It’s a crazy sight: a 6,000-square-foot organic vegetable farm spread like a striped green blanket across the roof of a squat, sprawling building in one of Brooklyn’s grayest neighborhoods. Eagle Street Rooftop Farms is never going to feed the whole borough (or even the whole block), but it grows dozens of crops, hosts its own Sunday market, and sells to local restaurants including Marlow & Sons and Anella, who serves a Rooftop Farm salad recipe in season. Rooftop farmer Annie Novak squeezes in as much Eagle Street time as she can around her day job as the coordinator of the children’s gardening program at the New York Botanical Garden. We talked to her as she did some light chores at the farm on an early summer Saturday.
Do you have any agriculture in your background?
I’m from the Midwest. It’s in the blood! But no, not really.
How did you get interested in farming, that this could be a living?
When I was in college, I was focused on development studies—the intersection between people and commodities. I was really interested in stories—where do things come from, where do they go, what do they do. The only way to get people to care about things is to give them a full narrative. Otherwise, who cares about recycling?
So I was studying chocolate, and I ended up going to West Africa, to study at the University of Cape Coast, in Ghana. And I was walking around the fields with this woman, and she was explaining to me how the women’s work fits into the chocolate cooperative that she was part of, and I was like women’s rights! Women’s rights! And then she says, “We should go look at some chocolate trees”—and I realized I didn’t know what they looked like. I felt like such an idiot. I knew nothing about the thing that I was writing about. That was when I started teaching myself about agriculture.
Which crops are you most excited about?
Everything seems to be growing really, really well. We had really good spinach; that was exciting. We dedicated two solid rows to cucumbers—all these different varieties, like Japanese and lemon cucumbers. We’re growing a lot of different things because if you grow a lot of different crops, you can tell by the end of the year what works. This is the first time anyone’s ever done a project on this scale on a roof, and we’re hoping to expand to other buildings in the neighborhood, so I want to know what will survive.
You have lots of volunteers helping out on the weekends. What do you have them do?
Harvest, compost, sow—anything you would do at a farm. But we try to give them only jobs that are instructive. It’s, what can they learn from it? I mentored with seven or eight different farmers, and I learned a lot from their different styles. In one case I picked thistles out of a cow field for six weeks. And I was like, “This is bullshit, I’m not learning anything.” So I’ve tried to give the best of what I’ve learned. It’s important to me to make the most of the space, and of the volunteers’ time. They’ve been keeping the farm well watered, pest-free, and full of an incredible energy.
Do you take compost contributions?
Yes! Everybody who comes to volunteer brings a little bag that they’ve been freezing all week.