Rooftop Vegetable Garden Celebrates a Bountiful Harvest: Young and Old in Xindian's Dapeng Community Cultivate and Share Together

Zhao Suping has been the village chief of Dapeng Village in Xindian District for nearly twenty years, and the past two years have been especially fulfilling. She has been promoting rooftop vegetable gardens in the community; more than three hundred residents have taken part in the organic farming training courses organized by the community, a rooftop farmers' market is held two days a week, and some of the vegetables and fruit are provided as ingredients for community meals for the elderly. The community kindergarten has followed suit, opening up a garden plot to teach the children how to grow vegetables.

Growing Vegetables on the Rooftop, Shared by Residents

It is not only the elderly who come to grow vegetables; the kindergarten on the ground floor of the activity center has joined in as well. Last year the kindergarten also set up a "fruit and vegetable growing area," which likewise has both soil cultivation and an aquaponics system, letting the children get hands-on experience of farming.

This ripple effect came from Zhao Suping's decision, at the very start of her efforts, to hold five consecutive training courses, each lasting three months, inviting Xu Pengzheng, a teacher who promotes rooftop vegetable gardens, to give the lessons. Over the course of more than a year, more than three hundred residents have attended this community farming training course, learning about seed collection, raising seedlings, repotting, transplanting, rainwater harvesting for irrigation, and making organic compost.

These more than three hundred residents who took the farming course went back to their own homes and sparked discussion, helping the whole community become more familiar with rooftop vegetable gardens and gain a certain level of technical know-how. Zhao Suping said that quite a few households are currently growing vegetables on their own building rooftops, and her goal is to extend this across the whole community so that all twenty buildings' rooftops can grow vegetables and make compost.

"Growing vegetables on community rooftops not only saves energy and reduces carbon emissions, it also makes people happy, both in body and mind, and healthy. I've been village chief for nearly twenty years, and these past few years have been the most tiring, but also the most fulfilling!" As Zhao Suping looked back on her experience promoting rooftop vegetable gardens, she was already thinking about the future. "The year before last we put up a trellis to grow passion fruit, but then last summer vacation a typhoon hit, the trellis collapsed, and the passion fruit was ruined. This year we're putting up the trellis again. We won't give up; we're going to keep growing passion fruit and try once more!"

(This article was funded by the Jianzhen Environmental Education Foundation, which sponsors personnel costs but does not interfere at all with news topic selection or interview writing, ensuring journalistic independence.)