Living Walls and Vertical Gardens » diy

Carlos’ Greenwall DIY video

Gavin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:45:58 +0000

Here’s a great looking greenwall fully installed in a home with an automatic irrigation system from Matt at DIY greenwalls. That’s a great site to check out if you haven’t been yet.

Home Made Vertical Gardens

Gavin — Sat, 15 May 2010 16:56:52 +0000

Lisa Wheeler has a fantastic blog about living walls. She is constantly creating DIY vertical gardens from seemlingly random material that she miraculously turns into works of art! For example:

I found this flowery thingie for cheap, made a mound of soil held in place by mesh, and turned it into this:

Moss vertical garden

She’s made living walls from all sorts of trays. She fills them with dirt, covers them with mesh, slits holes in the mesh for the plants, then plants them! They stay horizontal for about two months, then once they’ve gotten a bit established, she hangs them up like a work of living art. You can see her homemade living walls here.

An easy DIY vertical gardening video

Gavin — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:10:25 +0000

Here’s a great video on using a few simple products to make your own vertical garden system with a reservoir. They just used Marine Ply or EPS to make the frame. (I’d imagine you could even use regular wood and a pond liner) Then they covered the back of the wall with Rockwool (readily available at hydroponic retailers) and put in a drip irrigation system at the top. Then you just need to plug your pump into a timer and set it to water a few times a day automatically. For fertilizer, you can just buy the water soluable kind and put a bit in the reservoir and you’re all set. Does that sound like something you’d try?

Constructing a Vertical Garden Patrick Blanc Style

Gavin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:12:43 +0000

San Diego landscape designers Amelia B. Lima and Ricardo Marinho created this Patrick Blanc style vertical garden.

The location was a long, skinny yard – 40 ft by 17 ft wide. The dining room and kitchen looked right onto a block wall surrounding the property and Amelia’s goal was to create a living wall to bring a more natural look to the backyard. The result was a 260 square foot vertical garden using epiphytes and lithophytes (plants that usually grow without much soil, like on rocks)

Galvanized steel makes the frame. They’re set in place with concrete footings. Next, marine plywood and corrugated plastic are attached to the frame. Amelia then stapled on two layers of synthetic felt to the plastic and then cut slits in the first layer. The plants nestle between the layers of felt and which helps to evenly distribute the water across the wall from the drip irrigation system at the top.

Frame

PVC irrigation system at the top

Greenwall being planted

A water channel underneath the gravel pumps the water to the wall and collects the extra water to be used again later. Via Lushe