A roof agriculture or roof top garden is a garden on the roof of a building. Besides the decorative benefit, roof top gardening may provide food, temperature control, hydrological benefits, architectural enhancement, habitats or corridors for wildlife, recreational opportunities, and in large scale it may even have ecological benefits. The practice of cultivating food on the rooftop of buildings is sometimes referred to as rooftop farming. Roof top gardening is usually done using green roof, hydroponics, aeroponics or air-dynaponics systems or container gardens.
Roof top gardens allow people living in an urban environment the option to grow their own food. Beyond food cultivation, roof top gardens provide habitat for wildlife, recreational opportunities, and building beautification. They even provide architectural benefits such as such as temperature control.
The roof top garden is getting popular every day in past is was only for making the roof beautiful and to make a place more refreshing. But now a days people making rooftop gardens for various reason. Some are doing for making the building cooler during summer, some are doing to grow some fresh vegetables or fresh fruits, some are doing for environmental cause and some are doing for all causes.
Environmental impact of Roof top gardening
The rooftop garden make the roof cooler some time is from 3°c up to 11 °c that’s means you need lees power for you AC to cool you home. Also the plants makes oxygen from CO2 through its life time. there are some indirect way its helps to reduce CO2. For example if you grew 50% of you vegetables in you garden then you don’t need to go to market to buy it also the markets transports vegetable and fruits from the outside the city some time 100 to thousands of miles from the city so it product CO2 in process of bringing this to local market.
Urban agriculture by roof top gardening
In an accessible roof top garden, space becomes available for localized small-scale urban agriculture, a source of local food production. An urban garden can supplement the diets of the community it feeds with fresh produce and provide a tangible tie to food production. At Trent University, there is currently a working rooftop garden which provides food to the student café and local citizens.
For those who live in small apartments with little space, square foot gardening, or (when even less space is available) green walls (vertical gardening) can be a solution. These use much less space than traditional gardening (square foot gardening uses 20% of the space of conventional rows; ten times more produce can be generated from vertical gardens). These also encourage environmentally responsible practices, eliminating tilling, reducing or eliminating pesticides, and weeding, and encouraging the recycling of wastes through composting.