We look to our city facilities for nightlife, culture, fine dining room and above all, high-density urban living. Farming doesn’t come to mind. But landscape architect David Seiter states we can and should turn into our existing infrastructure as the landscape for growing our own food. One of his latest endeavors, Pool Farm, is persuasive evidence.

When Adam Block approached Seiter with the idea to convert the rooftop pool of his restaurant, The Press Lounge, into an upscale dining terrace and kitchen garden, Seiter has been thrilled. The project united Seiter’s passions for urban infill development, gardening and rooftop arenas within an unbeatable locale: Manhattan. The result is a stylish example of how you can grow your own food nearly everywhere.

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The restaurant has its own forager, and farm-to-table sourcing is favored by the chef. Having diners eat alongside ingredients of the foods made a lot of sense, both logistically and philosophically.

Block’s original idea for the garden was to sink the dining room area into what had been a rooftop pool. Using that concept, Seiter and his team at Future Green Studio made and designed a method of terraced planters. Cascading from the pool deck into the pool ground, the planters soften the transition in the lowest level whilst permitting easy access into the plants.

Salvaged ipe decking is the primary material during the project. Seiter took inspiration for its wood application from the design of a sushi mat: fixed and unyielding in one way, flexible and flexible in the other. The “mat” layout rolls fluidly from the deck into the pool and planters, surrounding a dining party in an intimate space inside the surrounding cityscape.

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Early on, Seiter fulfilled with the chef, the forager and a rooftop farming consultant to go over plant selection and website layout. The farming consultant would continue to manage the roof, working with the staff to replace seasonal vegetables.

Seiter acknowledges that while Pool Farm is upscale and exclusive and might contribute to the restaurant’s buzz more than anything, in addition, it can inspire ideas for edible gardening in towns and suburbs anyplace.

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1. Repurpose as soon as you’re able to or refurbish materials. Structure of Pool Farm coincided with a renovation of the restaurant downstairs. After finding a heap of scrap ipe wood leftover from the demolition, Seiter repurposed it made the whole project around the planks. Existing site conditions and substances influenced the layout in a responsible and creative way, if not unconventional.

Take the time to research and stock materials you already have before you go into the shop. Leftovers from a recent remodel, a forgotten collection of hodgepodge pottery or possibly a Dumpster-dive can supply your primary building materials. This saves money, produces less waste and creates an intimate relationship with every component of your garden.

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2. Work with the website, not against it. Seiter kept as a lot of the bones of this pool as possible, preserving the foundation of the website in a layering procedure. The pool steps remained, pool depths and handrail stayed — they repurposed the pool lights. The sunken dining room also shelters diners from rooftop winds and created more flexibility for planter layout.

Don’t stress too much over layout trends or what you believe your garden must look like. Embrace the website and work with what’s available for you.

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3. Solve problems creatively. Seiter terraced the planters to hide and camouflage different dimensions and depths. When designing the planting strategy, this enabled flexibility. More substantial, long-lived herbs, such as rosemary, were given larger planters while bigger, more delicate herbs can grow in shallower planters.

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Because these planters were created for edible gardening, leaching from the timber was an added concern. All ipe planters were lined with cedar. Otherwise, marine-grade or pressure-treated timber could suffice for ornamentals.

Rooftop gardens have the added challenge of weight to contend with. Soil, especially when wet, is extremely heavy and therefore typically needs a soil mixture made from lighter stuff. A company called Rooflite supplied the developing media for this undertaking. Pool Farm served as a test site for a new mixture designed specially for rooftop agriculture.

Rooftop gardening doesn’t need to be regulated by limitations and what you can not do. Know what has to be set up to your garden. Everything else could be left to permit.

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4. A productive garden is a beautiful garden. The Pool Farm project shows that not only are you able to garden and grow your own food wherever you reside, in addition, it shows that performative and productive landscapes can be equally as precious and beautiful, if not more, as decorative landscapes.

While we might not all have penthouse vegetable gardens surrounded with a fulltime forager, a lot people have front lawns, porches, windowsills or perhaps walls to utilize. Instead of a green lawn, consider an property. Create planters, urban structures or even a dwelling wall.

On the scale, why not consider urban road orchards in place of trees; temporary metropolitan farms on post-industrial sites.

Whether at town, where a windowsill or wall might be the closest thing to a garden; or even in the suburbs, where a front lawn has for years defined curb appeal, how can you make your landscape more relaxing now and sustainable for the long run?

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Seiter hopes that using jobs like Pool Farm, The High Line and Brooklyn Grange, the stigma of what makes a landscape worthwhile and appealing can be re-evaluated, fueling more and more jobs that can perform more than simply visually excite — they could work.

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