Kickstarter

We are so excited to be close to the $10k goal. You need to know that your pledge and help spreading the word directly enabled this project to happen! Period, well, exclamation mark. 

A few other great articles and kickstarter mentions have been posted on the interwebs since the last update and I'd like to thank them by posting their pieces. Interesting to note that we had quite different discussions with each of them and the articles ended up focusing on different aspects of the project, i.e. worth reading them all.
Jeff McIntire-Strasburb at Sundance Channel
Joe Erbentraut at Huffington Post
Josh Brusin at Chicago Foodies
There are probably a few I've missed (not to mention all the facebook/twitter posts!) and I apologize. Email me and everyone will be properly thanked on the Press Page of The Urban Canopy's website.

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In other news we wanted to let you know that the kickstarter doesn't stop at $10k and any extra support will go into actualizing a few more essential "side projects" we've been working on. Particularly these two cool projects:

Composting Sub-Project. Composting food scraps, leaves, etc. enables nature to get back the nutrients and fertility it put into growing those things. Likewise, farmers like The Urban Canopy need to add these nutrients back into the growing of fresh fruits and veggies on the rooftop. One of the best ways to do so is to vermi-compost (worms!) and use the worm "castings" as both a soil amendment and as a liquid dilution called "worm tea." This is exactly what we did last year for the pilot project. My little home worm bin won't be enough for this year's 3000 square foot farm, so we need to scale up and build a few large vermi-compost systems. We'll be collecting food scraps from a few customers and converting that back into fertilizer for the rooftop farm!

Living Hedge Sub-Project. One of the biggest challenges last year was the wind. As you can imagine, a 4th floor rooftop gets a bit windy...This year, instead of constructing something to block it, we'd like to grow a living hedge! Essentially, this will be a separate system of 6 gallon buckets to grow tall and bushy plants to absorb, divert, and disperse the wind around the perimeter of the rooftop farm. Current thoughts are growing small juniper trees, sunflowers, corn, raspberries, currant, jerusalem artichoke, sudan grass, and a few trellised plants like beans and peas as well. Here's a [very] crude attempt at drawing how something like this could work.

Cheers!