Inside Urban Green

Rain Gutter Gardens Update

This is the latest update of the sub-irrigated rain gutter garden on a boat dock in Nashville. It belongs to Larry Hall's brother Steve. This could be anyone's deck, patio, rooftop or back yard garden.

It is also an ideal method for making school gardens on paved surfaces. Following are work-in-progress photos of the rain gutter garden we are building at PS 133 here in Brooklyn. The garden project is coordinated by Frieda Lim of Slippery Slope Farm in Gowanus.

This application of the rain gutter system is to support the installation of existing planters with traditional drain holes.  There is a polyester fabric wick installed through the drain hole of each planter. It wicks water from the rain gutter reservoir below. Float valves will be installed to automate the irrigation of the planters. There will also likely be a rainwater harvesting system attached to one of the building's rain gutters.

Note that this two-track rain gutter system accomodates very large planters. There are also window boxes installed between them. The ultimate planting design is yet to be finalized. This photo will at least give you an idea of the basic planting configuration.

Stay tuned. There is much more to this garden and there will soon be many more photos to see as I upload them to Flickr.

via www.youtube.com

New Sub-irrigated Window Box Planters at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Cayleb Long, BBG Curator, Frieda Lim, planters designer and Ashley Gamel, BBG Curator (and coffee trees caretaker)

Frieda Lim and I helped install four new custom made window box planters at Brooklyn Botanic Garden last week. All of them are sub-irrigated and one of them has a special feature.

It has a viewing window so that kids of all ages can see exactly what is going on inside the planter. Growth of the root systems and status of the water & oxygen reservoirs is in clear view. This photo doesn't do it justice because the light was wrong. The last picture in this Flickr photo set will give you a better idea of the visibility through the window.

There will be more photos of this installation showing all of them planted.

Sherri's Rain Gutter Garden

Sherri did a nice job of posting her first video showing the set up of her Larry Hall rain gutter garden. Hopefully she will post more videos so that we can see the progress of her starter plants over the summer. We of course expect big things.

via www.youtube.com

A Rain Gutter Garden is Coming to Brooklyn This Week

This is an update of an obviously productive sub-irrigated rain gutter garden installed on a boat dock.

Later this week there will be a small rain gutter garden at PS 133 here in Brooklyn. It will be part of a school garden that will include 69 tote box sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) and the beta test of 3 vertical gardens modeled after African sack gardens, but made from trash containers.

No paved surfaces will be broken to create this garden. It will grow on concrete and replace some existing top-watered raised beds that did not work very well.

Highly productive gardens like this could be in the yards of hundreds and hundreds of schools and row houses all across New York City and beyond. There is no need for digging into often-contaminated city soils.

All it takes to create gardens like this is the knowledge of how to do it and a modest amount of funding. In the case of schools, it could be crowd sourced funding

via www.youtube.com

Water Roots in the Rain Gutter SIP Garden

This is a view inside the rain gutter of a sub-irrigated rain gutter system. It shows the bottom of the planter with the mesh pot wick and roots growing from it. 

These roots are "water roots" and are perfectly at home in water. The key to their health is that there is an abundant supply of oxygen. Because of this, there is no root rot or anaerobic condition. 

It is also true that if these roots die from drying out, it will be no problem for the plant to grow new roots. What is not apparent is the healthy, robust root system up inside the planter. 

Root growth like this is also alarming to many people who believe that plant roots do not like light. This is false. It is horticultural mythology. 

What most people who call these sub-irrigation systems "self-watering" do not understand is that this is a simplified form of hydroponics. Unlike most hydroponic systems however, there is no need for an electric powered oxygen pump.

Read the comments about this photo on Facebook  

We're All Waiting!

It seems like only yesterday that I was standing in a u-pick tomato field in Homestead, FL (south of Miami) talking to a farmer about the drastic change in the quality of his tomatoes. It wasn’t yesterday. It was somewhere around 1973.

Essentially what he said was "We now need to grow to ship rather than for you to pick”.

That was the beginning of thick wall tomatoes that could just as well have a Goodyear Tire brand. Tomatoes as durable as hockey pucks became the order of the day. As a result, how many people under 40 know what a real tomato tastes like?

We can wait for the change promised in this article but a better solution for many of us is to grow our own "real tomatoes" in portable, productive sub-irrigated planters (SIPs).

It’s a really good idea no matter what happens with supermarket tomatoes. There's a lot of satisfaction in growing your own.

via www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (May 24, 2012) — There is nothing better than a ripe, red, homegrown tomato, and now researchers reporting online on May 24 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have figured out just what it is that makes some of them so awfully good (and your average supermarket tomato so bland).

"We now know exactly what we need to do to fix the broken tomato," said Harry Klee of the University of Florida.

Tomato flavor depends on sugars, acids, and a host of less well-defined aroma volatiles (so named for the ease with which they vaporize, sending scent molecules into the air). Klee's team set out to define the chemicals that are most important to our fondness for one particular tomato or another. Read more...

Video » Check Out the Rain Gutter SIP System Facebook Page

Larry Hall Facebook page. We have liftoff!

Nashville Update » Sub-irrigated Rain Gutter Garden on a Boat Dock

A sub-irrigated rain gutter garden like this could be growing food in an urban yard, on a rooftop or balcony anywhere in the world. I'm looking forward to getting some hands-on experience with this system before the growing season is over.

via www.youtube.com

Rainwater Harvesting and Sub-irrigation 2,500 Years Ago

An aerial view of the Ramat Rahel site, where the gardens were discovered.
CREDIT: Boaz Gross, Tel Aviv University

Finding Professor Green's sub-irrigated planter bench in the Cyclopedia of Horticulture established the fact that SIPs have been around for a long time. He made his planter in the 1890-91 period.

Compared to the 2500-year-old gardens at Ramat Rahel, that was just yesterday. Why then is our consumer horticultural education system still fixated on drain holes, sprinklers and other overhead irrigation systems that waste water when compared to sub-irrigation?

Add the fact that sub-irrigation increases yields and produces healthier plants and we have a mystery of the modern age of climate change, conservation and sustainability.

The garden relied on an advanced irrigation system, which collected rainwater and distributed it using artsy water installations, including pools, underground channels, tunnels and gutters.

These water installations ended up being the key to the team's new discovery; the researchers found grains of pollen that likely got trapped in plaster when the installations were renovated and the plaster still wet. The result was preserved pollen grains.

via www.livescience.com

An ancient royal garden has come back into bloom in a way, as scientists have reconstructed what it would've looked like some 2,500 years ago in the kingdom of the biblical Judah.

Their reconstruction, which relied on analyses of excavated pollen, reveals a paradise of exotic plants.

The luxurious garden had been discovered at Ramat Rahel, an archaeological site located high above the modern city of Jerusalem, about midway between the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. This site was inhabited since the last century of the Kingdom of Judah (seventh century B.C.) until the early Muslim reign in Palestine (10th century), a period that saw many wars and exchanges of power, with the garden evolving under each civilization.

Since excavators discovered the garden, they could only imagine its leafy, flowery inhabitants. That is until now. Read more...

A Tomato Grower Par Excellance

This is Hero Member dbank (screen name) on the EarthBox forum standing next to one of her "tomato trees". It may look like a Photoshopped pic but it's real.

Not only does she share information about her giant tomato plants she explains in detail how to stake them with her "pea fence" system using lots of photos. Read on.

via forum.earthbox.com