Lessons from the rooftops - get your hands dirty and wear sunscreen
The downside is the silly sunburn right on my nose makes me look like I’ve had a little too much red wine. The plus side is that I got my ‘funburn’ from spending most of Saturday amongst a green patchwork on a rooftop in north London. Herbs, flowers and vegetation burst from tubs, boxes and rubble sacks, the results of the wonderfully named ‘Food from the Sky’ – an inspiring urban growing project hidden up on the roof of Thornton’s Budgens supermarket in Crouch End. Founded by Azul-Valerie Thome and Andrew Thornton, it’s supported (read planted, watered, weeded, lovingly tended) by an army of volunteers and friends, producing plenty of seeds to share, salads to sell in the Budgens below and flowers for bees and other buzzy things looking for safe pit stops across the city.
The garden is made up of dozens of containers, overflowing with life and leaves, from purple sprouting broccoli and lettuce to borage and flax. It’s fed from the compost bins and wormeries parked in the roof’s corners, which recycle organic waste from the shop below. And it’s where I’ll be spending a day every month for the rest of the year together with a small group of other container-full-of-compost enthusiasts, learning how to be a successful urban food grower.
At the end of last Saturday’s session, most of us agreed that what we’d enjoyed the most was “getting soil under our finger nails”. We live in a city where there isn’t much that’s not covered by paving slabs, tarmac or grass we’re supposed to keep off, and where we get most of our food out of a packet. There’s something wonderfully refreshing and powerful about digging your bare hands into a big tub of compost, grit and fertilising chicken poo pellets that instantly reconnects you with the cycle of life: where it begins and ends, and how to coax a future plump and tasty vegetable out of a tiny seed. It feels... real.
What really struck me was the number of us who described how busy and stressful our working lives were, and how much we’d been looking forward to our day on the rooftop to relax and reconnect with nature. So much of what we’re learning during the course – from soil mixes to food harvesting and seed preservation – is straightforward common sense, and I would argue, basic skills for life and living that we seem to have forgotten or come to ignore. Learning all this feels like a “demystifying” process – re-learning something we ought to know, and deep down, something we crave. Our busy city lives seem to leave little time or space for simple things that really are fundamental to human resilience and to our happiness too. After all, what good are all the Blackberries in the world if you’ve never picked fresh blackberries straight from a bush? How can browsing the veg aisles at the supermarket ever compare with harvesting fresh leaves from your carefully nurtured window box?
I can’t wait to get back on the rooftop next month (with sunscreen), and I can’t wait to see my balcony come out in full bloom (if I win the battle against those pesky squirrels who dig holes and snails who just eat everything). But most of all, I’m wondering whether and how, despite the tarmac and “keep off the grass” signs and plastic wrapping and general busy-ness of city life, I can make sure I have and always keep, time and space in my life for getting my hands dirty and feeling a little closer and more connected to nature, life and living?
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