Inside Urban Green

A Peoples Garden in Wisconsin » Sack Planters Part 2

Following are screen shots from the Wisconsin PBS video about sack planters on the parking lot of a Salvation Army pantry. I have added further explanation and comments about this highly productive and inexpensive way to grow vegetables in the city.

A layer of gravel is poured into the bottom of the sack to create a base. I would add a layer of pourous nursery fabric or plastic screening to prevent soil from seeping into the gravel base. This retains air space between the pieces of gravel.

Position a can (with the top and bottom removed) in the middle of the sack on top of the gravel base. This will act as a mold or form for a gravel column that will go from the bottom to the top of the sack. Add soil until level with the top of the can mold.

An alternate method is to create a center core for the gravel column by using a piece of window screen material rolled into a round column shape to form the core. The screen retainer would rise from the gravel base to the top of the planter in one piece.

What is not quite clear in the video is that she lifts the can out of the soil at the bottom of the sack. The gravel stays on the bottom of the planter. Now reposition the can on top of the first soil/gravel layer, fill with soil around it, add gravel and repeat this procedure until reaching the top of the sack.

The planter is complete. Here you can see the gravel column that facilitates flow of water from top to bottom throughout the sack planter. Equally important are the pore spaces between the pieces of gravel that provide all important oxygen to the root system.

I have other ideas on using this basic system to make vertical planters like these even more productive and durable. Stay tuned.

A Peoples Garden in Wisconsin » African Sack Planters with an Oxygen Tank Core

Watch How to Grow Food in a Burlap Bag on PBS. See more from THE WISCONSIN GARDENER.

This garden is in Appleton, Wisconsin but its origin is African. The garden is growing on the parking lot of a Salvation Army pantry. Its purpose is to demonstrate how to grow food in burlap bags.

Susan Richardson: But we're doing this as a part of a partnership with Salvation Army. To assist food pantry recipients in learning how to grow food, and to grow food in unusual spaces and in spaces where they don't need a lot of land.

We are doing this as a result of a grant that we received from the Community Foundation of the Fox Cities. It's part of the Basic Needs Giving Partnership Grant. We're a program of Goodwill Industries, so we have a lot of participants in this particular project, including food pantry participants, who have grown this food.

The sack planters in this video are based on a method that is used widely in Africa. What really got my attention is the quality of the vegetables growing in the sacks. These are healthy plants producing very healthy looking vegetables. The vegetables are of the quality one would expect to see from growing in sub-irrigated planters (SIPs).

The light dawned in the video segment demonstrating the making of a sack planter. Just as in SIP growing, the answer is oxygenation of the root system. Just like SIPs with water and oxygen reservoirs, these sack planters have an oxygen tank installed down the center. What a simple, but obviously very effective method this is.

A significant benefit of this system is that the oxygenation is not dependent on capillary action from reservoirs at the bottom. The soil media does not need to have the high level of capillarity that is characteristic of artificial media made with peat (or coir), bark and perlite.

These sack planters can work with a heavier mix of native soil and compost. That, of course, is why sack planters are popular in low-income regions of Africa with no access (or affordability) to bagged artificial soil mixes. 

There will be more posts about sack planters and I am looking forward to some hands-on experience with them. Like SIPs, these planters also belong in the so-called Peoples Gardens that currently are populated only with traditional dirt boxes.

via www.wpt.org

Patrick Blanc » Authentic Horticultural Genius

Every day doing my research, I see the word genius along with other undeserved superlatives tossed around indiscriminately. Hyperbole is the order of the day. In the case of Patrick Blanc, however, the word genius is well deserved.

In all my years as an interior plantscaping professional, I know of no other person who has scaled the heights of Monsieur Blanc. With that said, it was still a surprise to see him in a Wall Street Journal video.

In my view, he is largely responsible for breathing new life into the rather moribund, techno-averse interior plantscaping business. Call them green walls, vertical gardens, or living walls. I see Blanc type walls everywhere, most of them by new creative people in the business. There is hope for a new age of urban greenscaping founded on modern technology and that is definitely a good thing.

How would you like to have a view from your desk like his?

via online.wsj.com

Since Biblical times, gardens have been horizontal, with flowers and plants sprouting out of the ground. Patrick Blanc has turned that whole notion on its side, literally. Mr. Blanc is the inventor of the vertical garden, also known as the living (or green) wall.

Mr. Blanc, 58, is a botanist with France's National Center for Scientific Research, the country's giant science and technology agency. He also has a private practice designing gardens. Among the more than 250 he has installed around the world, his most famous are at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Caixa Forum Museum in Madrid and the French embassy in New Delhi. A celebrity among horticulturalists, he's even got a new kind of begonia named after him, Begonia blancii, after discovering it two years ago while trekking through a rainforest in the Philippines. These days, a Blanc-designed garden commands well into the six figures.

When he is not on a plane to the Middle East or exploring a remote rainforest in Hawaii to study native plants, Mr. Blanc works at the home he shares with singer Pascal Héni just outside Paris's city limits. There, he has a desk placed on top of a large aquarium, about 20 by 23 feet. "I see the fish swimming beneath my legs," he said. "It is a dream." His office includes a lush living wall, covered with plants. Read more...

Chicago » O’Hare International Flies Greener With Space Age Grow Towers

Bravo Chicago! Way to go! It warms my heart to see this visionary project. These look like the same aeroponics towers that created the spectacular rooftop garden atop the Bell, Book & Candle Restaurant in Manhattan. We will see many more of these highly productive vertical gardens in the future.

Many thanks to Seedstock.com for making my day. It's a great "get" by a very cool website.

Press Release via www.hmshost.com

On September 16, 2011, Rosemarie S. Andolino, Commissioner, Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) (left) and Elie W. Maalouf, President and CEO, HMSHost cut the ribbon for the grand opening of the O’Hare Urban Garden, a unique, environmentally-friendly aeroponic garden located in the mezzanine level of Terminal 3, G Concourse. The new 928-square-foot aeroponic garden is a joint effort between the CDA and HMSHost, a world leader in travel dining and shopping. The vegetables harvested from the garden will be used at HMSHost’s O’Hare restaurants and include sweet basil, cilantro, Bibb lettuce and habanero peppers.

Sub-irrigated Window Box Vertical Salad Bar Garden

If I were going to create a vertical garden, this is the way I would do it. These planters are not sub-irrigated but they should be.

Picture these sub-irrigated window boxes on the steps of this easy to build frame. The productivity of a vertical garden like this would be awesome. It could be the mother of all salad bar gardens.

Without a wall to lean on, it would need to be built as an A-frame. Then there could be sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) on both sides of the A.

Sun orientation and crop selection would be important factors, but this is an idea just waiting to happen.

via www.flickr.com

Paris » An Interview with Patrick Blanc

If you have not yet discovered Patrick Blanc and his work, this video is a good introduction. As an interior plantscaping professional, I am in awe of his plantscaping creativity. The man with green hair is truly a botanical genius and pathfinder. He has led the way into a completely new age of green walls, vertical gardens and urban greenscaping. Prior posts.

via www.youtube.com

B&Q Garden is Chelsea Flower Show Gold Award Winner

BBC News - Chelsea: B&Q prize-winning garden in high resolution

Click on the link above and you can zoom around this high-res photo of the Gold award winning B&Q garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. The garden is such a great melding of horticultural tradition and modernity. Oh, how I wish that I could have attended this fantastic show.

All of the plants produce edibles. The tower uses hydroponics. The structure to the left of the tower is the "insect hotel". Watch a video of school children constructing the individual "rooms" for the insects. If you sit at the glass dining table in front of the tower, you will see fish (tilapia) swimming below. Would you like fresh fish and salad for dinner?

Command Performance » The Royal Horticulture Society Chelsea Flower Show Opened Yesterday

photo: B&Q garden under construction

The Royal Horticulture Society (RHS) sponsored Chelsea Flower Show opened yesterday. Of course, there are those who think otherwise but in my view, it is the mother of all flower shows. I look forward to attending next year on new knees.

The show is open all this week and sold out this year at the earliest date in its history. The Queen visited last evening and my favorite actress Dame Helen MIrren (aka Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison) attended the opening. A highlight was having a carnivorous, Nepenthes “Helen” named for her. That is quite amusing, but so is Dame Nepenthes Helen.

The star of the show for me is the B&Q futuristic high-rise vertical garden tower. Everything is growing hydroponically and all plants are edible. B&Q is the orange-aproned UK version of Home Depot. It seems to have “personality” that Home Depot used to have but lost along the way, as it grew too big too fast.  

There is a ton of information on the web about the Chelsea Flower show and the B&Q tower garden. One of my favorites of the many YouTube videos is the one following that features students building the “insect hotels” that are a part of the B&Q garden. The young leading lady is definitely comfortable on camera.

San Francisco » Living Walls by Plants On Walls

via GreenScene-YouTube

It is most refreshing to see innovation like this. What a great commercial application of Patrick Blanc's incredible green wall art. It was nice to hear homage paid to him. The founding partners of Plants on Walls in San Francisco have created an innovative business. I look forward to visiting them one day.

In my view, the fabric pocket method is the best of the entire array of vertical growing methods I have seen. It is very plant friendly and has an "organic" sensibility. It emulates natural environments that I have seen when trekking though tropical rainforests.  

Urbio Urban Vertical Garden » No Good Product Craze Goes Unrecognized

Urbio Urban Vertical Garden from Enlisted Design on Vimeo.

The world of gardening seems to have discovered a new spatial dimension. If so, does the world really need another plastic vertical garden that does not address water and light?

What has Patrick Blanc the Magellen of vertical gardens spawned?

website: www.myurbio.com

via: re-nest