Dive into our sea of greens: the Anjou greenhouse.

Before we knew it, 2016 rolled around, and our Lufavore community had reached 10,000 members - making it time to start looking for a third rooftop to keep up with our community’s demand.

Aside from the rooftop hunt, we also launched our home delivery and became cash-flow positive in 2016! With two successful urban farms under our belts, convincing building owners to lend us their rooftops was getting easier. Soon enough, we began building our third greenhouse in the Anjou neighbourhood.

Despite our Laval greenhouse’s next-level efficiency, we realized that a simple, streamlined system could be just as effective. Although we had tons of tomatoes and cukes, we couldn’t keep up with the demand for lettuce. This led to us dedicating our entire third greenhouse to growing leafy greens with a simple single-climate greenhouse model housing 6,830 automated growing channels in 14 bays.

A 63,000-square-foot sea of greens! Our Anjou greens start their leafy life in our in-house seeding station, where the seeds sprout into seedlings with the magic of our specialized grow lights. Once they develop a solid root system, they’re placed in hydroponic channels for about four weeks, where they advance along our automated system until they’re ready for harvest.  

The climate, nutrition level, irrigation system, and even predatory insects are carefully selected to benefit our greens. That said, to bring variety to our Lufavores’ salads, our team takes on a never-ending process of trial and error to test which herbs and leafy veg can thrive alongside our lettuce. Camille, our Head Grower at Anjou, also bases our selection of products on what Lufavores are eating up - and after many tests and community feedback, she’s narrowed our crops to about a dozen Marketplace hits, including Boston lettuce, Genovese basil, and rainbow chard.

We’re always planning for more rooftops - taking note of the good, the bad, and everything in between along the way. With each new greenhouse, we build on the learnings from our previous sites to improve our processes for our next farms. Our three greenhouses held it down for a while, but it wasn’t long before we were at it again and prepping for our fourth.