A Year At Larimer Uprooted
By Kristen Moree
In April of 2019, the Bio-Logical Capital team embarked on a journey to explore the potential of urban agriculture in our home city of Denver, Colorado. With the support of our sister company, Urban Villages, we created Larimer Uprooted, an urban farm on the 6th floor of a parking garage in the heart of downtown. We are excited to share with our community our very first Year End Report for Larimer Uprooted’s initial year of production. This report shares both our successes we achieved and the lessons we learned from growing a diverse mix of fruits, vegetables, native plants, flowers and trees on a rooftop in downtown Denver, and why we’re interested in urban agriculture in the first place. We hope that by sharing these learnings with our larger community, we will inspire and inform others to start their own urban agriculture projects, too.
Thank you to everyone who joined us to create an incredible first season of growing and learning, we hope to see you next year on the rooftop! In the meantime, we encourage you to follow us on Facebook and Instagram to keep up with what we’re up to this winter and when we’ll be reopening for the spring season.
2019 Year End Report
October marked the end of our first growing season on Larimer Uprooted – an urban rooftop farm and community resource located in Denver’s historic Larimer Square. Developed in partnership with our sister company, Urban Villages - a mixed use, urban infill real estate development firm - Larimer Uprooted is a pilot project in growing food in a dense urban area. Our mission is to educate ourselves and our community about urban agriculture.
Why Urban Agriculture?
By 2050, our world’s population is expected to reach 9.8 billion. Of those nearly 10 billion people, 70% will likely live in cities according to current trends. With our urban areas growing at such a rapid rate, we are putting an unprecedented amount of stress on our local food systems. The vast majority of farms are located far outside of our cities, resulting in large distances that a fruit or vegetable has to travel to reach the shelves of our grocery stores. Today, some studies estimate that in the US, the average distance that produce travels from where it is grown to where it is consumed is 1,500 miles. This is equivalent to driving roughly halfway across the country. With farms struggling to survive and thereby consolidating into larger, industrially owned operations, this distance is likely to only increase.
When the farmer that grew your salad greens lives across the country, it’s difficult to feel a strong connection to her or to the land from which those greens came. Losing this connection has significant repercussions to both our ecological and public health. ‘Food miles’ are a significant contributor to climate change when you account for all of the energy that goes into not just transporting but also cooling and storing that food along the way. In addition, produce that has been processed, frozen or stored over a span of time has fewer nutrient levels than fresh produce harvested just a couple of days ago. How can urban residents begin to learn about these harmful implications of food miles when they have never set foot on a farm? How can we expect our neighbors to care about things like climate, wilderness, soil health, farmer financial stability, and all of the myriad offshoots stemming from how we grow food, when they have no reference point or context to situate these abstract concepts? Discovering new, innovative ways to connect people to their food and their surrounding wild landscapes will be imperative for the future wellbeing of our climate, cities, and health as a society.
Urban agriculture represents one of the many necessary solutions to restore and preserve this precious connection between cities, farms, food, and wild spaces. The ecological services provided by an urban farm are many – increased pollinator habitat, more biodiversity, greater storm water retention and healthier watersheds, fewer food miles and carbon emissions, greater localized cooling and mitigation of heat island effect, improved air quality, and more still being studied. The sociocultural impacts, while harder to quantify, are also numerous. Imagine if when you were younger, each morning on your bike ride to school you passed your neighborhood’s local urban farm and would grab some strawberries as a snack that were just harvested earlier that morning. Your science class would visit on field trips some weeks to learn about composting and cooking with fresh produce. You grow up learning to tend to a vegetable garden of your own, and share the extra tomatoes with your neighbors. The sense of community, connection to your city’s ecology and nutritious eating practices that are instilled in your life are true not only for you but also for everyone else whom resides in your neighborhood. As we have learned about human nature in many different scenarios, repetitive exposure to a practice or value can have powerful repercussions.
Planning and Design
With these impacts in mind, Urban Villages set a new precedent as a developer when it supported Bio-Logical Capital with the opportunity to design a rooftop farm on the 6th floor of a parking garage that they own and operate on Larimer Square. Together, we dreamed up an experiment that sought to answer the question, how can we grow fruits, vegetables and plants in the middle of downtown Denver? We knew it was possible, but the nuances in growing practices, species mix, drainage systems, soil types, and more were unknown to us.
With the following values at the forefront of our design, we created Larimer Uprooted: Local Food Production, Food Access, Education, Urban/Rural Connection and Community. We envisioned developing an urban agriculture project that demonstrates local, innovative, and one day, closed-loop food production and distribution in the middle of a city. We wanted to grow a diverse mix of perennial and native plants, trees and shrubs to serve as a connection to the natural surrounding landscape that was Denver before Denver existed for all of the visitors that came to the rooftop. We wanted our community to be able to participate in the growing process and use the space as a resource. As one of Denver’s first open-air, soil-based rooftop farms, we hoped this project could lay the groundwork to set Denver on the path to be a leader in sustainable urban food production.
We began designing the farm in the spring of 2019, realizing that we were getting a late start on the season but also taking advantage of this incredible opportunity to turn the top of a parking garage into a productive growing space. In June, we installed and planted 41 raised beds and in July we welcomed the community to the space. For the rest of the summer until October, we operated community open farm hours, and hosted events, workshops and school groups. We closed the farm gates in November and we are using the winter months to both reflect on the successes and lessons learned of this year, and for 2020 farm planning.
The primary goal of our 2019 season was to observe, test and learn as much information as we could about the best practices involved with operating an open air, soil based rooftop farm in Denver (in a space that was retrofitted, not designed from the start as a farm). During the season we tested different infrastructure for the raised beds, planted a diverse planting mix of fruits, vegetables, trees, and perennial plants, and also explored various growing practices and different soil composition. In addition, we held open community hours at various times of the week (to better understand when and how our community wanted to use the space). We are eager to share both our successes and lessons learned, and to use this gained knowledge to inform on the 2020 season of Larimer Uprooted.
Key Numbers from the 2019 Season
Number of Trees Planted on the Rooftop: 20
Varieties of Vegetables Grown: 20
Species of Native Plants Grown: 18
Total Number of Community Events & Workshops Hosted: 20
Total Event Attendance: 638
Local Food, Agriculture and Sustainability Groups Engaged: 40+
Visitors During Community Hours: 376
Farm Tour Attendees: 309
Class Field Trips: 4
Total Visitors to the Rooftop: 1,400+
Key Learnings
Larimer Uprooted is an experiment in understanding both how to grow food in an urban, concrete setting and how to balance creating a community space with a viable rooftop farming business model. Throughout the season we explored, refined and shifted our model, operations and growing practices in order to learn what grows best and with what techniques, how to best activate this space as a community resource, and how to effectively disseminate urban agriculture and rooftop farming knowledge to the community through education initiatives on the farm. We are excited to share some of these learnings below, and we will be producing an additional case study at the end of the year.
Our direct-seeded fruits and vegetables grew better than our transplants, partly due to the time of year planted (transplanting typically occurs in spring and we did not transplant until June) and likely due to the shock involved with the harsher rooftop environment. Furthermore, many of the transplants we purchased were picked over due to our late-season start, and were therefore less healthy. This probably contributed to their inability to adapt to the harsh environment. We will continue to learn and test these assumptions in 2020.
For our rooftop climate and well-balanced soil composition, we found that drip irrigation works more effectively than spray irrigation. This is largely because drip irrigation ensures that water is accessible to the vegetables’ root systems. Furthermore, many plants do not like to have water droplets (from the spray irrigation) on their leaves as this increases light magnification from the sun (which is also increased by the pavement around our garden boxes).
Our vegetables responded well to both increased compost levels in our beds and weekly compost tea application. We are still experimenting with finding the optimum level of compost that works best in our vegetable beds, and will have a few different ‘test beds’ next year to continue this learning process.
Soil that has a high concentration of organic matter and ability to retain water is highly imperative, both to fruit and vegetable health and to the structural integrity of the boxes and the rooftop. We initially used a soil base that is created for green roofs due to its lightweight and porous characteristics, allowing for greater soil depth and drainage, but lacking in some essential nutrients for production. We also will keep testing and modifying how we balance soil weight, drainage and nutrient qualities.
The balance between nutrient density, weight and drainage will likely differ from rooftop to rooftop. While adequate drainage is important to limit the total weight load per bed, it is not ideal for a retrofitted rooftop farm, as the water doesn’t necessarily have a sufficient place to drain. Other rooftops (especially if the farm is part of the building design and construction) may not have this same issue, but it is an important component to plan for in rooftop farm design.
Native plants and herbs do extremely well on the rooftop with minimal water and nutrients necessary.
Overall Reflections & Looking Ahead
Part of the challenge of spearheading a new industry is navigating city regulations that have never assessed projects of similar nature. Even though Denver wants to support more urban agriculture projects, current zoning code does not allow for ease in setting one up, especially in the case of a rooftop farm on a parking garage. We successfully navigated several initial regulation hurdles, and in doing so, are hopeful that we set a path forward for those who want to do the same.
We learned a lot this summer, one of the most important lessons being that it is possible to grow fruits, vegetables, herbs, shrubs, flowers and trees on an outdoor rooftop in Denver, Colorado (which some groups initially told us was not possible). We are therefore optimistic in reaching our goal of setting the stage for future developers, agricultural organizations and food businesses to create their own rooftop farms in the city.
Furthermore, we are excited to continue to share our learnings with our community. Although there is a lot of excitement and information about Living Green Roofs in Denver, green roofs do not require the same infrastructure and practices as rooftops that produce food. There is a knowledge and skills gap in Denver regarding the necessary steps to set up a successful productive green roof, and this is a space that we hope to influence as our rooftop farming operations expand and we reach more community members through operating Larimer Uprooted.
As we shift gears for the 2020 growing season, we are excited to direct our focus to achieving production levels at a higher volume, simplifying our operations and engaging with more of the community on the rooftop. We hope you will visit and join us in this journey of learning how to grow fruits, vegetables and plants on a rooftop!