Who We Are

The Carrot Green Roof is an urban gardening and community resource centre located on the roof of the Carrot Common mall in the heart of Toronto. This space is among the first of its kind in the city to have public access to a wide diversity of vegetation and innovation within these intensive and extensive gardens. The Carrot Green Roof is a centre for learning for interested community to learn from a variety of demonstrations related to urban agriculture and related concerns.

The garden itself includes: Various types of Intensive, Extensive and Vertical Gardens, Summer Trays, a University Research Garden, Outdoor education areas, a Demonstration Kitchen, Self-watering Planters and Container Gardens

The Carrot Green Roof website is an interactive space where users can navigate through the various rooftop gardens, connect through upcoming rooftop and community events, participate as volunteers and access the open space for learning. Included within the website, our virtual ‘CGR Learning Hub’ is an open source portal for community groups and individuals to contribute their research, ideas and experiences toward urban agriculture, sustainable practices and green initiatives.

Carrot Green Roof and CGR Learning Hub Goals

• Connect people and communities to the growing process through collaboration
• Demonstrate and showcase innovative projects
• Encourage collaboration and share knowledge and experience
• Increase the public benefits and transfer knowledge to new projects
• Encourage and mobilize other community based projects
• Create a social, active roof garden

What we offer

The Carrot Green Roof offers space for: alternative community garden projects, education and training programs, wellness practitioners, and community driven workshops. There are social outreach programs, and it is an inspiring location for picnics and social events. It is a place for green consulting on various projects to other organizations, as well as providing a gateway for green developers and organizers to connect with the community. It is a facility for the use of speakers and local community groups and a showcase facility for demonstrations, panels and launches. The Carrot Green Roof has the potential to be a place for intergenerational programming for the whole community.

Benefits of the Carrot Green Roof

The Carrot Green Roof is a source of information on sustainable food practices and healthy eating in the city as well as illustrating the therapeutic benefits of growing and consuming healthy food. It is a place that demonstrates a collaborative approach to community healing, providing opportunities to become connected to one another, and bringing together the diversity of community members. There is job creation and training in a social enterprise environment, engagement with other community development and social enterprise organizations and provision of facilities for the use of community members, businesses and organizations. The Carrot Green Roof promotes learning, sharing, creating and innovation; it allows individuals freedom to choose their entry level, and it grants permission to choose who you want to work with. The CGR Learning Hub is a space created to encourage collaborative ideas, experience and learning.

GTA peer organizations

The Carrot Green Roof is part of a broader food movement that is redefining society’s production and consumption of food. In the Greater Toronto Area there are many other such projects, enterprises and organizations. By sharing our stories and achievements with other peer organizations in the GTA, the CGR Learning Hub can become a resource for others involved in urban agriculture, sustainable practices and green initiatives.

Collaboration

We have already established collaborative projects with several academic groups. The following are some examples of the kind of collaborations here at the Carrot Green Roof.

• One of the extensive garden plots has been dedicated to the University of Guelph and their research investigating sedum and other plant species, and their ability to tolerate the demanding growing conditions of green roofs in a Northern climate.
• The University of Guelph has allocated three sub plots to the study of Biochar and to explore the impact of soil amendments with Biochar on sedum growth.
• The University of Toronto has two projects on the Carrot Green Roof. The first, by two students from St. Roberts Catholic High School in Woodbridge, involves comparing the growth of selected vegetables in minimal growing media on extensive green roofs in both urban and suburban environments. The second involves the construction of a green wall and biofiltration system designed by Robert Cameron at Penn State University. The manual provided for this vertical garden will encourage further conversation regarding waste water management and food security.
• A collaborative project involving World Crops in Ontario at Vineland Research and Innovation Centre has been developed between the Greenbelt Foundation, The Stop, and various community gardens including the Carrot Green Roof. This work continues to examine the growth of traditionally imported crops in Ontario and, this summer, five selected crops are being grown at the various community garden sites across the GTA, including the CGR. This project has the potential to introduce an important link between urban agriculture and city food policies since it addresses issues raised in recent food strategy reports.

Additional networks have potential to be established from these various collaborative projects, and we will continually seek out new ways in which we can collaborate with other community projects.

* For more information regarding the various research projects please visit the CGR Learning Hub of this website.

Community Networking

The Carrot Green Roof evolved out of the work of Carrot Cache, a foundation that has distributed over $1 Million to more than 200 groups over the past 10 years. These groups are part of our community network, and they include numerous organizations in Toronto that promote urban agriculture, green initiatives and sustainable practices. The Carrot Green Roof is interested in supporting and collaborating with small food projects.  This support can be in the form of providing a space for workshops or community meetings, or by creating connections and networks through our CGR Learning Hub.