Now that's a raised garden

Jim Maloney is a lifelong 'Yunker, calf muscles honed from six decades of walking up and down this very vertical neighborhood. With his wife, Maureen, 62, another lifer, he has raised four children in a 19th-century rowhouse on Shurs Lane, whose steep grade famously punishes masochistic bicyclists.

Nina Phalen and Edgar Smith are relative newbies in comparison; they plan to marry Sept. 30. She's 32, from Easton. He's 43, from Vancouver and London. And for almost four years, they've lived in a sleek condominium in a former candy factory on Leopard Street, in now-funky Fishtown.

Two couples, two neighborhoods, and, yes, two worlds. But they share one big thing: a generation-spanning, boundary-busting, universe-expanding love of gardening.

Which they express in distinctly urban style - not in the backyard, but up on the roof.

"A garden in the sky," Maloney calls it.

Three years ago, Maloney, a general contractor, built a raised flower bed for a client, which gave him an idea: "I'm gonna put one of these on my roof," he recalls thinking.

In this he was channeling his Polish grandfather, an Old World gardener who worked as a farmer, huckster, and milkman in Manayunk. Pop made his own wine, grew all his family's vegetables, and canned for winter.

So what began for Maloney as a relatively simple scheme, a deck with pots on it, soon became a production. He added a second deck, three tiers of planting space in all, and decided that he, too, would can all that goodness for year-round eating.

"People ask me, 'Why do you do all this?' Because it's so enjoyable!" Maloney booms.

The first deck, 16 by 16 feet, was built off the third floor of the house. Maloney then topped it with a wood-frame roof, threaded rebar (reinforcing steel) through the 2-by-6-inch beams, and hung 18 five-gallon paint buckets on the rebar with safety hooks.

The buckets, $2 each at Lowe's, are planted to the max. Annual begonias take root in the top; upside-down tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants come out a hole in the bottom. Their medium is a mix of homemade compost, store-bought garden soil, crushed eggshells for calcium, and crunched-up newspapers to keep the veggies from washing out when they're hand-watered.