Rooftop Supermarket Garden Provides Produce to Shoppers Below

It’s more than a simple garden plot atop a high rise – it’s a small scale farm actually producing food for purchase to the supermarket below. How’s that for locally grown!

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Rooftop Supermarket Garden Provides Produce to Shoppers Below by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 03. 8.11

Image credit: Food from the Sky

Adam Stein once famously derided high-tech vertical farms as pie in the sky, but I've always liked the idea of growing high value produce on the roofs of stores that sell it. After all, who needs to ship those teeny tiny packages of rosemary around the country? One community project has been doing just that—growing food on the rooftop of an urban supermarket, and they've just picked up a prestigious award for their troubles.

Rooftop Garden Grows Food for Store

Food from the Sky rooftop garden—which sits above a Thornton's Budgens supermarket in North London—describes itself as a "world first". Growing vegetables, fruits, mushrooms and herbs using organic methods with children and other members of the community, the project then sells these wares in the supermarket below it every Friday.

Rooftop Farms Proliferate Elsewhere

Of course rooftop farms are proliferating elsewhere too, with some even claiming that rooftop farms could ease Middle East unrest. But whether or not this project really is a world first—or one of a pioneering new trend—hardly seems to matter. The fact is that these folks are growing sustainable, ultra-local produce, and they are providing a much needed connection with nature for inner-city kids.