A Comprehensive Guide to Designing & Building Small Green Roofs

A Practical ‘How To’ DIY Guide by John Little & Dusty Gedge

With the stresses traditional ecosystems and the environment in general are under, finding ways to improve biodiversity in even the smallest spaces has never been more vital. Two of the leading advocates for green roofs have combined their knowledge and experience to provide a practical and cost conscious guide to help you create your own patch of biodiversity at home.

This online guide is designed to meet the complete needs of DIY enthusiasts looking to safely build a small green roof on a garden shed, outhouse, bin shed, bike store, garage or house extension, as well as builders and landscaper contractors who want to gain insight into building small green roofs. All the information you may require in one place!

This guide on how to build a green roof has been developed to:

• Set out the basic principles behind which things are needed (or not) and why,
• Provide Step-by-Step detailed instructions (down to what nails and screws to use) in a step by step format,
• Provide DIY and professional practitioners with the confidence to initiate & take a project to completion,
• Supply copious illustrations, photos, videos and text that make the green roof building process easy.

Have you ever asked yourself the question – ‘I want to build a green roof…but it all seems so complicated?’ If you have, then this DIY Guide may well be ideal for you, wherever in the world you are thinking of building and whatever type of small green roof you are considering.

Learn from experts on how to build a low cost small green roof

The intention of this online guide is take some of the mystery out of how to build a green roof. Between them Dusty & John have over 50 years experience in designing, planning, building and maintaining green roofs. As they were both getting numerous emails from people wanting to do a green roof but weren’t sure how to go about it they decided to produce the original DIY Guide in 2008. It was evident that the main stumbling block was a lack of confidence and confusion on what layer went where, what were the planting options and what was feasible on a wide range of small structures?

This guide features multimedia features, step by step walkthroughs and useful tips and insights not available in other online resources;

• Videos of the various stages giving in a detail visual guide to stages of the building of a small-scale green roof:
• Detailed plant lists for the UK and other countries, regions and biomes
• Updates on recent innovations particularly about substrates and edge detailing
• More detailed sketches and drawings to make the stages of the construction much clearer

Measurements are all metric but wherever possible we have converted into US Imperial to save time for purchasers from the US or other countries that use US Imperial.

This website based guide builds on the material and information in our original pdf – ‘The DIY Guide to Green & Living Roofs’ which we published in 2008. That original information has been taken and updated, new and redrawn diagrams made, and multimedia items added. These include short ‘to do’ videos on specific tasks. There are also publicly accessible videos on our youtube channel if you want a quick preview.

A Guide to a Safe and Successful Build

Whether you want to know how to safely build one for your garden shed, garage or house extension, we hope to provide a clear pathway to accomplishing it. This is provided in a straightforward, structured manner, where possible eschewing the overly technical nature of traditional resources that can easily overwhelm the beginner.

Finally we know that the majority of those who purchased the first edition have gone on to build their own green roof and we know that if you purchase the guide it’s likely you will also. And we would love to hear from you when you have completed your project!