The effects of greening rooftops are quite well known, there are enough examples for quite a clear picture to have emerged, showing a wide range of benefits and no apparent downside.
The idea of greening rooftops could hit the big time any time, like the local food movement that's sweeping the world (and the media) right now. The foundation for that was already there, with the CSAs, city farms, local markets, community gardens of the last 30 years, then the Slow Food movement and so on. The work had been done, it was just waiting to happen. Greening rooftops could also be just waiting to happen. There's obviously a lot of synergy with the local food boom. The Journey to Forever garden at our first hq at the Beach House on Lantau Island in Hong Kong got me thinking a lot about rooftop gardens. We grew pumpkins and stuff in big baskets up old bamboo ladders onto the cement roofs of two outbuildings there that were hellish hot inside during summer, definitely a good thing to do. The whole garden was built on cement, or through it. I removed the cement for the sq foot beds and so on, but there was eight feet of sea sand mixed with builders rubble underneath (pre-plastic, 1960s rubble). Only one person ever asked where we got the soil. We made it, 12" deep, on top of the sand. Our tomatoes were 12 feet tall and very productive, everything was productive - we grew potatoes and sweet potatoes in bathtubs, and sweet potatoes on top of bare cement (one was 2 ft long). Large variety of crops. A whole ecology moved in, birds and bees and bugs that you don't find on beaches, frogs, butterflies, we found a small watersnake living in our pond (another bathtub). That small space produced a lot of great food! http://journeytoforever.org/garden.html Organic gardening: Journey to Forever organic garden http://journeytoforever.org/garden_con.html No ground? Use containers Etc. It wasn't that different from a rooftop garden. For anything more than an outhouse you need to know what loads roofs can take and so on, how much wet soil weighs, figure out water supply and drainage. But if it's built for people to walk on you should be able to green it effectively in one way or another. I'd like to have more and better resources at Journey to Forever on rooftop gardening. I'll do a search when I get the time. Any suggestions welcome. Best Keith >A grass roof would be evaporatively cooled. Need less air >conditioning. Average attic in summer is a sauna. > >Zeke Yewdall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > I don't see cows being kept on rooftops. Cow-sized staircases would just > > consume too much space! But I do see small dairy operations within easy > > walking distance of city centres. > > > > Dawie > > > >LOL. Probably not cows. But a goat could. And chickens. Milk and >eggs. They eat the scraps from the rooftop garden and turn it back >into protein for the humans and fertilizer for the garden. We need to >start seeing our roofs as something other than wasteland helping >generate a heat island and view it as a land area that we could use >for food and energy production. _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
