true art.
Vertical herb garden
Two different styles of vertical gardens are discussed here. The first is using a panel to build an outdoor vertical garden, and the second is how to build your own vertical herb garden. A landscape designer from the UK (I believe) came up with this design.. it looks to be very practical and something that could potentially be done in a day or two. Basically, he makes something sort of like a bookshelf with plywood at the back. Then he drills holes though the different shelves to run the pipes through. It’s just drip irrigation tubing that should be available locally. Then, he fills up each hole with compost/soil and staples a geotextile lining across the whole thing. That geotextile’s purpose is to help retain the soil in the vertical herb garden / living wall and it can also help transferring the water. This design can be either watered through pouring water through the top and have the water trickle down, or by using a pump and the drip irrigation system.
A couple things to think about when looking at this design could be that if you’re planning on growing herbs or other edibles, you’ll want the ’shelf’ unit of the living wall to be non-toxic. Using wood that’s been treated for walking on doesn’t necessarily mean the plants wouldn’t absorb some of the chemicals used to treat the wood. That’s not to say the design is bad, but if you use natural wood to construct the whole thing, and something like linseed oil, you should be better off. Something else is that it’d be hard to reach the top to water top down if your garden is pretty high. If you do use the drip irrigation method, you’re going to need some kind of basin and they didn’t cover that in the video. You could use some kind of non-toxic container for the water reservoir.. or perhaps use a pond liner across a wooden frame to hold the water. What do you think of this idea? Would you use it?
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about 6 months ago
Personally, I’m trying to figure out how to do exactly this, a vertical herb and lettuce garden. I was hoping to use a design like Patrick Blanc’s, which is soilless (I just got his book from the library), but I’m curious about what I’d need to do for it to work with herbs. My guess is that I’ll need to make the individual plants easily removable since eventually I’ll harvest all the leaves and if the roots stay grown into the mat, they’ll just rot.
I’ll definitely need to have a look around here for ideas. Thanks for all the gorgeous photos and helpful info!
about 6 months ago
Hey Wendy. Good luck in getting your vertical garden set up. One thing with Patrick’s Vertical Garden is that he uses specific types of plants that can grow on rock faces with little or no dirt… so it makes it a bit easier for those types of plants to adapt to his system.
To be honest, though, many vertical gardens use dirt.. even Patrick Blanc style vertical gardens. Basically you have a waterproof backing – like a PVC sheet, then you have at least 2 layers of felt. The first layer sits right against the pvc, and the second layer sits on top the first layer. You then cut slits for the plants in the first layer of felt. Then you have options, if you want to grow plants (herbs) from seed, you’ll staple a little pocket for dirt around the slit, stuff the dirt in the slit between the two layers of felt, and plant your seeds. Alternatively you can just put your pregrown plants, including the dirt around the rootball, right into the felt. So it wouldn’t be completely soiless, but it’d still be hydroponic and your plants would do very well. Many of Patrick’s vertical gardens are done that way.