Herb Garden

This is the ultimate herb garden. It’s not yet in production, but was designed by Xavier Calluaud and shows lots of promise.  It employs drip watering, worms and compost to provide fresh edible plants. The design is named “Urb Garden” and was designed in Australia. The Urb Garden is a vertical garden designed to encourage personal food production in small urban domestic environments.

The vertical garden is compact which is perfect for balconies, courtyards and community gardens.
It’s made from HDPE which is easily recycled and fully weather resistant. Food scraps are then placed into the worm farm which produces liquid fertilizer. Water is then added to the fertilizer and the liquid is pumped up to a holding tank.  It then drips down through the growing pods and then drains back to the tank to be recycled through the system. The potting mix can be refreshed with castings from the worm farm before replanting.

Urban Garden

Urb Garden

Urb Garden

The study was originally intended to find ways to clean up the air in space.. but the knowledge is very useful here as well.

Indoor air pollution is often worse than outdoor air due to all the chemicals we have in our homes. From cleaners and disinfectants to the VOC’s emitted from carpets and paints etc, indoor air pollution sometimes builds up.

The study showed that many houseplants also remove harmful elements such as trichloroethylene, benzene, and formaldehyde from the air.. plus they’re all removing CO2 anyways.

Three main chemicals are found in your home. Trichloroethylene is used in paints and varnishes, Formaldehyde is used in many building materials and Benzene is found often in paints.

Although all plants help indoor air pollution, some are better than others in absorbing chemicals and removing CO2

You can get most of these houseplants right from your nursery. It’s always handy to have some plants in your home.. but these are some of the best:

• Philodendron scandens or domesticum
• Dracaena
• English ivy
• Spider plant
• golden pothos
• peace lily
• Chinese evergreen

Here’s a couple links to a couple of the studies done by NASA:

Here and Here
The below excepts are directly from NASA.. the first quote indicates how the plants do it:

“NASA’s research with foliage houseplants during the past 10 years has produced a new concept in indoor air quality improvement. This new and exciting technology is quite simple. Both plant leaves and roots are utilized in removing trace levels of toxic vapors from inside tightly sealed buildings. Low levels of chemicals such as carbon monoxide and formaldehyde can be removed from indoor environments by plant leaves alone, while higher concentrations of numerous toxic chemicals can be removed by filtering indoor air through the plant roots surrounded by activated carbon. The activated carbon absorbs large quantities of the toxic chemicals and retains them until the plant roots and associated microorganisms degrade and assimilate these chemicals.”

“The technology of using houseplant leaves for reducing volatile organics inside closed facilities has been demonstrated with formaldehyde and benzene. Philodendrons are among the most effective plants tested to date.”

Then I saw Patric LeBlanc’s mur vegetal http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/ – Vertical Garden. That was about a year and a half ago. Since that time, I’ve been doing almost nothing but researching and experimenting on how to build a vertical garden. Patric’s mur vegetal or vertical garden was built using polyamide felt, massive sheets of PVC and a large, rigid steel structure the wall hangs on. The result is an amazing looking wall garden, but extremely intimidating for a home owner.. or even small business owner. The cost to build one of those gardens is extremely high.. and way more than I wanted to spend.

That’s what fueled my drive to build a vertical garden myself that I could put in my condo. I had a couple goals in mind: it must be relatively inexpensive, modular, green, and super simple to maintain. Right from the start I wanted to design something that I felt could be used by almost anyone, from homeowner to business owner, young and old alike.

As far as inexpensive goes, I was thinking that if I could get a good design going, then get it massed produced, it’d be super cheap per part. So I looked into that a bit more. I found that each piece I wanted to make have injection molded, I’d need between 10 and 20 thousand just to get the tool built, then I’d have to pay more for each part. That seemed a bit out of my league.

Then I tried making a couple designs out of acrylic. I bought all the supplies, used the same products they use to seal aquariums so I knew it would be plant safe.. and went to work. I quickly found that it’s ridiculously hard to make exact cuts on acrylic with the multiple small pieces needed to build the vertical garden and hang it. My design, I found, needed improvement to make it more simple (fewer cuts means a more solid product)… and.. I hated acrylic. I wanted something better.

After countless hours pouring over design options, I considered everything from using wood, marine epoxy coatings over wood, to small pvc sheets (like LeBlanc in a way), to topiary-style vertical gardens with sphagnum moss and everything in between. Each had its set-backs. Wood isn’t waterproof as a standalone, and attempting to build a water reservoir out of wood is obviously not going to work. Marine epoxy is expensive, emits toxic fumes and I wasn’t 100% sure it wouldn’t be harmful to plants – epoxy set for potable water would’ve been safe.. but even more expensive. Smaller PVC sheets had a limitation because it forced owners to use a pump or irrigation system and it’s not modular. Everything has to be custom fitted which would greatly increase the cost for each person. Just to note – an irrigation system’s not bad.. and can actually make life a lot easier, but it’s nice to have the option to manually or wick-water plants as well.. and the PVC idea didn’t allow for that. Topiary vertical gardens are interesting, but they use sphagnum moss.. and the thing with that is the moss itself can be expensive and it’s very messy. Pieces of the moss can fall off and I didn’t want that all over my floor.. and I’m thinking that sentiment is shared by you as well.

So, you ask, what is the stellar solution to this problem??

Foam. Here’s the thing. It’s super light.. which means hanging on a wall won’t put excess weight up there. I can also get 100% food safe foam boxes. That’s huge. You don’t want your plants having toxins leached into them by the planter box. If you choose to grow food in a vertical garden, then the desire to have a 100% food safe foam box is that much stronger. Some foam is produced to be used as insulation.. and that results in foam that’s not food safe.  With food safe foam boxes, they are waterproof and will allow your plants to thrive.

So, if you use foam, how to you avoid ugly? I would hate to have an ugly white foam box holding plants.. it would detract from the look of the plants.. plus foam by itself isn’t that strong.

That’s why I use a hard non-toxic casing around the foam box. It makes the foam really strong and looks great. And it’s paintable — in case you’re curious (and I found this out the hard way) if you spray paint directly on foam, the foam actually melts! Go figure. So having a strong outer-casing really makes the whole idea of building a vertical garden out of foam that much more practical.

The question I had now was where I should get that foam. If I just buy the foam, it’s not a great solution. Styrofoam takes a really long time to break down in landfills.. I forget where I read it, but if I remember right it takes 35 years. Also, if you just recycle the styrofoam by breaking it down and building new products, it’s very expensive and still uses signficant amounts of energy.

This what sealed the deal though – just going to a couple local businesses, I found where the businesses were going to be sending these boxes to the landfill. I managed to secure a steady source of these boxes, and each planter that’s built directly contributes to one more styrofoam box being recycled.

That’s one of the things that had the biggest impact on me. As I was looking at other designs, some can be recycled and some can’t… but I haven’t found one planter available that’s primarily made out of something that’s ALREADY BEEN recycled without wasting any more energy to recycle it.