Inside Urban Green

Brick City Mayor Visits the Farm

This is a photo from the Brick City Urban Farm website. It’s in Newark, N.J. 

No, this isn’t a turned earth farm. Those vegetables are growing in EarthBoxes (sub-irrigated grow boxes) rather than dirt. There are about 1,000 boxes sitting on a previously empty lot in this center city location and on a rooftop nearby. The man in the middle is Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark. 

I wonder how many other cities in the top 100 U.S. cities have a "brick city" grow box farm. Further, how many big city mayors do you think would have any clue as to what an EarthBox or sub-irrigated grow box is? My guess is somewhere between a few and none with my best guess being none. 

Read more about this inspiring story.  

An Urban Box Garden is Born

Brick City Urban Farms

Read the article...

What can you do with a ½ acre of contaminated soil in downtown Newark? What can you do with 8,000 square feet of tar papered commercial rooftop in the same city? 

For John Taylor and his associates, there was an answer that few would find. Both of these locations became farms without dirt. 

There was no need for turned earth because both spaces were covered with EarthBoxes, the 21^st century way to grow food in the city. This is how Brick City the downtown farm in Newark was born this past summer. 

Now that Brick City has demonstrated that you don’t need plowed dirt to grow vegetables in the city, the bigger question is why haven’t other cities done the same. Many individuals and organizations have already done it. Read about some of them.  

Why aren’t “urban box gardens” blossoming on every block in every city of the country? Why hasn’t Brooklyn, where I live, done the same? We’re just across the harbor from Newark and we have the exact same problems as they do. 

I’m going to try to answer that question in a new series of posts about urban agriculture and our woefully inadequate efforts to grow food locally. You will discover as I have that our institutions have let us down. We have an endemic education problem and we need to fix it. 

New Trees from the "Survivors"

The Ficus benjamina trees in the top photo were propagated from cuttings this past April. They are 3 more of the "survivors". 

I pruned some branches from these trees as shown in the bottom photo. These cuttings will make two new trees in less than a month. That is the time it will take to root them in pop bottle planters with hoods (propagators) as shown here. 

I will post photos showing new growth on the pruned trees as well as the progress of the 2 new trees, the progeny of the "survivors". 

NatureMill Video

The NatureMill kitchen composter may become a significant potting media source for sub-irrigated grow boxes in the future. Have a look at their video. Perhaps a bit pricey but it's a cool kitchen appliance. I'm looking forward to testing it. 

Watering in the Zone - Week 3

To illustrate how little water sub-irrigated houseplants use in low light interiors, I'm tracking this Dracaena Janet Craig 'Compacta'. It was a new 4" plant potted into a 2-liter recycled pop bottle planter about 3 weeks ago. No additional water has been added to the plant since then. 

Going into week 4, it has used and/or evaporated only 8 ounces of water. Today I added 6 ounces, the first water added in 3 weeks. 

The range of ideal moisture "in the zone" for this plant is most likely between 10 and 16 ounces. Next Monday when the plant is weighed again we will know how much of the 6 ounces was used and that information will guide future watering. 

Two things to note, the water is fed to the plant from the bottom by capillary action (sub-irrigation). It goes directly to the roots. There is no way you can supply water to a container plant with this kind of precision by gravity feed top watering. 

Read more about watering in the zone. "Listen" to your plants with a scale. Instead of you telling your plants how much water they need, have them tell you precisely how much water they need. 

Ficus Window Wall

This photo illustrates a question asked on Apartment Therapy. 

Liz writes to us with a question after seeing an idea in Dwell Magazine:

The November issue of Dwell has an interesting article on a supportive-housing development in Chicago designed by Helmut Jahn ("All Aboard," pg 160). One resident uses large houseplants instead of curtains on his street-level windows to provide privacy and block light. (Pictured on pg 164, the photos are great, but I couldn't find one online.) I would love plants instead of curtains in our place! Have other AT readers used plants inside to create privacy or separate spaces? How difficult is it to find the right plant and right size? I would love ideas on how to do this or see what people have done!
Liz Fish
Los Angeles

The scanned photo is a bit blurry but in all probability, what we see here is a Ficus benjamina window screen. 

If you hired a professional interior plantscaper to solve this design problem, this would likely be the recommendation. With better selection of trees, 2-3 Ficus trees would be sufficient to screen this window.  

Urban Compost Tumbler

 

Here is another urban composter option. It's called an Urban Compost Tumbler. It looks like it would work in a small city yard or even a good size balcony. I have no outdoor space so something like the NatureMill kitchen composter looks like a better option for apartment dwellers like me.

The UCT is made by D&P Industries in Oregon. They do business as Urban Garden Center. The composters are evidently made from recycled pickle barrels and may be subject to availability regarding size. Apparently there are two sizes, 7.3 cu. ft. and 9 cu. ft.    

This composter was featured on Apartment Therapy. 

Kitchen Composter

This is a NatureMill kitchen composter. I'm seriously considering buying one. At about $300, it is a significant decision in this economy. I do, however, want to start composting kitchen waste. Living in an apartment, an outdoor composter is not an option and I'm not particularly keen on vermiculture.

I plan to experiment with the compost in combination with coir and commercial potting mix. I’ll use it for growing and maintaining indoor plants. 

It will be interesting to see how it performs in recycled pop bottle planters. Unlike conventional opaque pots, they make it very easy to observe what’s going on in the soil system. 

The compost will also be used to grow vegetables in sub-irrigated grow boxes next spring. 

Have you had any experience with this composter? Or, do you know someone who has one. 

EarthBox Video

If you're not familiar with how the EarthBox (and other sub-irrigated grow boxes) work, this is a good way to learn. Molly Philbin is Education Director for the EarthBox company. 

How Green is this Building?

This is the new Solar 2 Green Energy, Arts and Education Center building by Solar One on the East River in Manhattan. It is a green building with  a lot of green growing on the facade as you can see. 

The Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, part of the Holcim Group, selected it for its 2008 Gold Award North America. You can see project photos here and a PDF overview of the project here. 

The question is "Is there any green from plants inside this building?" There is none visible in the renderings.