Communicating with food at a garden rooftop
On the toughest street in the toughest neighborhood of south Tel Aviv, Darfurian refugees, Chinese workers and Israelis are working together to make a rooftop blossom.
“They don’t have the same language so they can’t communicate,” urban farming consultant Lavi Kushelevich told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday. “But they can communicate through food.”
Kushelevich, 29, is the entrepreneur behind the Rooftop Gardens project that is bringing together an unlikely set of neighbors to cultivate a hydroponic farm on the roof of the building at 11 Fein Street in Tel Aviv’s dicey Neveh Sha’anan quarter.
Since the project began about a month-and-a-half ago, the building’s diverse array of inhabitants – refugees and foreign workers from Darfur, Nigeria, Eritrea, Sudan and China, as well as Israelis – have been meeting each Saturday to learn growing techniques and take care of the garden.
“The main issue today is that we need to find a way to grow our food very close to our plate,” Kushelevich said. “Waste of food mainly [occurs] because the farmer is very far away from our plate. Urban farming is part of the solution to the food crisis.”
The rooftop garden tackles these challenges by bringing community members together to grow food using innovative hydroponics, as first reported by Green Prophet, the Middle East sustainability news site.
“When we grow food very close to our plate it’s in the cities, and land is a resource that is not that available in cities. And it’s expensive,” Kushelevich said. “One of the unused spaces in the city is rooftops. We have a rooftop, but we need to find technology that will provide the food we need to grow.”
For Kushelevich, hydroponics precisely satisfied that need. Unlike plants cultivated in traditional soil gardens, those grown through hydroponics rely on water-based nutrient solutions. The hydroponic systems at Rooftop Gardens came to the Neveh Sha’anan building from Green In The City (Yarok Bair), the urban farming complex on the Dizengoff Center’s rooftop, where Kushelevich also serves as a lecturer.
Among the many advantages of using hydroponics is the lightweight nature of the system compared to soil, as well as the simple installation and easy ability to grow food, he explained.
“People today don’t want to work in agriculture; they just want to make food by pushing a button.”
While the Rooftop Gardens site does use some soil-based plants as a “living wall,” crops for consumption are grown with hydroponics. These include lettuce, basil, cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, mint, strawberries and bok choy, a type of Chinese cabbage that is a cultural staple for some of the workers.
To help meet specific needs of various residents of the building, Kushelevich plans to import seeds from some of their native countries.
“Those residents are getting expertise in growing food in hydroponic systems, the new generation of agriculture,” he said.
Kushelevich targeted this particular space for the project after a friend put him in touch with an Israeli living in the building who was able to help secure the rooftop. Funding for building the infrastructure was raised from private philanthropists.
Now, each Saturday, neighbors who formerly had little contact with each other – along with a number of Israeli volunteers – come together to study and take care of the crops.
“It’s a very dynamic thing to live in that place,” he said.
Kushelevich hopes to see this type of farm replicated in buildings across Tel Aviv, and feels such ventures help make a city more resilient.
“Urban farming is a tool toward making a good community,” he said.