If I said this was a radio station you would probably believe me. If I said it was also a vegetable garden, probably not. It happens to be the home of WXHQ 105.9 LPFM in Newport, Rhode Island. Look up at the top of the lower roof and you can see the tops of vegetables growing in sub-irrigated EarthBoxes. There are obviously some bright (and green) minds working at this station.
EarthBox calls them self-watering and you probably do too. Unfortunately this junk science marketing term has become the generic name for sub-irrigation in the consumer market. Each time it is used is evidence of the user's science education deficiency. Some providers do understand the difference but choose to use a bit of marketing puffery to sell the product to ill-informed buyers. Okay, that's not the point of this post. I'll save my continuing rant about the misuse of the term "self-watering" for another post.
The story here is about urban container gardening on roof-tops, pavement or anywhere there's enough sunlight. In looking at the photo is there any doubt that you can grow some very high quality vegetables in these boxes. What do yours look like? Oh, you don't have any because you don't have a yard with dirt or you're not physically able to dig in the dirt. As you can see, there's no dirt here and the boxes could easily be on benches for easy access if necessary to enable the handicapped.
Still not convinced? Look again, and then follow this link to a set of three slide shows with more pictures. You can see the garden grow from start to finish before your eyes.
Now that you're convinced, can you tell me why our tax dollars are being used in a way to impede the progress of these sub-irrigation grow boxes? More about that in a future post. Be sure to upload this feed to your RSS reader and come back. With all the buzz about local food production you should know what going on with the progress blockers.
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