About

Thirty years of reading soil, applied to a city that grows upward.

Strata Agronomy is two people: one who has spent three decades diagnosing ground, and one who builds the structure that sits on top of it.

Who we are

Principal Agronomist

Nirmal

Thirty years of agronomy, most of it spent on ground that other people had already written off. Nirmal's work is diagnostic: what the soil is doing, why the last season failed, and what will actually change it.

That experience is the reason Strata starts with soil rather than with a planting plan. Three decades of seasons is a long record of watching which shortcuts fail, and when.

  • 30 years in field agronomy
  • Soil diagnostics and remediation
  • High-altitude and monsoon-cycle cropping

Systems & Operations

Aditya

Aditya builds the structure around the agronomy — how a rooftop carries the load, moves the water, and keeps working without daily attention.

He also runs the teaching side of the practice, on the principle that a method only matters if it survives being handed to someone else.

  • Structural and drainage system design
  • Irrigation and water management
  • Workshop programme design
Methodology

Soil First

Diagnose the soil before designing anything above it.

Most rooftop gardens in Kathmandu fail in their second year, not their first. The plants that struggle are a symptom; the growing medium is usually the cause. We start every project with what is actually in the soil — structure, biology, drainage behaviour and what the last crop took out of it — and build the plan from that reading.

  • Physical and biological assessment before any planting plan
  • Amendment strategy matched to the crop and the season, not a generic mix
  • Composting systems sized to the household that feeds them
  • Soil that improves year on year instead of being replaced

System Architecture

A rooftop is a structure before it is a garden.

Saturated soil is heavy, monsoon water has to go somewhere, and a Kathmandu rooftop was engineered for neither. We treat the build as civil work: load paths, waterproofing, drainage and irrigation designed together, so the growing system carries its own weight for decades rather than damaging the building beneath it.

  • Load assessment against the existing roof slab
  • Waterproofing and root barriers specified before beds are built
  • Drainage that handles monsoon volume, not average rainfall
  • Irrigation sized for the dry months, when the system is actually tested

Learn the method in person.

Our first hands-on workshops open soon, capped at fifty people.

Join the waitlist Read the field notes