‘Rooftop Salad’ on their menu every day of the year

Photo by Steve Ringman. Colin McCrate of Seattle Urban Farm Company checks on a fresh crop of lettuces planted in a raised bed on top of Ballard’s Bastille restaurant. The lids are fitted with shade cloth to prevent the lettuces and arugula from bolting in the rooftop’s unobstructed sunlight. In winter, glass lids will help protect against the cold.

At Seattle’s Bastille, the garden goodies are on the roof

Bastille in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood offers lettuces and other fresh menu items grown right on the restaurant’s roof.

By Valerie Easton
Nov 15 2009
Seattle Times

From all the fuss over Bastille restaurant’s new rooftop vegetable plots, you’d think that gardening on top of a building is a brand new concept. All over the world, people in urban areas take advantage of the sun-drenched space up top to grow food and flowers. Apiarists are even keeping bees on the rooftop of the Opera House and the Eiffel Park Hotel in Paris. But here in Seattle we’re just getting used to urban density, and owners James Weimann and Demming Maclise are out front putting a commercial rooftop to work growing fresh herbs and lettuces for their restaurant.

“We wanted to pioneer this idea,” says Weimann. The weight calculations were a shock, however, and the lovely old Ballard building needed extensive retrofitting to support a 2,500-square-foot working garden. “You could park a tank up there now,” jokes Maclise. “We’ll break even in about 20 years.”

The owners’ vision is an ambitious one: They hope to list “Rooftop Salad” on their menu every day of the year. Chef Shannon Galusha looks forward to snipping greens for sandwiches and salads, as well as herbs for savory dishes and made-to-order sorbets and glacées. Plans include growing garlic, peppers and tomatoes.

Enter Colin McCrate of Seattle Urban Farm Company, hired to come up with a scheme for growing a year-round garden on a windy, glaring hot roof. These less-than-hospitable conditions won’t daunt the basil and lavender, but tender greens suffer, even bolt, in such intense sun and heat.

McCrate designed clever, boxlike raised beds, each with its own little roof that can be easily raised and lowered. In the heat of summer, the lids are outfitted with shade cloth and overhead spray to create an encouragingly cool environment for arugula and lettuces. In winter, McCrate plans to fit lids with glass for a greenhouse effect and thread the soil with heating coils to push the greens to keep producing.

See the rest of the article here.

Seattle Urban Farm Company prepares for display garden for the Northwest Flower and Garden Show

In the greenhouse we are “forcing” some vegetables to grow out of season (corn, tomatoes, cabbage, everything else we could think of).

Follow the Seattle Urban Farm Company on Facebook here.