Inside Urban Green

Want Your Plants to Look LIke They're Sick?

Here's yet another high design houseplant gimmick. It's nothing more than a drip system which is fine for outdoor plants in high light but not for indoor plants in low light. Show me your Anthurium or Orchid after a few months in this setup. 

What is the symbolism of an IV? Right. Sick plant. Using this, that's probably what you'll end up with. Have fun with if you have money to burn and you think it's cute. 

There's a much better solution. If you like the shape and style of the planter, buy one like it and convert it to sub-irrigation. All you need do is install a pad of polyester backing material at the bottom to act as a wick. 

Place the plant in its plastic grower pot on the pad and add a measured amount of water. Never add so much that it rises to the surface. The soil surface should remain dry. It's that simple.

You can find a wide assortment of ceramic bowls at TJ Maxx, Marshall’s, Ross, Target, Bed, Bath & Beyond, and others like them. Look in the housewares, giftware sections rather than gardening. 

Most containers designed for plants in the gardening department are rather trite looking in my view. You'll end up with the over done pot and saucer look. Contrary to widespread opinion, you do not need a drain hole.

If you're not sure about sub-irrigation, try it out using a repurposed pop bottle planter. Just add enough light.   

Via: NOTCOT

Pretty Pictures Gardening

                Photos by Bill Wilson © 2008

This could have been a demonstration of real world urban agriculture using sub-irrigated grow boxes integrated with the "pretty pictures" garden. 

Instead, San Francisco urbanites get a lesson in burlap bag, drip irrigation gardening. There's a lot of buzzword rhetoric here instead of reality. What a missed opportunity. 

Today Mayor Newsom announced his intention to keep the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden at Joseph Alioto Piazza (Civic Center Plaza) in place until November.

The garden was originally scheduled to be disassembled and moved to a more permanent location on September 21, three weeks after the conclusion of Slow Food Nation.

There has been a tremendous outpouring of public support for the project since its initial installation in early July.

The garden was a joint initiative between Slow Food Nation and Victory Gardens 2008+.

“By all accounts, this has been a wonderful installation for the city and has been a highly visible demonstration of our commitment to the issues embodied in how our food system operates,” said Mayor Newsom.

“From protecting the environment, to supporting our local and regional economy, to ensuring we can provide access to wholesome, nutritious food for all San Franciscans, the Victory Garden has given us a powerful platform from which to make the case for more good, clean and fair food in this country.” 

See the Fire Escape Peppers on August 15, 2008

Click on the photo and it will take you to Flickr. Click on "All Sizes" on the menu above the photo. Select "Original" (the largest view). Scan the photo carefully and you will see many peppers on these plants. 

These are not heirloom seeded plants or anything special. They are simply a collection of cell-pack pepper plants from a local nursery. I could have done a better job of identifying them but didn't. My interest was in the growing of them as a test of various homemade sub-irrigated planters. It will be a surprise to see (and taste) the results.

The peppers are not easy to see because they are currently all green and blend in with the leaves. I am going to let them all grow to full maturity and turn color for visibility. Stay tuned. 

Note the healthy condition of these plants with no chlorosis of the type you will see in the following photos. Note also that this is a flash photo with resultant yellow light reflection. The peppers are very hard to see without flash. 

Public Farm 1 at P.S.1 - August 8, 2008

Michael Pollan spoke at P.S.1 site of Public Farm 1 last evening. I took a series of photos before his lecture. They are posted to a set on Flickr. 

Smart Pots at Public Farm 1

You may have wondered how they water the vegetables on the Public Farm 1 at P.S.1. The plants are installed in what the manufacturer calls “smart pots”.

This is a bit of horticultural hype considering that the “smart” relates only to a quality of the fabric used to make the bag (not really a pot). Without going into the horticultural nitty-gritty, the fabric prevents roots from growing in a circular pattern and girdling the tree. These are really meant as tree planters you see.

The benefit of these bags at Public Farm 1 is they provided a means of offsite growing and ease of transport to the site. They really have no other specific value in this project since these are one-season vegetables, not trees.

You can see in the top photo that there is an ordinary drip system installed. Collected rainwater is fed to the plants this way. There are more photos of the planters here.

I understand why the architects and consultants used the system they did. The shortfall is that it is not relevant to urbanites interested in growing vegetables in the city.

Urbanites are not likely to use these so-called “smart pots”. They just aren’t practical for city patios, pavements, balconies and rooftops.

From a public education viewpoint, it would have been better to sub-irrigate these vegetables as is done in EarthBoxes and home made sub-irrigated grow boxes. This method is perfect for urban agriculture on a small one-box scale to gardens with many boxes.

Using sub-irrigated planting, Public Farm 1 would be a leading edge demonstration garden of 21st century urban vegetable growing on a very personal level.

Public Farm 1 at P.S.1

Public Farm 1 is the name of the summer season edible garden installed in the courtyard of P.S.1 an affiliate of The Museum of Modern Art. Work AC, a New York architectural firm, won this annual Young Architects Program competition. 

They now have a most informative website that details how the project evolved. Have a look at this time-lapse video and watch the garden come to life in a matter of minutes. 

I picked a bad time to visit on a Saturday evening. There was a party at the museum, it was packed and the music was loud. I’ll go back on a weekday and take some pictures when things will be quieter.

In looking at the planter construction, this was obviously a missed opportunity to employ sub-irrigation. Thanks to our ultraconservative horticultural educators, the architectural and design community is largely unaware of the “green” benefits of sub-irrigated planters.

I have no doubt that sub-irrigation would be saving water and producing a higher vegetable yield in this unique urban agriculture project.

A Better Alternative

There’s no quarrel with using a drip system, but was it the best choice for San Francisco’s Victory Gardens 2008+ program? Given a choice, how many potential “victory gardeners” would opt for this system versus a simple sub-irrigated grow box? 

Here, this is a box. Fill it with planter mix, plant the plants in the box, put it wherever you have six hours or more of sunlight and fill the reservoir with water. No, you do not need a shovel, spade fork, hoe or rake to create your vegetable garden.

If the sunlight is adequate you can put this box on your rooftop, balcony or even on paved surfaces. There is no need to turn the soil.

Now tell me that most residents would pick the drip system over the grow box. Ask the young folks at the Rooftop Gardens Project in Montreal for their opinion. They have been successfully promoting vegetable gardens with their sub-irrigated grow boxes.

People of any age, young or old, even the frail can easily manage one or more grow boxes. Watch this film and you’ll see with your own eyes.

New York City Rooftop Vegetable Garden

These white buckets may look familiar. They're the same recycled bucket planters used by Art and Heidi on their rooftop garden in Wicker Park, Chicago.

There's one significant difference however. These are not sub-irrigated planters. Laura the owner of this New York City rooftop garden installed a drip system rather than sub-irrigate.

What's the difference? Who knows but it's worth a comparative study. For sure, sub-irrigation and drip irrigation will out perform manual overhead watering.

The problem of course is that our institutions have failed us. Individuals like Laura, Bruce and Heidi to name a few are doing the heavy lifting both literally and figuratively.

Our horticultural, gardening and botanical institutions are stuck in an outdated farming paradigm that's inappropriate in densely populated cities. .

At a time when food production, water shortages and ominous predictions about the future dominate the news, our institutions practice primitive methods of urban agriculture that waste water, resources and time along with taxpayer dollars.

Remember that the majority of these institutions are funded with public or donated money. We should expect a lot more than we are getting.