Durban’s 1,300m2 rooftop garden
Wendy Taylor has transformed an empty urban space into a farm that is now attracting bees, birds and butterflies. Photo by Charli Charles Denison.
Sky’s the limit for rooftop farming
By Barbara Cole
Sunday Tribune
November 21, 2011
Excerpt:
Durban, South Africa – Delegates to the massive Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP17) in Durban are going to learn all about rooftop farming – and they will not have too far too travel either.
Just across the road from the International Convention Centre, where the global conference is being held, there are cabbages, onions and spinach growing next to the taxi rank in Monty Naicker (Pine) Street.
Photo by Charli Charles Denison.
Delegates, who are due to descend on Durban in their thousands at the weekend, will get to see how to grow food even though there might not be enough space. Even a wall can lend itself to growing tomatoes and granadillas.
An urban farm, which has taken only a few months to develop, is on the roof of the “Priority Zone” building – a former warehouse – at 77 Monty Naicker Street, where a pilot project has been running for three years.
Rooftop mural in progress.
3 comments
It sickens me to see such window dressing going on in an effort to fool the world that we are doing something as far as climate change is concerned when the opposite is true.
It is very clear that lots of money has been thrown at the project to impress the delegates. Just look at it, it is a display that was created with mature plants just as you would see at the Chelsea flower show. Look at the grass for instance it was clearly laid hours before the photos were taken and the neat little flowering marrigolds that have just been planted.
It is as fake as the dummy wind generators that were to be erected on the Bluff unfortunately it makes our City and nation look like fakes in the eyes of the world which makes me very angry.
I agree to a large extent with Michael. But in addition, I feel not enough is done especially in Durban to for example get rid of alien vegetation. It is all very well to “take care of the problem” on the tourist routes but in reality, these “horror” plants are left thriving and strangling indigenous tress and plants but most of all quickly and mercilessly draining the water from the ground in less affluent surburbs (which are in the majority). This is worrying!!! After COP 17 the powers that be need to forget the window dressing and get municipalities into action together with communities.
But Michael, I see the positive spin-offs of the Priority Zone for schools and laypersons like myself. The layout of the garden, the idea of using old tyres, the tunnel farming idea etc will I am sure be ideas that can and in all possibility will be explored and used. I hope people like Wendy Taylor could be used by government to help kick-off projects like these in ALL schools. An initiative like hers should not be allowed to “fizzle” out!!! or be rendered as just another “window-dressing” effort to hoodwink the rest of the discerning world!!!
I think Michael must first do a little homework before he comments on such a wonderfull project…..he need to see the bigger picture… This project was not ment for Cop 17 as far as I know and this is no window dressing….believe it or not veggies grow and was harvested …so obviously needs to be replaced. This garden was designed and installed by a very well known landscape company TopTurf Group . Only the tunnesl were done by another company. So Michael please do yourself a favour and go and meet Wendy and her team so that she can give your the real facts of this project, and then decide who is the fool!!!! That is our South Africans problems….we do not give credit where credit is due….Good work TopTurf and Wendy you make us proud. …….Sylvia
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