South Africa: Johannesburg’s mushrooming rooftop gardens

Around the world, food gardens are springing up on suburban sidewalks, waste spaces and inner-city rooftops, their farmers motivated by everything from basic food security and employment creation to more bourgeois concerns such as slow food, prime freshness and the drive to "eat local".

Joburg is no exception: it is home to several long-running food gardening initiatives, with many more in the pipeline.

Joubert Park’s GreenHouse Project, for example, has been going since 2001. It’s an unexpected oasis in the midst of Hillbrow’s raucous, decaying sprawl that serves primarily as a walk-in demo centre, according to one of the project’s "champions", Itumeleng Pooe.

The project’s vegetable garden grows in and around the skeleton of the 1937 Victorian-style greenhouse. It’s seemingly overrun with blackjacks, though that’s not a problem: blackjack leaves cooked with spinach and pumpkin leaves make a "top-notch, exotically divine ital [a Rastafarian speciality]," says Pooe.

Vegetables from the greenhouse are sold to hawkers, local restaurants and anybody prepared to venture into Hillbrow. The project also has bee hives, a biodigester that fuels its kitchen (take that, Eskom) and a rooftop succulent garden, where the spekboom is hard at work gobbling up carbon.

A few kilometres away, in Bertrams, the Bambanani Food & Herb Co-operative is an award-winning organic farm that was established in 2006 on an abandoned bowling green. Devised to improve the community’s access to more nutritious food, it sells its fare to local supermarkets, restaurants and hip inner-city markets. It has also played a significant role in educating people about organic farming techniques.

Read more at the Financial Mail (Natalie Watermeyer)