By Addison Martin

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On the rooftop of Iowa City’s local M.C. Ginsberg lies an urban oasis of hydroponic gardening. While Iowa City is no New York, urban gardening has been sweeping the nation for years, and Mark Ginsberg hopes to bring that to the top of Iowa City.

“When you look around at all the flat roofs, just the mechanicals, there’s 1.5 million square feet of rooftop, and it makes sense to use all the space for something positive,” he said. “And why not, if we can figure out how to put it on these roofs, why not farms?”

Why not indeed, because many rooftops in Iowa City are an unused reality that are the perfect location for these cheap and environmentally beneficial gardens.

“At this point, it’s not about seeing how much we can produce, it’s seeing what we can produce,” Ginsberg said.

The garden is, for now, serving as an experiment and hopefully an example for future models throughout Iowa City.

“It’s a model, it’s a recipe for how to grow a hydroponic garden … no soil,” he said.

He eventually hopes to be able to sell the model online through a database that would allow users to specify their environments and get a plan that’s best fit to grow hydroponic gardens.

Ginsberg said the hydroponic system works without soil. It functions somewhat like  an irrigation system, except that all of the nutrients needed for the plants are mixed directly into the water, which is then distributed to the plants.

Each plant sits in a food-grade bucket in porous volcanic rocks that allow the water to flow through easily and are cost effective.

The garden is still in its early stage, with the first vegetables planted in late May, but construction expert Chad Treloar is optimistic about what the young plants will mean for the future rooftops of Iowa City and what they can provide on this rooftop.

“Once we understand the concept behind hydroponics, now we can make it more conducive to different environments,” he said.

Ginsberg said he’s still figuring out how to maintain his garden to how Iowa’s temperamental weather and frigid winters will affect a garden that’s  more exposed to the elements than normal gardens.

“The cold situation is yet to come; we’re trying to think of how to come up with a self-contained system, like a hoop, and heat the inside of that so that the plants can grow,” he said. “The problem is that it can get more costly … that’s probably the biggest obstacle that we’re going to come across next.”

Jacob Simpson, a co-president of University of Iowa Student Gardeners, is also an advocate for urban gardening. He said it’s essentially beneficial for the environment.

“Rooftops, specifically, if you think about how we use our space as a society, we have our buildings, and they appear productive from the ground up,” he said. “But when you have a building with a rooftop, you have unspent area, and all it does is collect heat from the Sun and bounce rays back into the atmosphere.” 

Since having visited Ginsberg’s rooftop garden, Simpson said, he is hopeful this unused space will be taken up by beautiful gardens.

“Standing up there, you can just dream of all the green possibilities,” he said.