Garden was developed by converting the existing green roof into an edible roof through the addition of compost, sheet mulch and various seedlings from Ryerson’s greenhouse. Currently, the Rooftop Garden flourishes with eggplants, hot peppers, squashes, basil, tomatoes and various types of lettuces.
Our tour showed how the Rye’s HomeGrown team made use of the space, organized it according to bio-dynamic princples (such as growing borage, a leafy-green with a cucumber-y taste, and many bright blue flowers, as a pollinator at the end of each row of produce, in order to attract bees), and finally engaged the community through the Community Supported Agriculture network. They also sell their produce at the Wednesday Farmer’s Market on Gould Street at Ryerson’s campus in Toronto.
Toronto has a green roof by-law, which required requires green roofs on new commercial, institutional and residential development with a minimum Gross Floor Area of 2,000m2 as of January 31, 2010.
Often these green roof’s are planted with seedums and other low-growing plants requiring little to no maintenance. The team at Ryerson however found that the plants on the existing Green Roof were quickly invaded by wind and bird delivered seeds which grew into “weeds”. There idea to convert this green roof to productive ends shows us the path towards not only reducing heat-island effect (a key tenent of the Toronto by-law), but also how local, organic, and bio-dynamic food production can take place on interstitial, or un-used green-roof space downtown.
Special thanks to Rye’s HomeGrown team for the tour, and their hospitality! Keep up the good work