Projects

The first window farm was built in a low-light Brooklyn window after Britta Riley read Michael Pollan’s New York Times’ Magazine article “Why Bother?” Pollan suggests growing some of your own food to help heal “the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.

What she lacked in yardspace, Riley made up vertically, developing a hydroponic system to grow food all year round in her window. Made from recycled and easily accessible materials, the first Windowfarm produced 25 plants and a salad a week and sparked thousands of other growers to build gardens in their own windows. Riley and Rebecca Bray fully developed the project in February, 2009 through an artist’s residency at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York and sponsorship by Submersible Design, Riley and Bray’s interactive design firm.

Building a community of growers online and providing a platform for open source collaboration have been part of the Windowfarms mission from the beginning. Since the Windowfarm Community launched online in 2009, it has grown to include over 30,000 people from all over the world: the Netherlands, Sweden, China, Brooklyn, Boston.

[This is all from the fantastic Windowfarm.org website - visit it!]