She is creating the soil wicks around the recycled plastic jugs that form the water and oxygen reservoir system. It doesn't get any simpler than this. PVC and power tools not necessary. All you need is a water tight container and a place in the sun. It could even be a raised bed made water tight with sheet plastic.
Alex Hemke and Jennifer Nicklay fill a homemade GrowBarrel with soil Saturday at Van Cleve Park. The barrels are a sustainable alternative to a traditional garden.- photo Joseph Michaud-Scorza
A neighborhood community group in Minneapolis is “rolling out” barrels of fresh vegetables in portable micro garden planters they named GrowBarrels.
This is an inspiring story of community involvement in building sub-irrigated (aka “self-watering”) planters (SIPs) from recycled plastic barrels. The interior “plumbing” is also made from recycled plastics following this basic method.
The Southeast Como Improvement Association has discovered the best of all worlds. There is no waiting list in this community garden, there can be an unlimited number of growers and it does not require valuable city land.
Neighbors meet in workshops to build the portable micro gardens but the gardens go home with each of them. Home is clearly the best place to grow some fresh food. Every family member, young and old, can participate.
We could make a very significant contribution to the supply of local fresh food in cities if groups of people in all cities got together to do what these folks are doing in Minneapolis. This could be done block by block. All it will take is some leadership and education about building SIPs.
It struck me that this sub-irrigated portable mini garden made from recycled kitty litter buckets had a colorful and playful quality and thought it would make a neat kids garden.
We have thousands of schools across the country that do not have school gardens. What they do have in abundance however is concrete, kids, and art and science teachers.
Working with sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) like these who knows the creative designs that would come out of the minds of art and science teachers working together? These SIPs are science based but in my view have play dough and finger paint qualities.
We could easily have very low cost but highly productive school gardens like this in every public, private and day care school in America. They would go a long way in solving our obesity, poor nutrition and hunger problems.
Sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) also teach some good science and simple technology. In my experience, there is as much or more STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in gardens created from SIPs than there is in traditional dirt gardening. These DIY SIPs also teach recycling, and respect for the environment by saving water and eliminating runoff.
To enhance plant science learning, it would be an easy matter to make clear walls on one side of some of the planters so that students could see the root system and capillary action at work. This could be done quite easily with clear Plexiglas and an adhesive like Goop. Drug store type hydrogen peroxide would take care of any algae growth.
Another advantage of portable micro gardens is that the SIP components can go home with kids over the summer. A rules-based SIP “adoption” program solves the problem of summer recess maintenance and provides even more student learning opportunity. Kids can learn valuable personal self-sufficiency skills by growing food at home during summer vacation.
What we need to make this happen are mainstream parents who are not dirt gardening ideologues to speak up. Currently we have too many misguided school administrators, teachers and gardening parents who think that “garden” and “growing” are synonyms for dirt.
Many of them are hooked into thinking that grandiose greenhouse projects costing as much as $2 million dollars are necessary. For example, think Edible Schoolyards and Alice Waters. Expensive projects like these are a superfluous luxury in a down economy, with rising food prices and so many people unemployed.
The real culprit behind this dilemma is our broken horticultural education system led largely by the USDA Extension Program and urban botanical gardens. I rarely find progressive information about modern food production methods from any of these institutions. Their comfort zone seems to be from a prior century when we were a rural society and all we knew was dirt farming and gardening.
Those days are gone. We will continue to become increasingly urbanized with an even greater need for technology based food production. It is time to move forward not backwards to a bygone time of Victory Gardens in the dirt.
Finally, if your kids school won't support a garden like this make one at home. It's easy to do. If you have questions, I'll be happy to help. Comment or email me at urbangreenscaper [AT] gmail.com
Lao Tzu - "Give a Man a Fish, Feed Him For a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, Feed Him For a Lifetime"
This morning I shot a quick video showing how well my tomatoes and peppers are doing in this years batch of self watering containers. Near the end of the video I show how easy it is to fill the water reservoir that does NOT require a PVC or copper tube in order to add more water.
This looks like another good reuse program initiated by TerraCycle. Recycled food containers are also an excellent source material for making sub-irrigated planters (SIPs). I am long overdue to contact TerraCycle about the benefits of this.
As part of a six-state initiative, 200 Walmart stores throughout the Northeast have partnered with Garden State Growers, a family-owned Hunterdon County nursery, and TerraCycle, a New Jersey based company that specializes in the collection and reuse of non-recyclable or difficult-to-recycle post-consumer waste, to offer a new spin on plastic plant pots for sale at Walmart.
The new eco-friendly option replaces traditional, disposable pots, in which flowers are typically sold, and instead gives plastic containers like Country Crock tubs and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter tubs a second life.
“It’s all about reducing our environmental impact,” said Stacey Cusack, TerraCycle public relations manager.
This is an interesting item in the news. Trade in your plastic bags for a chance to win a plastic EarthBox. This will iikely have plastic hating dirt huggers in a tizzy.
A better idea would be for customers to bring in their used nursery flats and empty food containers and be shown how to use them in making sub-irrigated planters using utility buckets, tote boxes, mortar mixing boxes, uneeded recycle bins and traditional wooden raised beds.
A series of stations throughout the stores will illustrate how Wegmans and its suppliers are helping to reduce, reuse, and recycle resources. Employees at each station will have a show-and-tell or tasting sample to share.
At the front of the store, customers are invited to bring in plastic bags to recycle for $1 off a new, all-cotton reusable bag. Here they’ll also receive a handout (on recycled paper, of course) outlining points of interest at each station and a raffle entry to win an EarthBox Gardening Kit - a mini-garden on wheels that makes it easy to garden on porch, patio, or deck.
The video demonstrates how I am starting seeds this year. I bought a 3/4" blocker (makes 20 blocks) and a 2" blocker (makes 4 blocks) from PottingBlocks.com. Most of the blocks will go into recycled barbeque chicken container propagators with wicks for sub-irrigation. I will post progress photos of the seedlings in the blocks as they sprout. These photos are from a prior growing season. The blocks should make it much easier to separate and plant the seedlings since the roots will not be tangled together. The blocks "air prune" the roots and keep each seedling separate from the others.
If you have heard the term "farming concrete”, it is now a reality with no jack-hammer required. A new edible portable micro garden (with sub-irrigated planters aka SIPs) is officially opening tomorrow afternoon at 3:30 at PS 39 in Brooklyn. Just like kids, these little gardens can find their way into small spaces anywhere, even on driveways, balconies and rooftops.
I call PS 39 the "little school that could". It may be small, but the community of people who made this garden happen thinks big. It also took some big thinking and open mindedness by school principal Anita de Paz. We need many more school principals like her all across the country.
It is much too early in the Brooklyn gardening season for there to be vegetables to pick but the garden is already a work of art worth seeing. Even if you cannot make the opening tomorrow, stop by at any time and have a look. The garden is located in the front yard of PS 39 at the corner of 6th Avenue and 8th Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn.
There are buildings like this all over New York City. All it will take to create a new urban food production industry and new jobs is educational and political leadership. At the present time we have neither but that will change. I salute the pioneering work that John Edel is doing in Chicago. I wish him well and hope he wins the Buckminster Fuller Challange.
This is one sure way to avoid the hazard of often-contaminated city soil. The bonus is increased productivity in the range of 50% more vegetables per square foot vs. in-ground growing while saving up to 90% of the water.
The recycled plastic containers create water and oxygen reservoirs. The front row is an inverted nursery flat, the second is a row of strawberry containers and the third (blue containers) held mushrooms. Note that there are aeration holes drilled (or use a hot poker) in the tops of the reservoirs.
The fill tube (upper left) is a water bottle with the bottom cut off. Note that there is no need for connection pipes between the reservoirs. The bottom of the planter acts as the connection "pipe". Water will flow and fill each reservoir.
The soil in the spaces between the recycled containers forms a wicking system. The photo shows the planter only partially filled for demonstration purposes. It is now ready for filling to the top with soil mix and planting of either seeds or starter plants.
This is the first effort at cutting glass bottles to make sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) or hydroculture planters. I believe it is the start of something big. Wine, champagne, liquor, water bottle planters to come. Who knows what else.
I pulled these small beer bottles out of the trash. The planter on the right is the same configuration as the plastic soda bottle SIPs.
The inverted neck portion of the bottle forms the planter. The bottom section forms the water and air reservoir.
There is a fabric wick/retainer at the end of the neck that holds the soil mix in the neck of the bottle and feeds water up by capillary action.
The planter to the left is hydroculture, which is a very simple form of hydroponics. There is no need for the neck. The bottom is filled with expanded clay pebbles. There is a ½” clear plastic tube going all the way to the bottom of the bottle planter. You can insert a piece of ¼” clear plastic tubing (or a straw) and oxygenate the water by blowing air. You do not need an electric pump or air stone.
This is clearly the rock star of the urban greenscaper photo collection. There is no close second. People from all over the world have viewed it 26,738 times as of today.
There is good reason for calling it the Rosetta Stone of container plant growing. Whether growing houseplants, herbs or vegetable starters it makes plant growing so much easier. You do not need a mythical green thumb to grow healthy plants.
Even with almost 40 years of horticultural experience, I continue to learn new things about plants using these recycled (or upcycled) soda bottle sub-irrigated planters.
They are not only better for plants than drain hole planters, they are free and you are helping the environment by using them. They are clearly (pun intended) better than what you can buy.
You can use them to propagate cuttings or seeds. Grow vegetable starter plants in them and then move them into raised bed, utility bucket, tote box or EarthBox portable micro gardens (aka sub-irrigated planters, SIPs).
Stay tuned for recycled glass wine and beer bottle versions of these planters. A YouTube instructional video is also in the works.
