MARC BOUCHER-COLBERT
Rooftop Gardening and Grassroots Teaching
“Imagine all this was green, every rooftop with a garden like this one,” Marc Boucher-Colbert says as he scans the Portland skyline from the top of the lipstick-red Rocket Building on East Burnside. “Imagine the amount of food we could grow,” the 30-something farmer says wistfully as he shows me around the rooftop garden he oversees with Erin Alt of Edible Skyline for Rocket, the chic restaurant one story below.
He shows off a row of plastic kiddie pools lining the south side of the roof and laughs, “Leather [Chef Leather Storrs of Rocket] calls these ‘veggie day care.’ They’ll harvest pounds of arugula from just one.” Along with the kiddie pools, large steel boxes contain mini greenhouses and compost bins, plumbing tubes ingeniously serve as strawberry planters, and the edges of the building are built with shallow garden plots complete with drainage. All told, the garden is supplying vegetables and herbs for Rocket several months of the year. “In August the kitchen was being outpaced by the garden’s output,” Boucher-Colbert says proudly. “They can harvest sorrel as early as March and they’re up here harvesting as late as November.”
It is an unconventional way to grow food, but then again, New Hampshire native Boucher-Colbert loves a challenge. After eight years as the resident farmer of the Urban Bounty Farm (now Zenger Farm) and a volunteer stint in Brazil, Boucher-Colbert came back to Portland looking to combine his love of agriculture and teaching.
Through the PIIECL program, he worked with the Open Meadow Alternative School and learned first-hand the obstacles and triumphs of setting up garden-based learning at a school. “Everyone is overworked, especially teachers, so if you ask them to create a program, there’s going to be an initial enthusiasm but it wanes over the semester as people get busy with school or other concerns,” says Boucher-Colbert. “If there is someone there who is responsible for the garden and helps the teachers make it happen, then the synergy starts and it can succeed.”
After completing his thesis on starting up garden-based education programs, Boucher-Colbert found a position at Franciscan Montessori Earth School, where he works on sustainability initiatives like capturing rainwater, landscape redesign, growing fresh food for the middle school lunch program, and teaching kids hands-on lessons in the garden. In a recent lesson plan, his students grew wheat, ground it into flour and made grilled flatbreads. “I’m hoping to create habits, interests, and tactile memories so they can really feel where their food comes from, and hopefully the connection will stay with them,” he says cheerfully.
