Georgetown Garden Calls a Condo Rooftop Home

On a wet, gray, and blustery day, a set of 18 beds of dirt and winter cover crops survive, awaiting the spring. The scene would be unremarkable anywhere else, but this organic garden grows on the roof of a Georgetown brick condo building.

Heading from Wisconsin Avenue, walk down Prospect Street, pass Café Milano and go through the glass doors of an apartment building until you reach a stairwell and you will eventually arrive at the small vegetable garden.

Brynn Slate, gardener and coordinator of the project showed off the dormant plots earlier this week. She identified a few heads of lettuce still around from the fall, dried sunflower stalks and bushes of basil.

Nothing, other than the lettuce, is edible yet, but Slate says, last fall and summer, sun-loving plants like eggplant grew well on the roof. The garden also attracted city wildlife - birds, butterflies and bees.

From this elevated farm much of the city is visible: the Kennedy Center, rows of townhomes and the National Air Force Memorial across the river. Its unlikely location is precisely the reason Airle Foundation chose to bring a garden to a city roof.

The project is a demonstration site created by the Virginia conference center and foundation. Airlie Foundation formed The Local Food Project to educate residents about local food production.

The Foundation focuses on growing food in small spaces and urban areas, says Slate. So the opportunity to grow food on a rooftop in Georgetown was something the organization seized.   

Not simply a demonstration site, Slate will bring youth to the garden to foster a dialog around food production. An interest of Slate’s is involving youth in agriculture – more specifically, shedding the stereotypical image of an American farmer. She hopes projects like this engage youth in gardening and growing, inspiring them to consider agriculture as a profession.

“There’s many different ways you can be a farmer and one of them means growing food on a rooftop for a restaurant …or people in a neighborhood,” explains Slate.

And for crops this season, Slate predicts that basil and tomatoes will generate the most income and interest from restaurants and other potential buyers. Harvesters will bring yields from the garden down a few flights of stairs and sell the food to businesses on the building’s ground floor.

Rooftops not only use urban land not previously in use.  They “will spark pretty much anyone’s imagination because it is so unique,” states Slate.