Fresh Vegetables Five Stories Up

These lucky vegetables have quite a view. Only a block away from the hustle and bustle of M Street, the crops planted on the rooftop of this five-story building in Georgetown overlook all of Washington. They also have produced pounds of delicious eggplant, cherry tomatoes, basil, and parsley in a typically undervalued and underutilized urban space.

Most people who stroll by on the sidewalk below or eat lunch on the restaurant patios at ground level would never guess that the roof of this building provides fresh food to the people who live and work inside it. For the past several seasons, the Local Food Project has demonstrated the potential to grow food in small spaces with our 9 by 14-foot Parking Space Garden. Now we are exploring other ways to garden in space-constrained environments. LFP’s new initiative this season—the Georgetown Rooftop Food Project—answers the call to make local food even more local by growing it right in the city.

Standing among the raised beds of  the Georgetown Rooftop Food Project (or GRFP for short), its urban location is impossible to forget. Airplanes roar overhead as they take off and land at Reagan National Airport. The Washington Monument and Air Force Memorial jut up from the city’s signature low skyline. Children laugh and yell in the yard of a neighboring preschool and rooftop exhaust fans rattle constantly. But there’s also a special peace that comes with the high-altitude breeze and gives this garden an air of possibility. If vegetables and herbs can be grown on this roof, why not others? And if people enjoy the flavor and freshness of this produce, what does that signify for their relationships to other kinds of food? And how can projects like this one encourage more urban residents to eat locally produced food and even grow some of their own?

As summer draws to a close and fall winds blow in, we’ll continue to harvest the bounty at GRFP. We’ll also be thinking about what might come next for this elevated garden in the city. If you have ideas or want to check it out, let us know!

Arugula, Class, Snow & Winter

Four inches of snow sits atop beds of arugula in the Local Food Project garden- meanwhile, winter sowing of arugula and greens carries on in the LFP Passive Solar Hoophouse. As we wrap up a year full of workshops and seminars at Airlie Center, we look forward to our January 2010 Conference- Nordell & Martens: Culture in Cultivation, featuring a small vegetable farm powered by draft horses, and a 1,300 acre organic grain operation with custom milling of animal feeds.

Winter, where the harvest is soooo sweet, literally! That's because the cool temps concentrate sugars in cool weather crops, from carrots to kale to yes, arugula. If you have ever wondered why your garden carrots are not that sweet, is may be partially due to the temps of the soil during harvest. So many crops that are bland or even bitter during the summer and early fall take on an entirely new flavor in the fall and early winter.

The key becomes how you keep these crops alive in the garden for that sweet harvest.

At the LFP garden, we believe in simplicity. Metal hoops (you can cut your own using any decently thick steel wire) straddle our three ft. wide garden beds. Over these hoops, we drape floating row cover, a poly-fabric that provides a mild amount of frost protection (a few degrees), but creates a temperate, wind-free environment in which cold-tolerant greens and roots (like radishes, carrots & beets) can hang around and sweeten up until harvest. The row cover comes in varying thicknesses and price, but we like to use the stuff that is in the middle- not too light, not too heavy.

So when it snows, the cover will at least provide a little buffer between the plants and the snow, provided the snow is not too heavy. It is truly amazing to dust off the snow, and uncover a dazzling green bed of crispy greens amidst a winter wonderland!

For heading deep into winter, a hoophouse is the way to go. It's the same concept of providing a little protection for the crops with hoops and a covering, but the hoops are much larger and the covering is a high-grade plastic. In the LFP garden, we have a 30x72 ft. gothic frame hoophouse. The frame came from Ledgewood Farms. The plastic, vents, and end-wall paneling came from Griffins Greenhouse Supply. We harvested and milled all the white oak baseboards and door framing ourselves, with the guidance of experienced timber framer Eric Westergart.

And that brings us back to winter. I encourage all gardeners to go for a winter harvest, which is essentially an extension of your fall crops via a little protection from the elements.

Lots of Lettuce

The Local Food Project crew is harvesting baskets and baskets of crisp, crunchy lettuce these days. Pink-tinged Fireball, frilly green Nevada, and tall ruffled Concept all appreciate the wet, mild weather. We planted the little seedlings close together (six inches apart in four rows) and began harvesting them out as baby lettuce heads. Now they’re all growing fast and we’re supplying bountiful lettuce for lots of fresh salads for Airlie guests.

December’s Colorful Harvest

The first day of December dawned cold and gray, but these brilliantly-colored beets made the garden feel as festive as the tropics! Surviving the frosts under swaths of row cover, our “Chioggia” (red) and “Golden” (orange) beets are a favorite of Airlie Center chefs and are among the last of our 2008 field crops.

Another heartening find was this perfect head of “Red Cross” lettuce, still prettily ruffled, crisp, and unharmed by frost, deer, or groundhog.