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High above San Francisco’s
city streets, perched on the roof of the Tenderloin neighborhood
YMCA, is a small, lush community garden. With some 60 tubs of
flowers and a few benches and chairs, the garden has offered
visitors a small outdoor oasis in an otherwise concrete jungle
for over 25 years. In an area known as one of the city’s
roughest neighborhoods, plagued by poverty, crime, drug addiction
and homelessness, this lush garden, nine stories up, is virtually
the only green spot for miles.
Most often, roof top visitors are sunbathers, hoping to take
advantage of city’s sunshine and to relax in the gentle
company of plants. Occasionally the garden is visited by casual
sightseers, hoping to take in a little of the skyline view.
That is, until now. These days, many of people who go up to
the roof top expect to get more than a tan. They expect to find
tomatoes or spinach or parsley or basil. That’s because,
since June of this year ,an underutilized portion of the roof
top has been transformed into a high-yielding vegetable and
herb hydroponic production garden. |
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Envisioning the roof’s empty and flat stretch of pavement
as anything other than grey asphalt takes bit of imagination.
Yet for Jessica Berkson, the immediate thought was “why
not grow food ?”
Jessica began the roof top hydroponics project in March,
shortly after being hired as the Y’s part-time garden
coordinator. Perhaps the garden’s food production potential
wasn’t lost on her because she's passionate about hydroponic
gardening.
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According to Jessica, the idea for the garden grew partly out of
an interest in developing a sustainable food cycle. Hydroponics,
she says, makes urban food production possible and practical for
individuals, families and communities. The roof top garden is just
one of the possible models for urban food production, explains Jessica,
adding “for people who don’t have access to dirt, [hydroponic
gardening] is really the way to go.”
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The Y’s roof top
garden is a small, but certainly important way of promoting
sustainable agriculture in California. According to SLUG, a
San Francisco network of community gardens, the Y’s modest
hydroponic garden is the only in the city of its kind. However,
other places such as Singapore and Australia have already become
rooftop hydroponic hot spots due to their use of the gardening
system in community and public programs. Jessica hopes public
hydroponic gardens will catch on in San Francisco: “I drive
across the Bay Bridge and see all these flat, perfect roof tops,
and I think, ‘wouldn’t it be great if all the roof
tops could be green?’”
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With a meager budget and equipment, either
donated or sold at cost from GreenCoast, the Y’s hydroponic garden
project took off. The garden relies on two types of hydroponic growing
systems: an ebb & flow system and a drip system. With the ebb
& flow set up, plants are kept in pots with clay pebbles and nutrient
rich water is regularly pumped over the plant roots. By contrast,
the drip system works similar to a backyard irrigation system - nutrient
solution is literally ‘dripped’ over the base of the plant,
trickling down to the roots before being recycled in a reservoir.
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Modern hydroponics is a relatively new science -- only some
twenty years old -- but because it allows people to garden
without dirt, both outside and inside (with the help of lights),
hydroponics gardening possibilities are virtually limitless.
“People are excited when they realize they can grow
without dirt --- it’s so liberating,” says Jessica,
who emphasizes that hydroponics allows gardeners with a variety
of needs and space limitations to successfully grow plants.
"They see what we're doing here and realize they can
do this at home."
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| For starters, the Y’s roof top is
a less than ideal spot for a vegetable garden. Since the roof
top already had some 65 dirt containers for flowers, the nearly
100 year-old roof simply can’t handle the pressure of more
dirt. (One tub of wet dirt can weigh well over 100 lbs.) Additionally,
there just isn’t enough space to allow for a soil-based
working production vegetable garden. As if that wasn’t
enough, the garden is nine floors off the ground and is subject
to the worst of San Francisco’s capricious weather.
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| Each of these
obstacles was overcome, allowing Jessica and a small cadre
of volunteers to plant veggies like bell peppers and tomatoes
(the San Francisco Fog variety), and herbs such as parsley,
basil and cilantro in the summer, and braising greens
like mustard greens, spinach kale and swiss chard in the
fall. Volunteers helped to conquer San Francisco’s
weather woes by constructing a make-shift greenhouse out
of PVC pipe and mountrclear plastic tarp to shield plants
from harsh wind and extreme heat. The structure serves
for protection when plants are small and offers support
as they get larger. |
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Since mid-summer,
the garden has produced enough to supply the YMCA’s café
with fresh produce and herbs once a week. A modest beginning,
for sure, but one that offers a welcome addition to the kitchen’s
ingredient list. In fact, café visitors often find the
eatery’s chalkboard menu boasting the garden’s daily
bounty. Although the garden’s yield is relatively meager,
the produce yielded does offset some of the café’s
food costs and is of better quality than the produce purchased
from commercial supermarkets. “People are really excited
about the quality of the produce,” says Jessica. "I
keep hearing how beautiful it is." |
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Plans for Expansion
The future of the Y’s hydroponics gardening project looks
bright. There are plans in the works to expand the food production
using an NFT system, which is used widely by commercial growers
to enhance their crop yield. The manufacturer of the system, American
Hydroponics is greatly interested in urban agriculture and are working
with the YMCA to make the project affordable. Jessica projects next
year’s lettuce crop alone will be at least 100 heads per week.
Plans are currently being ironed out to incorporate the Y’s
youth program into the hydroponics garden project which Jessica
hopes will teach the basics of hydroponics and allow the kids to
earn money for scholarships by growing plants. There is also talk
of adding job skills training for the unemployed to the project.
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| With the bulk of this
season’s crops harvested, Jessica has a little time to
reflect. “There are lots of things we’ll do differently
and better,” she says. This year’s crop hit a few
snags: planting began in late June making it impossible to raise
hydroponics seedlings, and so store bought varieties were used.
Plantings weren’t staggered quite right for maximum yield,
and special provisions have to be made for harsh weather conditions.
Still, all things considered, Jessica says she is pleased with
this summer's crop and the winter crop is already benefitting
from the summer experience. She says she expects great things
to grow at the YMCA in the near future. “I can’t wait
until next summer.” |
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The Makings of the YMCA Hydroponic Garden
The YMCA hydroponic garden incorporates many different levels of
hydroponic systems. One is a homemade ebb & flow table with
a volunteer-built frame. Another is the two tray ebb and flow system
from American Hydroponics. A third is a drip system called the Terrace
Garden from American Agritech .Each system runs off of a separate
reservoir allowing for the growth of plants with different nutrient
requirements. In the spring there is hopes of adding a large scale
NFT system.
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