美国国家公共电台 NPR On Top Of Hong Kong's High Rises, Rooftop Gardens Take Root

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

In one of the world's most densely¹ populated cities, Hong Kong, if you want to grab a tomato for your salad, you might have to run upstairs - a lot of stairs. NPR's Rob Schmitz has this report on the vegetable gardens growing on the city's rooftops.

ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE²: On a typical block in this city, thousands of people live on top of each other. Pol Fabrega thinks about all these people as he looks up at the towering high-rises above the streets. And then he thinks about all that space above all these people.

POL FABREGA: The square footage here is incredibly expensive. But yet, if you look at Hong Kong from above, it's full of empty rooftops.

SCHMITZ: It is, he says, a big opportunity for growth. Fabrega is not a developer. In a city full of bankers, he's a gardener. He helps run a gardening cooperative called Rooftop Republic.

FABREGA: In Hong Kong currently, there are around 700 hectares of farmland that are being farmed. So the amount of rooftop space is almost the same as the amount we're using today to farm, like, actual farmland.

SCHMITZ: Hong Kong's agricultural contribution to its GDP is 0.02 percent. Fabrega's goal is to boost that tiny number by filling Hong Kong's 1,500 acres of rooftop space with vegetable gardens. He's starting small by giving tutorials to city residents.

FABREGA: Put this in. Yeah.

SCHMITZ: We're on the roof of a French restaurant in Hong Kong's Central District. It's surrounded by skyscrapers³, and it's covered with row after row of container gardens. Rooftop Republic co-founder Andrew Tsui gives a tour.

ANDREW TSUI: What we're looking at now, we have butter lettuce⁴, romaine lettuce, kale. We have cherry tomato. We have carrots. We have some basil and also a lot - tons of mint.

SCHMITZ: Tsui and Fabrega stop to show expat resident Gina Ma how to remove a head of cabbage from its stalk.

GINA MA: And twist - or should I pull?

SCHMITZ: Rooftop Republic has helped fill more than 26,000 square feet of rooftop on 22 rooftop farms. The biggest one is on the roof of Cathay Pacific, where 40 employees manage container vegetable plots on a daily basis. Gina Ma's rooftop garden is tiny by comparison, but she's spreading the word at her children's school.

MA: I was like Johnny Appleseed. I was just calling everybody up - called up the school, sent an email to all my neighbors being like, I have seedlings⁵. They're amazing.

(LAUGHTER)

MA: And they're all from, like, you know, stuff that - organic. And stuff you can't get here, come get it.

SCHMITZ: It's that last point, being organic, healthy, that's important to Fabrega's clients.

FABREGA: In the case of Hong Kong, we also face the particular challenge that 98 percent of our vegetables and fruits come from China. And there's endless amounts of, like, scandals surrounding the food that's coming from mainland China.

SCHMITZ: And that's why hotels and restaurants are some of Rooftop Republic's biggest clients, all in a city where returning to the land can be as simple as a quick trip up the stairs to the roof. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Hong Kong.