These days, dining out feels increasingly like a 4-H Club meeting. Chefs and restaurateurs everywhere are taking a farm-to-table approach, serving carefully sourced, locally produced foods whenever possible. This goes beyond organic and sustainable. Many restaurants now can--and proudly do--tell you the names of the family farms your meal's ingredients came from.

One restaurant has taken farm-to-table even further. Ask where the greens for your salad came from at Uncommon Ground on Devon Avenue in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood and, chances are, your server will just point straight up. Uncommon Ground owners Helen and Michael Cameron had always taken a farm-to-table approach at their original Clark Street location, building relationships with farmers who follow sustainable and organic methods. So when they opened their Devon location in 2007, they took the next logical step: They planted a farm on the roof.

And this is no ordinary farm. The tiny 2,500 square-foot space was declared the first certified organic rooftop farm in the United States by the Midwest Organic Services Association in 2008. The owners even hired an urban farmer to help them run it.

Building a rooftop farm was a big commitment--and no small feat. The remodeling of the restaurant space began with digging down an extra five feet into the basement to install heavy-duty steel beams that could support the farm. Twenty-eight raised bed planter boxes built by local craftspeople hold nearly six tons of organic soil, creating 640 square feet of growing space. Produce from the farm is used in their restaurants, as is honey from four rooftop hives. Five rooftop solar panels heat up to 50% of the restaurant's water. The Character Approved farm also serves as a place to teach urban agriculture classes.

"There are many green roofs in Chicago," says Helen Cameron, "but they are not necessarily geared for full-on production and used as an educational tool. We made an enormous investment with the idea of producing food for the restaurants and using it to teach and create awareness about the possibilities of urban agriculture." And when it comes to those possibilities for the Camerons, the sky's apparently the limit.

[Image: Uncommon Ground]