The Bastille restaurant in the Ballard district of Seattle, Washington not only serves fantastic French-inspired cuisine but it’s as fresh as fresh can get. They are so committed to this concept that they grow their own produce on their roof.

One of the things that I found particularly interesting was the chef’s comment regarding new kitchen staff and students. He said that many aspiring chefs don’t fully understand or appreciate where food comes from and how precious it really is. Then he said that after a day of pulling weeds and picking produce for that evening’s dinner menu, they have a new-found respect for food and they are even more careful during preparation and they try harder not to waste anything because suddenly they have a full understanding of all the hard work involved in getting it there to their counter, ready to be prepared for a gormet dish.

Like most restaurants that pursue rooftop gardening, it started out small and there was a lot of trial and error but now they’ve pretty well figured out what works and what doesn’t.
In fact, one of their lessons learned is that something like the picture above with the nicely built, expensive wooden planter with removable doors, irrigation and even heating coils was just not necessary to have good plant growth. As pretty as they are, they work just as well as the images below.

This container is really just a kiddie pool filled with rock and topped with another kiddie pool with drainage holes in it then covered in a sort of black plastic (which they learned was necessary to keep the kiddie pools from breaking down in the sun) and filled with the appropriate growing media. Extras include irrigation and a removeable wall and lid that can open and close. And this much cheaper and easier to build than the more sophisticated wooden planters yet functioned just as well.

Just as simple as the kiddie pools are the buckets for the tomatoes.

The Bastille also has bee hives integrated with the roof for both pollination and a portion of the honey for their restaurant. The bees are provided by Ballard Bee Company as a pollination service for the restaurant and honey for the owners.

Ultimately, with all the success they’ve had from their current rooftop, their looking to expand further and take over the neighboring rooftop!

Growing up on a farm as a child, I was fairly well connected to the idea of food, place and time but of course didn’t think about it much back then. In 2008, while working in Germany and sitting next to a girl from Colombia, I made a comment one day about the fruit bowl she kept on her desk and the amazing amount of apples that she ate. Every single day she would be happily crunching away on an apple, a fruit of great abundance in the area of southern Germany where I lived which was surrounded by countless orchards. She told me that she grew up with the kinds of fruit I would consider exotic like mangos and papayas but the only apples they could grow were very small and not as flavorful. When she arrived in Germany she was in heaven being surrounded by all the delicious and fresh local apples. It sort of stopped me because I had moved from a place in the US that had a great abundance of apples so to me it was of little difference that I could buy apples at the market. I began thinking more and more about how fruit can define place, not just what is cultivated but what can grow naturally just out in the open. I thought back to my childhood again and realized that a lot of what defined that time and place in my mind had to do with fruit, like wild huckleberries. I remember strategically choosing a favorite sitting spot in a tree because it was within reach of the little red berries that I would sit and snack on.

Awhile ago I came across a great group that followed along this line of thinking, using the fruit as their lense to investigate the ecologicial, social and political issues surrounding food and land use as well as to inspire community building. They are called, Fallen Fruit, an art collaboration created by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young that began six years ago.

The trio first began in their own stomping grounds of the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles by mapping out “public fruit” which included the creation of street-by-street diagrams of fruit trees that grew on public land. They were especially interested in the use of this public fruit and expanding on the idea of a city planting with the goal of helping to support their populace through something of a planned urban orchard.

The groups website describes what they are about:

“Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration that began with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles.”

“Over time our interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include Public Fruit Jams in which we invite the citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Community Fruit Tree Plantings on the margins of private property and in community gardens; Public Fruit Park proposals in Hollywood, Los Feliz and downtown LA; and Neighborhood Infusions, taking the fruit found on one street and infusing it in alcohol to capture the spirit of the place.”

The trio doesn’t just stop at Los Angeles, or even the United States but finds inspiration in whatever part of the world that calls to them. They have followed activites around the world that have interested them in regards to the social aspect of food from documenting the harvest of isolated, wild berries in Norway to following a boy in Copenhagen all the way to Colombia to research and study the activities surrounding the banana.

While all of their projects are interesting in their own way, I was especially drawn to a project titled Public Fruit Jam that made its first appearance in 2006 and is ongoing. They say everyone has a fruit story and I have many but one thing that I always recall with great fondness, even from my very early childhood years, the days I’d spend making jam with my grandparents from the fruit we picked together on their farm. Making jam is so easy a child can participate and there is little concentration involved so during the time it is an incredible opportunity for socializing. This event is especially interestined because by attending and bringing fruit, each person from the community shows up with a story as well as an interest in the topic and together people can explore their connections through the fruit they gathered in their own neighborhood and walk away with something they made through shared resources and effort, adding layers to the story they began with. A description of the project from the site:

“Fallen Fruit invites the public to bring home-grown or street picked fruit and collaborate with us in making a collective fruit jams. Working without recipes, we ask people to sit with others they do not already know and negotiate what kind of jam to make: if I have lemons and you have figs, we’d make lemon fig jam (with lavender). Usually held in a gallery or museum, this event highlights the social and public nature of Fallen Fruit’s work, and we consider it a collaboration with the public as well as each other.”

Their latest project, called EATLACMA, will be held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art beginning this month and will run through November. A video below provides a teaser of the project and the LACMA website describes the project:

“EATLACMA is a year-long investigation into food, art, culture and politics. Fusing the richness of LACMA’s permanent collection with the ephemerality of food and the natural growth cycle, EATLACMA’s projects consider food as a common ground that explores the social role of art and ritual in community and human relationships. EATLACMA unfolds seasonally, with artist’s gardens planted and harvested on the museum campus, hands-on public events, and a concurrent exhibition, Fallen Fruit Presents The Fruit of LACMA (June 27-November 7, 2010). It culminates in a day-long event (November 7, 2010) in which over fifty artists and collectives will activate, intervene, and re-imagine the entire museum’s campus and galleries.”

images via Fallen Fruit

Based out of El Paso, Texas, a company called Valcent has been working on a vertical farming system called VertiCrop that they believe is even better and more cost-effective than traditional field agriculture because the system has produced “20 times the normal production volume and only requires 5% of the average water used in conventional growing conditions.” All the trays kind of remind of lunch period back in school.

Here’s how the VertiCrop high density vertical farming system works:

“The VertiCrop system grows plants in a suspended tray system moving on an overhead conveyor system. The system is designed to provide maximum sunlight and precisely correct nutrients to each plant. Ultraviolet light and filter systems exclude the need for herbicides and pesticides. Sophisticated control systems gain optimum growth performance through the correct misting of nutrients, the accurate balancing of PH and the delivery of the correct amount of heat, light and water.”

images via valcent