By Tony Davis
...With her startup, (click here) Terre de Monaco, Jessica Sbaraglia aims to transform the roofs, terraces and balconies of Monte Carlo into as many organic fruit and vegetable plantations. Monaco, on the two km2 of the principality, this micro-state is one of the densest urban areas in the world: only a few hundred square meters of gardens, squares and roundabouts have escaped the stone and concrete, but the flat roofs have several thousand m2: an ideal surface for bins and planters to grow raspberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, radishes, herbs, beans, chickpeas and other rarer or older varieties .. The whole concept has been designed with a priority given to ecology, and even the bins come from certified forest woods.
"Try this," suggests Jessica Sbaraglia, (click here) a thirtysomething ex-model who single-handedly controls a wealthy European nation's entire agricultural sector.I tentatively put the bright purple flower to my lips. It's from a plant from South Africa and tastes like garlic. Sbaraglia points to several rows of other edible flowers. Around us there are also 30 types of tomato and an array of vegetables, neatly arranged in 50 centimetres of soil – on the roof of the Monte-Carlo Bay Casino.
Sbaraglia controls all of Monaco's farming because until she set to work with her bucket and trowel two years ago, no one thought it worth growing food on the world's most expensive land. She studied Google Maps' satellite view to locate the few flat spaces in the tiny principality that were not in use, and then set about changing that situation. This site is 400 square metres; other plots on private land cover a further 1100 square metres.
The overall impact of this hyper-local, all-organic approach is minuscule. "We take five months to grow tomatoes. In the commercial sector, they take six weeks," says Sbaraglia, yet her Terre de Monaco company is part of something much bigger. This tiny tax haven on the Mediterranean, the world's second-smallest country (behind Vatican City) and probably the richest city-state in history, wants to be the greenest place on earth....
