On Starting a Container Vegetable Garden on my Rooftop Terrace and a Brief History of Urban Gardening in NYC
To be clear, I am a city girl through and through. Although I have lived in semi-rural areas in my childhood, I have a crippling fear of something that shall go unnamed and lives mostly in those areas and in rural ones. As such, I could never move to the country. But even so, I occasionally fantasize about living in a homestead with plenty of arable space, and maybe a couple of pigs and some chickens. Minus the tradwife values, of course.
As any foe of Marie Antoinette would love to tell you, I am far from the first person to have these ideations. But the reality is that I will never be a rural dweller. That doesn’t mean I can’t grow some things though, even in the middle of the concrete jungle. So, a couple of years ago, when one of the private terraces on my building’s rooftop became available, we jumped on it. This was my opportunity to satisfy my homesteading itch without the actual homestead and all the hard labor that goes along with it.
That first summer I bought a halfway mature tomato plant from Home Depot. It was in a container with a built-in cage that I have now come to realize was much too small. It was a complete disaster. I, admittedly, watered it infrequently, which led to blossom end rot for the few tomatoes that fruited. I also left it alone for two weeks when the opportunity to travel to the UK presented itself. I want to grow vegetables, but I love traveling more. In my defense, I did try to keep the plant alive; I used a makeshift watering system that promised to keep the plant watered for two weeks. I even put down mulch and left the pot in the shade to minimize evaporation. The plant did not make it.
I was disappointed and felt defeated, even if it was my own doing. The following summer I did not plant anything.
This year, we were thinking about moving, and that time frame coincided with the time that people in my area usually start gardening either outdoors or inside – I’m in zone 7b, if you must know. We didn’t find anything we liked, met our needs, and could afford so we stayed put. Then we decided to give up the terrace since we weren’t doing anything with it and it isn’t free. The building management let us have it for another 6 months free of charge so I resolved right then and there that, by golly, I was going to grow something this summer. I have friends who already have successful rooftop edible gardens, so why not me? It didn’t matter that, according to YouTube and gardening sites, I was behind on many things.
It started small, just a few things. On April 30th, I planted some seeds I had from two years ago in little seed-starting pods. Just bell peppers, German Johnson tomatoes, and mini cantaloupes. Then, on May 1st, I went to Lowes to buy a pot and came home with two pepper plants. Next thing I knew I had planted 24 different crops and spent more money on potting soil and containers than I ever thought I would. Some things I started from seed, others from small plants. Everything except one thing either germinated or is doing great after transplant. The bell peppers from seed didn’t germinate, and I, of course, replaced them with a plant.
I’m growing three varieties of peppers (both sweet and hot), six varieties of tomatoes, burgundy beans, herbs, salad greens, scallions, chives, and the Sugar Cube mini melons. The wackiest thing is, perhaps, the makrut lime tree, formerly known as kaffir lime. It’s not frost hardy and I have no idea what I’m going to do with it when winter comes. To be fair, it’s hardly a tree right now. It’s more like a twig.
Things definitely got out of hand, but it has been a month and I’ve enjoyed it more than I expected. The truth is, this little increasingly green(er) oasis on my tiled urban roof terrace has given me a bit of daily purpose when, for longer than I care to reveal, I’ve felt adrift. I am forced to get dressed every day, which, if I’m honest, I just hadn’t been doing. And since I’ve invested so much time already into this garden, and have so much going on up there, I think the sunk cost fallacy will deter me from abandoning the plants like I did two years ago. That’s my hope, anyway. In fact, I may be babying them too much, as my husband pointed out when I wondered out loud if I should put the small seedlings under the roofed part of the terrace during a storm a few days ago. I didn’t, and they were fine.
Still, he indulges me and my shenanigans.
I am so happy with how the garden is coming along, and I cannot wait to see what it looks like in a month, or two, or four. I already had my first harvest of three little Cherry Belle radishes and I was thrilled. I don’t even like radishes, but I love having grown them.
My rooftop garden is small, a luxury, and serves only me, but New York City is no stranger to small gardens in unexpected places. In fact, grassroots movements to cultivate vacant lots amidst the hustle and bustle of the city go back decades. The turning point came in the 1960s when activist and environmentalist legend Hattie Carthan, also called the Tree Lady, created the Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee. Carthan had moved to the area the previous decade, and over the years the number of trees in the neighborhood dwindled until there were virtually none left. This was in no small part due to the demographics of the neighborhood – largely black – which meant the city didn’t really put much effort into its upkeep.
Carthan secured funding for replanting trees, and with the help of volunteers and youths who were paid for summer internships, her organization went on to plant something like 1500 trees. These were not edible trees, but this movement did lead into other types of grassroots organizations that went on to create hundreds, if not thousands, of community gardens all over the city. Many of these edible gardens had the explicit purpose of alleviating food insecurity and the economic crisis many were experiencing in the 1960s and 1970s.
The city itself eventually came on board with this idea and allowed organizations to take over some vacant lots the city owned. This didn’t come easy, however. It took acts of what many considered vandalism and squatting for the city to finally agree. In 1978, the city created Green Thumb to support and license community gardens.
The Giuliani administration reneged on the deals the city had made with community garden leaders, and by 1999 114 plots were up for public auction without restrictions on how they could be used. 112 of them were sold, and those gardens were lost. There was a proposal for a further 600 plots to be put up for auction specifically meant for developers. In 2000 the city bulldozed Esperanza Garden, a community garden on the Lower East Side that was centered around growing medicinal plants and tending chickens. The garden, whose name in English means Garden of Hope, served a Hispanic community who put up a fight after they received the demolition notice. They even filed a lawsuit against the city but a judge ruled that the gardeners didn’t have the right to stop the development.
Since then, the shutting down and redevelopment of community gardens has paralleled the loss of trees that Hatti Carthan experienced and fought to rectify. And today, just like in the past, community organizers and activists constantly fight to keep the remaining community gardens in the hands of the community. According to Green Thumb, there are currently only about 550 community gardens left in the city. These gardens are not just a respite from the concrete jungle that is New York City; they are also places of learning, socializing, beautification, places of ecological diversity. Their loss, which no doubt will continue considering the scarcity of land in New York City, is truly an enormous one, and not just for the people who operate them.
It is so satisfying to watch a plant grow, especially from seed. I remember community gardens in the East Village in the 80s, one with bins that accepted recyclables.