Yesterday a woman named Annie Novak came to educate our learning community about rooftop gardens. Annie works in Brooklyn at the New York Botanical Garden and she is founder and director of many programs around the boroughs. She explained to us how rooftop gardening is extremely ecological beneficial. Her philosophy is to transform roofs into gardens or farms.

Rooftop gardens are found in urban environments and save a lot of space. They are also at less of risk of being destroyed by animals being that they are not on the ground. Fruits and vegetables are grown in these farms and gardens and they are all organic. Nothing is sprayed with pesticides and nothing is processed. She told the class that if they ever wanted to buy a product that was “healthy” they should look at the label and make sure it says “organic” that way you know what you are eaten and how your food was grown.

Annie also explained that she never knew anything about plants and wanted to know more about something she never knew about. She went to school for journalism and she wanted to be a writer, but she came across this career and decided it was a better path for her. She is extremely passionate about what she does and I admire her for that.

Annie also spends a lot of her time with bees. She told us that honey is actually bee throw up which I found to be interesting and disgusting at the same time. Having bees around the rooftop garden helps with the soil and helps the plants grow.

After this lecture, I was inspired to eat more organic and rich foods. I never really had the opportunity to appreciate plants and trees but now since I am educated about them, I can now appreciate them more. Fruits and vegetables are an important part of any persons diet and they provide the body with proper daily nutrients. I really appreciated Annie coming to our school and now I will always truly appreciate plants.

Today, December 1st, we had a guest speaker in my RFT class. Her name was Annie Novak and she is founder and director of Growing Chefs field-to-fork food education program and the Manager of the Edible Academy at the New York Botanical Garden. She is also the co-founder and farmer of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in partnership with Goode Green and Broadway Stages. She is the author of The Rooftop Growing Guide: How to Transform Your Roof into a Garden or Farm, published by Ten Speed Press. As she spoke to my class about her experience with plants, she had done it in such a passionate way and it really inspired me. Annie explained to the class why she chose to do this job for the rest of her life and the reason is because she wanted to study something she never knew about. She explained how she wanted a change and needed motivation for the rest of her life and that is how she is where she is now. Learning about plants was interesting for her and she became so involved and starting loving her job more and more each day.

Annie tells the class all about plants and rooftop gardens and how they are put together. She also explains in steps how fruits and vegetables are picked off plants and what happens after that. Annie prefers fruits and vegetables to be organic and she explained how it happens. She showed us on maps where rooftop gardens are located and how all of them are different. She spends a lot of time around plants and she really loves the concept of bees and soil because she tells us that the two help with plants. She taught me  so much about plants in such a short amount of time.

After Annie talked to my class, it really inspired me to take advantage of plants and trees and everything that gross on them. It is important to eat fruits and vegetables because provide us with so much nutrients, and they taste amazing as well! I enjoyed this guest speaker and I feel she is helping the environment and the world in such an amazing way.

Last night I had the opportunity to attend the Oxfam dinner with our learning community. Before this dinner, I had no idea what I was attending. When I walked into the banquet hall, I was handed a green card and was separated from my friends when I was directed to sit on the right side of the room. I was placed at the High-Income table with 4 other girls. My card said I was a 40 year old doctor living in India with my husband who is a businessman and two children who attend private school.

This banquet not only informed me with statistics about classes and different income groups, but also how people are living and what people are going through. A person truly does not know how good they have it until they have experienced poverty. POverty is extremely common but a lot of people, like myself, are not fully aware of it. I am from a fairly large town in New Jersey and poverty is not common at all.

Every year on Thanksgiving, my family delivers Thanksgiving dinners to elderly people in poverty. It allows me to be exposed to poverty and teaches me to be thankful that my family can provide me a meal on the dinner table every night.

The two girls presenting at the banquet had a lot to say about poverty in our area and really informed the students what it is like for people in need by giving us real situations and real people’s names and circumstances. This dinner was extremely informative and it makes me look at life differently than I did previously.

After attending the presentation by guest speaker, Annie Novak, I was inspired be her. Discussing the agricultural world, I was intrigued at how much I learned from her in a short period of time. She was very knowledgeable and passionate about rooftop farming, going into depth about each topic she spoke about. While I was never particularly interested in planting and growing crops, I was also interested in health and nutrition which she discussed. I’ve always felt the organic way of living was unrealistic because of the expense and the difficulty in growing fresh crops without them going bad. She opened my eyes to think about the food world differently.

In growing cities like New York, Annie Novak focused on utilizing the space available and started growing farms on rooftops. To me, this is a very innovative and genius idea because, as she discussed in the presentation, these cities do not have the space for farms anymore with overpopulation being such an issue. This reminded me of the RFT neighborhood projects where we looked at growing neighborhoods and the rising issues of overpopulation and gentrification. These rooftops farms are still allowing for the neighborhood to cater to its population while creating a better food source for locals. The rooftop gardens also provide better insulation for the building , the accessibility to use more nutrient-rich soil because you start on a new slate as well as being able to keep animals that live on the ground away from destroying the crops.

Annie Novak as inspired me to do something I love and be very passionate in whatever I chose to do. Also over the past few years, I have traveled to new places and began a love for traveling and she further inspired me to visit new places and see new things because it can totally change my life, like it did for her when she visited West Africa and the chocolate plants. Annie also spoke very educated and emphasized her feelings towards never being ignorant. I hope to learn more and grow like she had and expand my knowledge beyond my school life. While this lecture was focused on plants, rooftops gardens and the Botanical Garden, I took away much more of a intellectual and inspirational message from Annie Novak.