Eagle Street Rooftop Farm

I arrived at the farm early after a bike ride that took me about an hour and 45 minutes.  I had to stop several times to (a) catch my breath and (b) look at the street map to see how much further it was to the turnoff.  The ride there was actually not bad though the area around the Queens/Brooklyn border was very industrial and rather nasty.

Several of my friends were supposed to meet me there.  Sherita sent me a text saying she couldn’t make it because she had been out too late the night before.  Dory had been planning to take the G Train which was not running so she had gotten her bike out and discovered it had a flat tire that she was unable to reinflate.  Oh well, they didn’t really miss much, so I was almost glad that they didn’t come as I would have felt badly.

Farah and her husband, John, came out and we walked around on the roof.  The farm is on top of the roof of a building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and has an amazing view of the Manhattan skyline.   There are actually three different roofs: one that does not seem to be in use at this time that leads to the stairs to the other two roofs.  It was obvious that we were there at a time that is between crops.  They had harvested a lot of their veggies and had just planted seeds in probably 2/3 of the space.  Also, we had a very bad hailstorm that had ruined their new seedlings, so they were basically starting from scratch. There are only 15 rows (each being about 30’ long) as well as a bed of herbs and a very small chicken pen with four chickens. They had several rows of peppers that they were still harvesting, a row of mustard greens, a couple of rows of radishes, a partial row of carrots, a couple of rows of eggplants and the rest was just starting to sprout.  The farm has CSA members according to their literature and they have a small store.  Sherita told me that they sell their eggs for 50 cents each (!). The store didn't have too much on hand when I was there: a few handfuls of mustard greens, a small basket of peppers and a selection of their herbs.  Their herb garden was actually the best part. They had tarragon, sage, parsley, thyme, two types of basil and dill.

There were quite a few people there visiting and Rockaway Tacos was serving both fish and tofu tacos, but we were not so interested in eating just then.  The weather was quite fine – sunny with a hint of coolness – so we hung out on the roof chatting for about an hour about the documentary I had seen on the previous Friday night.

So, although the rooftop farm itself was a bit disappointing, it was nice to hang out with Farah and John for a few hours.