About Rooftop Ready Seeds

Gardening in The City isn’t easy, and not every kind of veggie or herb will grow well in our Urban-Heat-Island-affected climate. So we strive to make gardening more accessible by making your starting point-your seeds- more in line with your conditions.

Rooftop Ready Seeds is the first seed company to offer urban gardeners a line of seed grown just for their specific climate. All our seed is open-pollinated (meaning you can save seed from your own plants and regrow next year), and grown in New York City in containers or shallow rooftop planting beds, always using organic methods. Our seeds are untreated and are collected only from plants that thrive in our specific climate year after year. Some varieties being sold represent fifth generation seed.

Grown here, thrived here, for here.

About From Three to Twenty Feet Up

From Three to Twenty Feet Up is a blog dedicated to the topics of urban agriculture, sustainable farming, and food justice. It as a venue for the presentation and discussion of the latest developments in urban agriculture and the fight for a more just and more sustainable food system. I will share my personal work while highlighting the best of what is happening in urban settings across the country and right here in Brooklyn, New York City. I will even venture off the roof farm to discuss food politics and other issues of concern to what we hope to be a food movement that impacts everyone.

In his 1948 book Out of the Earth, Louis Bromfield (author, screenwriter, and eventual farmer from my hometown of Mansfield, OH) writes about the need to farm ‘from three to twenty feet down’, criticizing farmers at the time for depleting their topsoil while ignoring the nutrient rich subsoils that lay below. He called for crop rotations that would bring the nutrients up to ground level so the crops could be plowed under and replenish the topsoil, thus creating a more dynamic farm plan. But most importantly, he was calling for a change in farmers’ view of their land. He called for a move from two dimensional farming concerned with plots and profits, farming that ignored natural order, to three dimensional farming concerned with the whole land.

Today, myself and many like me are working to change what has come to be recognized as our unsustainable food system. Conventional farming is ‘topsoil’-level farming, farming that is depleting our land, hurting our environment, and disempowering our communities. Now in urban settings, people all over the country are finding new ways to change their food system, moving their plots above the ground, cultivating food on fire escapes and roofs, in window farms and hydroponic systems, in window boxes and vertical farms. They are learning how to farm from three to twenty feet UP.

About Me

Having grown up in rural Ohio, agriculture and gardening was a part of my life whether I liked it or not. I named my favorite stuffed animal ‘Zucchini’ one July day while laying in the grass by my parents plot. I would help my parents and grandparents in their gardens both willingly and later sullenly as a moody teenager. When I was 14, my first job away from my father’s business was at the local orchard, picking blueberries for 50 cents per pound.

I knew I would have a garden wherever I ended up after transient college life. It turned out that garden would be on the roof of a converted warehouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, where I’ve been growing food and composting for four years. Away from the homestead, I’ve started rooftop gardens for restaurants and indoor growing spaces for schools, led workshops, taught kids how to build worm compost bins, and built rooftop greenhouses. I am also a certified Master Composter through the New York City Compost Project, care of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I currently work as the farm manager at Riverpark Farm in Manhattan- not on a roof, but fun nonetheless.