City Building Sprout Urban Gardens Sipho Kings    12 Oct 2018 00:00 A rooftop greenhouse in Johannesburg's CBD. (Delwyn Vesamy/M&G) Johannesburg is rethinking how it works. Its tall, concrete buildings stretch across a vast swath of land between the tar of the motorway network that brings it workers and resources. These tar tentacles run deep into the countryside, sucking in everything needed for the city: tomatoes from Limpopo, wheat from the Free State and citrus from Mpumalanga. The city cannot provide for itself, but that’s changing. You wouldn’t notice walking through Jo’burg, unless you looked up, to the dull-white greenhouses proliferating on top of buildings. Fezile …

Farms in the sky There’s green things sprouting high in the sky in the Joburg inner city. hose things are spinach, basil and lettuce, planted in hydroponic farms on skyscraper rooftops as part of a project called the Urban Agriculture Initiative (UAI). Thirty-three year-old Puseletso Mamogale diligently picks at tiny pots – each containing a single fledgling spinach seedling, arranged in A-fame racks of 10 shelves – like a mother nurturing her children. They’re three weeks old, she says. “In six weeks they’ll be ready for harvesting.” She already has a market for the plants, and will then plant her second batch. The plants are grown in …