Sustainable Saturday - Up on the Roof and the Fire Escape

It's July and summer is already a couple of weeks old.  New York gardening season is in full swing.

Especially in New York City.

New York City?  The land of the "concrete canyon"? Well, yes.  Wherever you find a spare piece of ground near where people live, you may well find green sights like these:

Photographed from the High Line elevated park, Manhattan, New York City (see low building on left side, with trees.  Yes, this is a rooftop garden - and they may well have edibles planted there, too.)  (And yes, I am going to do a feature on my visit to the High Line next week.)

I think this plant may be a luffa plant - but whatever it is, it is climbing up a fire escape ladder in Brooklyn.

A Brooklyn zucchini, growing in a narrow strip between an apartment building and the sidewalk.  And here are some more plants in that garden:

Swiss chard and tomatoes.

Eggplant in back, tomato in front.

No dirt?  No problem!  Here's a tomato plant in a container. Doesn't need to be a fancy container, either. (Apartment dwellers do have other challenges - which I am well aware of as I lived in an apartment without a balcony or access to the roof for some 21 years.)

And dill.

Finally, in a small backyard - a fig tree. (Wish we could have good fig trees by where I live in upstate New York.)  See the small trunk next to the pole.

Have you seen gardens in large cities?  Does your city have any special program to encourage them?