Urban Agriculture on the Rooftop

Urban Agriculture on the Rooftop Michelle Nowak Cornell University Senior Honors Thesis May 2004 The Rossetties liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof, a few of them hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning as fragments... More

Urban Agriculture on the Rooftop Michelle Nowak Cornell University Senior Honors Thesis May 2004 The Rossetties liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof, a few of them hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning as fragments of peculiar alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of prize Wessex Saddleback sows quartered there by Throp’s successor, and dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive epicurean – all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas. Pirate, driven to despair by the wartime banana shortage, decided to build a glass hothouse on the roof, and persuade a friend who flew the Rio-to-Ascension-to-Fort-Lamy run to pinch him a sapling banana tree or two, in exchange for a Germ Less