Every year, tons of fresh fruit and vegetables are produced… directly on rooftops! Although this activity is still not widely practiced, the creation of market garden walls and other vegetable roofs could well become essential in the capital and throughout. Let’s discover market garden walls and urban agriculture.
Market garden walls, what are they?
Like green walls, market garden walls make it possible to integrate vegetable growing into the architecture of a building and produce in the heart of large cities that are constantly expanding. An interesting alternative to agriculture, which has always been reserved for the countryside. This concept of market garden buildings, in addition to producing food, would also provide jobs since maintenance and harvesting would require labor.
We already knew about the above-ground vegetable garden that allowed people in big cities to grow their vegetables on their balconies or even inside their homes. This increasingly widespread practice is now being pushed to its extreme.
The advantages:
- Making the city more sustainable
- Making the city self-sufficient
- Allowing city dwellers to consume more fresh produce
- Offer cheaper vegetables
- Create social bonds
An activity already well developed across the Atlantic and around the world
In Brooklyn, more than 300 tons of fresh fruits and vegetables are produced this way each year, a Quebec agricultural company, built greenhouses on the roofs of buildings in Montreal in 2010, and more recently in Laval.
These somewhat unusual farms supply several thousand people with fresh fruits and vegetables each year, sold to individuals through a cooperative. The founder of Lufa Farms even claims that Montreal would be self-sufficient in fruit and vegetable production if all the roofs of the city’s 19 shopping centers were used in this way… For the moment, the two greenhouses of Lufa Farms grow 50 types of plants (including 22 varieties of tomatoes) and harvest 2 tons of vegetables per day! The company plans to export its model to the United States.
Chinese architecture firm Spark is pushing the boundaries of the concept by wanting to create residential neighborhoods entirely around urban agriculture in Shanghai and Singapore. It is already offering retired seniors the chance to become farmers for established urban settlements.
Paris: a vegetable capital?
Europeans are not left out: In Paris, the company Topager offers to plant vegetable gardens directly on rooftops. Several hundred m² are used on the Pullman Hotel or on the Robert Doisneau Center where salads and tomatoes grow! Imagine salads made with vegetables harvested straight from the rooftops of the capital.
As part of the call for projects “innovative greening”, the Association for Soilless Cultivation also proposed a project for growing crops on buildings, which was selected by the municipality. 1,000m² of greening membranes, created from waste and supplied with organic fertilizers, will be installed in the 20th arrondissement, on the roofs and walls of social housing.
This same association offers courses to individuals to create outdoor and indoor green walls as well as above-ground vegetable gardens. The objectives of the vegetable wall course:
- Know the plant varieties suited to this process and to your growing conditions
- Mastering fertigation on inert and organic substrates
- Build a hanging structure
- Automate installation
- Maintaining a growing area
