Above is a view of the edible campus at McGilll University in Montreal. This award winning project is a joint venture between McGill and The Rooftop Garden Project. Student volunteers created an urban edible landscape that is truly spectacular. That is not ivy growing on the wall. These vines are a source of fresh nutritious food.
You can see the 2007 project in a series of 73 photos progressing from a rather uninviting bare hardscape to a verdant edible garden—green in every sense of the word.
Why is there nothing like this in the great City of New York where I live? If there is, I have not found it. Our institutions appear to be stuck in a horticultural dead end defined by clay pots and saucers.
Notice the simple construction of the "growers". Even a non-DIY person could make these planters. And no, you will not find the highly misleading term "self-watering" used to describe them.
The wonderful people at UW-Madison have put together a fantastic site devoted to recycled-bottle projects: http://www.bottlebiology.org/
As a city composting instructor, I find the "decomposition column" very interesting.
Posted by: Propagatrix | May 30, 2008 at 05:31 PM