Tomatoes grow in 5-gallon buckets at Boswyck Farms, a loft near the DeKalb L-train stop. — Photos by Aaron Short

While most of Bushwick was digging itself out of two feet of snow this winter, loft-gardener Lee Mandell was busy harvesting kale, collard greens, and lettuce.

It took some practice, but Mandell figured out how to grow greens hydroponically in an open greenhouse in 12˚F weather without a source of heat.

“We kept the nutrients warm, which kept the roots warm,” said Mandell.

For this small miracle, hungry customers at Roberta’s enjoyed green salads sourced from the restaurant’s greenhouse when everything surrounding it was white and gray.

Mandell is just one of a growing number of farmers in Brooklyn who creatively use their apartments, rooftops, backyards, and even flatbed trucks to grow vegetables throughout the year.

 
Mandrell at Boswyck Farms. Click to see more.

His operation, Boswyck Farms, occupies about 200 square feet of his 1,000-square-foot loft steps from the DeKalb Avenue L-train stop. The loft is moist and warm; the pleasant sound of water trickling through PVC piping transports visitors to a spring brook in the Adirondacks, nearly obscuring the mechanical whirring of Mandell’s refrigerator.

A self-taught hydroponic gardener, Mandell has been at it since September 2008, when his first crop of wilted lettuce was an utter failure.

“They need light and I didn’t give them light. So they grew two inches tall and fell over,” said Mandell.

The next batch was orange bell peppers, which grew two feet tall but succumbed to an infestation of whiteflies.

After the first few crops, Mandell kept refining his soils and nutrient levels, using coconut husks, perlite, and rounded clay stones to give root structures something to grip onto. He has since grown peppers in a drop system, herbs in a deep-water culture in PVC pipes, and tomatoes germinating in a five-gallon bucket.

“Every four hours, the system gets flooded for 15 minutes. Then it drains,” said Mandell, describing the deep-water culture.

Mandell is not producing enough vegetables and herbs to feed, say, a food co-op, but he is looking to instruct students in elementary school and high school. His partner, Joanna Burgeis, has worked to design a curriculum that plucks lessons from hydroponics. Fourth-graders and high-school students create their own passive systems and record data as their plants grow over a period of time.

“It’s not a straight-up lecture. The kids are moving around,” said Burgeis. “Kids just learn better if it is project-based and they learn about failure and how to fix failure.”

This summer, a 7-week program with local education organization El Puente is in the works, as are collaborations like the lemon-basil pesto made by a local resident with Mandell’s produce sold at the Bushwick Farmer’s Market.

Mandell knows that the interest in urban farming – rooftops in Greenpoint, asphalt in Red Hook, back yards in Bushwick – has risen exponentially, but he is satisfied to run his hydroponic farm the same way his lettuce does. Slowly and patiently.

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