in Check It Out, Green, Raleigh

Bringing a rooftop garden to East Raleigh

I read this interesting tidbit in yesterday’s N&O about a company that builds rooftop gardens for grocery stores and thought my neighborhood would be perfect for this.

  • There are relatively few choices for good, healthy food in my area (a.k.a, a food desert).
  • An often-heard complaint about my local grocery store is the quality of its produce.
  • Said grocery store has lots of rooftop space and a large, southern-facing, sunlit, vacant outparcel nearby.
  • The Brooklyn-based owner of my local shopping center has rooftop gardens on the Brooklyn warehouses she owns.
  • This should be a slam dunk, shouldn’t it? We’ll see!

A New York company has developed a hyper local way to get fresh produce to grocery stores: grow it on the store’s own rooftop – or at least one very close by.

BrightFarms builds hydroponic greenhouses on top of buildings and then sells the lettuce, tomatoes and herbs to local supermarkets. So far, the company’s partners include A&P in Brooklyn, Whole Foods in New Jersey, and Homeland Stores in Oklahoma. Now BrightFarms wants to come to the Triangle.

P.S. The link in the N&O blog entry is broken. The contest URL is http://brightfarms.com/projects/north-carolina-envision-us-here-contest

via .biz – Company seeks roof garden sites | newsobserver.com blogs.