Introduction

WELCOME to ECHO's special site for people wishing to grow food in "unlikely" urban settings. For 27 years, ECHO has experimented with and promoted methods for growing vegetables or flowers on rooftops and a variety of other above the ground situations.

These methods are well suited to many urban locations not normally considered good gardening sites: on rooftops, concrete slabs, or abandoned parking areas. They also have use in any area where gardens may benefit from being out of the ground due to factors like flooding; roaming chickens, iguanas, or goats; extremely poor or acidic or alkaline soil; or simply the ease of working in gardens that are raised to waist or chest height.

There is a major difference between ECHO's techniques and those used on or contemplated by planners for most rooftop gardens in wealthier countries. The techniques described here can be done at a fraction of the expense that is normally considered necessary. They do not require specially engineered buildings to make sure that the roof can handle the weight of the soil. Gardens can even be grown on the edge of a tin roof of a shanty.

We have seen above-ground gardening methods used from rural Haiti (where raised tires kept chickens from ruining gardens), to the rocky soils of the Bahamas, to very urban settings like St. Petersburg, Russia or Port-au-Prince, Haiti--places where rooftops may be the only space available for growing.

As this is being written, food riots in Port-au-Prince, Haiti are making the news. Food riots and demonstrations are starting to occur in other cities in other impoverished countries around the world. Some food producing countries are banning or restricting exports on important food staples. Leaders have little control over the high prices of food, but are desperate to know what can be done to make more food available, at a lower price.

Quite aside from these problems, there has been a growing interest in urban food production in both economically developed and developing countries. Reasons are many. Ecological benefits to the city. A desire to use more locally grown food. Opportunities for micro farming activities for profit. The wholesomeness of allowing people to experience the joy of gardening. School programs. Producing food by or for families who cannot buy what they need.

ECHO would like to interact with people who are using these techniques or methods of their own to grow food or flowers for home use or sale in urban environments. We may, with your permission, share highlights from what you share with us on this website, forming a "network" of people seeking to turn urban areas into productive agricultural areas. I call it "the last agricultural frontier."

The Last Agricultural Frontier

The root cause of most hunger and malnutrition around the world is not usually caused by a lack of food, although that may be changing. From the point of view of the hungry family, the cause is usually a lack of income sufficient to purchase the food. Anyone with enough income will be able to obtain food, except perhaps after major disasters or in a war zone.

There are so few options for the extremely poor. What can a family do if the national unemployment rate is over 50%, wages are a dollar or two a day, prices of food are increasing and may at times be even higher than in the USA, they have neither savings nor credit and there is no governmental safety net?

For many, an option of last resort is to find a piece of land somewhere and try to grow enough to at least keep the family alive. Hopefully there would be some excess that could be sold so that perhaps at least one child could go to elementary school and emergency medical expenses could be met.

But how does someone in an urban area with nonexistent financial resources get land to cultivate? Perhaps they could find some land that they could farm on a share basis (e.g. half of the produce goes to the owner.) But often the best option is to go beyond the frontier of where commercial agriculture has gone-essentially to some place that people with money do not want. They might be able to start farming on a piece of land far down the side of a remote mountain somewhere, or in the rainforest, or where there might be a nine-month dry season every year.

Such land has many disadvantages. It is typically remote from markets which means prices for produce are very low and agricultural inputs expensive. Often there is environmental damage when steep hillsides are cultivated or forests are cleared to make way for crops. Yields are low and uncertain due to infertile soils and unreliable rainfall. Farming on this last frontier is difficult!

But there is another frontier for agriculture that has been overlooked almost everywhere-the frontier above us! In contrast to the difficulties and environmental harm common to the last frontiers for in-ground agriculture, farming on urban rooftops has many advantages.

The urban gardener can sell at full retail price because there is no need for transportation and middlemen.

The environment inside the house and even in the community is improved as the gardens absorb energy from the sun, thus lowering the temperature of the air and of the roof of the building.

Production is more consistent because it does not depend on unpredictable rainfall (assuming that city water is available).

Finally, no fences are needed to protect the garden from wandering livestock.

Many of the principles and techniques that I am about to describe have turned out to be useful for gardeners in the United States. In fact, most of my home gardening (flowers, vegetables and herbs) is now done using some of techniques that I am about to describe. I find that I have greater success with less effort using these "containers" than with the same plants grown in the ground around my home. I will share how I have adapted our experience to solve challenging

How Did ECHO Become Involved in Rooftop Gardening?

My first overseas trip for ECHO was in 1981 to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I was visiting with a missionary nurse, Beth Mayhood, standing on the flat roof of a building she had just completed to house the orphans she cared for. We were discussing how the building took up nearly all the land she owned and how the children needed what little land was left for recreation, leaving no place to plant a garden. That was quite a disappointment because she wanted to involve the kids in gardening and the children also needed the vegetables it would produce.

Our discussion turned to whether it might be feasible to garden on the roof of the orphanage. It represented 2500 square feet of perfectly flat "land" in full sun. As we looked around we could see dozens of flat rooftops. The city has acres of potential growing areas that are just one staircase away from an enormous (and hungry) urban population.

I also noticed that rebar protruded through and several inches above the cement along each side of the roof. ["Rebar" refers to long metal rods that are placed in the foundation, walls and cement roof of a building under construction. When cement is poured the rebar adds strength to these essential structures and helps tie them all together.] In many tropical cities it is standard practice to leave the rebar protruding along the edges of the roof so that the owner would have the option in the future of tying an additional story to the rest of the building when the money becomes available. The protruding rebar indicated to me that the roof was designed to hold considerable weight in the event that it someday became the floor of a second story.

The potential was obvious, but how would one go about gardening on a rooftop in a manner that did not cost a lot of money and would not endanger the structure? We first thought of hydroponic gardening, i.e. using systems where plants are grown without soil. But these very productive commercial systems are complicated, relatively expensive, and usually require pumps that must work without fail during the life of the plants. The electricity was often off in Haiti, so that alone ruled out most hydroponic systems.

I told Beth that when I returned to ECHO we would begin a project to see how gardens could be grown on rooftops that were simple and inexpensive enough to be appropriate for an impoverished nation with limited infrastructure.

By the time we had some systems ready to be tried, Beth's health had failed and she was no longer at the orphanage. It meant a lot to me though that she did get to visit ECHO and see some of the promising early experiments. Every year since then we have maintained year-round demonstrations of the most successful techniques for rooftop gardening and always try out a few new ideas too.

A visitor recently asked, "How did ECHO come up with these innovative container gardens? Did you stumble on them by accident?"

The answer is that we concentrate on the three things that roots require: air, water and nutrients plus something to keep the sun and wind from drying out the roots (see Chapter 1). We make no assumptions about what the container or growing medium should look like. We think about what spatial arrangements and what recycled or inexpensive things we can find or buy that will let us meet these basic requirements. Then we set about doing trial and error experiments until we achieve good production. (Some systems demonstrated at ECHO were our own ideas and some have been adapted from work of other people or organizations. It was especially helpful when we were doing the early experiments exchanging ideas with Pat Lahr, a missionary in Haiti who specialized in urban gardening.) You can simply follow our designs, or you can do some creative thinking and come up with your own. The latter option is likely to be necessary if you work with the extremely poor where you must use recycled materials and sources of fertility that may be different from what ECHO has used.

Lessons Learned From Initial Discouragements

Being an avid gardener, I was thrilled when I moved eleven hundred miles south from Ohio to ECHO in SW Florida in 1981. I imagined that I was about to garden in the Garden of Eden-at least a lot closer to that than in wintry Ohio. I got the surprise of my life. Most of the common vegetables that I grew in Ohio simply could not survive the heat, humidity and intense sunlight of a Florida summer. As for winter, the normal time to grow temperate vegetables in Florida, I found that the climate is usually warm but that the days are much shorter and the sun is low on the southern sky. Furthermore, although it is not unusual to have frost or a freeze right in the middle of the ideal growing season, it does not get cold enough to kill the pests in the ground. As I write this, 27 years later, I now know what to grow and when to grow it. But as often as not, freezes, frosts, nematodes or diseases ruin even my tomatoes before I get to eat them. Most vegetables never reach the size they did up north where days are long and the sun is more intense than in the Florida winter growing season. I had never given thought to root knot nematodes before gardening in Florida. These are microscopic wireworms that live in the soil and attack roots of many kinds of vegetables. Where nematodes are present, it is almost like having poisonous soil. Soon the roots of susceptible crops, like tomato or squash, are covered with knots that keep water and nutrients from being taken up from the soil. And nematodes especially like sandy soil. ECHO's farm has only sand for soil.

Interestingly, nurseries in the early 1980s were coping with nematodes by selling tomato plants grown in half-bushel bean hampers (baskets) filled nearly to near the top with wood chips. Nurseries sold the baskets, mulch and tomato plant plus soluble hydroponic fertilizer as a packaged system.

Rather than buy their system, I created a similar environment by filling five-gallon buckets with wood chips, after first making drainage holes of course, and planted a tomato in each bucket. I poured a dilute hydroponic fertilizer solution on the tomatoes every day or two and let it drain onto the wood chips below. The plants grew beautifully without a hint of nematodes. (That is because nematodes were not present in the wood chips. And, if they somehow were transferred there from the soil, they do not thrive on wood chips.) My tomatoes did much better than tomatoes in the sandy Florida soil.

How can a tomato grow in wood chips? Take a look at our criteria for a "happy" root system. There was a lot of space between wood chip particles, which meant that the roots were constantly exposed to air. I watered it frequently enough that the roots could draw water from the surface of the constantly moist chips. I added a complete fertilizer to the water, so the roots had a constant supply of nutrients. The wood chips kept the sun and wind off of the roots and provided a space in which the roots could grow. Those are the only needs, so it is not important that no soil was present.