Inside Urban Green

Raised Bed Rooftop Garden With Rainwater Harvesting

This is a rooftop garden that was entered in an Apartment Therapy contest. The entry is about a DIY rainwater harvesting system but what caught my eye was the planter box garden. 

More than likely the planter boxes (raised beds) are watered by drip irrigation or hose watering. You can see a hose in the walk space between the planters. 

What is little understood in the gardening world is that sub-irrigation is a much better way to irrigate these boxes. There are many books and blogs about top watered raised beds but little about sub-irrigated beds or wicking beds. 

It appears that the boxes are lined. In any case they should be lined with sheet plastic and a raised bottom created to hold water. A wicking system would then move the water up by capillary action.  

This method provides the ultimate in even moisture on a consistent basis. Plants thrive on this with the result that vegetable productivity may be as much as doubled, at the same time using much less water. 

One of the goals of the Center for Urban Greenscaping will be to test various systems of sub-irrigation with the goal of finding the most productive and easiest to build. 

Solar for Energy, Solar for Food

 

These two videos from the Wall Street Journal illustrate a point. The green roof video is all about water runoff and nothing about food production. The types of roofs they’re talking about are referred to as “extensive” green roofs. These are typically a shallow layer of low maintenance sedum (succulent) plants. 

A container garden type green roof is called an “intensive” green roof. If you can keep these two green roof terms straight in your mind, you have a better memory than I. We need more easily understood and memorable terms for these roofs. 

More importantly, we need a new focus on a higher goal of green roofs to include food production. 

Rain Barrel Sub-irrigation

This is a rain barrel with a removable lid that is a sub-irrigation (self-watering) planter. Why not? There isn't a detailed description in this article but that looks like a rope wick coming out of the hole in the middle of the planter lid. 

There isn't a photo with a plant installed but it certainly is a creative way to decorate a utilitarian rain barrel. You could have a rain barrel that looks like this. I like it a lot better than this one. 

What the city of Lexington, Kentucky is calling the "Lily" is available only to residents for $75. The Lily was designed by two local residents who call it the Raintainer. Whether it will be available on the consumer market remains to be seen. 

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. 

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.

The Clay Pot Martha Rain Barrel

Catching rain water. A good thing! Wasting rain water using clay pots. Not a good thing!

Via: Apartment Therapy