Living Walls and Vertical Gardens » food

Ecohabitare’s portable greenwall

Gavin — Sat, 29 May 2010 00:23:41 +0000

Industrial designers Daniele Adamo and Ravel Casela have created a vertical garden from flat plates out of recycled packages and other plastics. This vertical garden is portable and easy to install. It can be installed on decks, balconies, or walls as long as it gets at least 4 hours of sunlight. All the space it needs is a wall 3 meters (about 9 ft) long. This system allows you to harvest your garden at shoulder height so there’s no straining on your back. It takes only a bit of water and you only need to take about 20 minutes/day to harvest and irrigate. The designers say you can grow tomato, strawberries, and herbs like chives, parsely, basil, mint and rosemary. Just change the soil once a year and add new seeds whenever you need.

Vertical Garden with Edibles

Ecohabitaire

From Ecofiend

Aquaponic Vertical Garden from Inka Biospheric Systems

Gavin — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:13:49 +0000

Inka biospheric systems

Inka Biospheric Systems creates 3 different vertical gardening products. One, the Inka Stretch, is a fabric that can stretch across fences in urban environments. You can grow decorative plants, grass, herbs, fruits and most vegetables – pretty much anything except root vegetables in that system. Another is similar to ELT’s living wall panels – a hard plastic planter that be hung on a wall.

Inka Sun Curve

Perhaps the most interesting, however, is the completely closed-loop urban food growing system – the Inka Sun Curve. The fish in the tank need oxygenated, clean water. The water from the tank is pumped up through the system and the roots of the plants act as a biofilter to help clean the water. As it drips through the system and back into the tank, it puts more oxygen into the water for the fish.

With aquaponics, the fish poop acts like fertilizer for the plants so the plants naturally get the nutrients they need. While fish naturally produce ammonia which isn’t something plants can use, by putting certain microorganisms into the grow media, the ammonia is turned into nutrients the plants love.

Aquaponics

Aquaponics

To get the water pumping, power is needed. The Sun Curve uses both solar and wind to collect power to be stored in a battery bank so they consistently have enough to regularly keep the water pumping through the system. This model was originally designed to support remote clinics, schools, and refugee camps.

Like other hydroponic solutions, this method of gardening can use only 10% of the water used by traditional farms as all the extra water runoff is returned to the fish tank. Nothing runs off into the ground. You can read more at Inside Urban Green – a great resource for efficient gardening.

Gutter vertical garden for food

Gavin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:55:27 +0000

Living wall eavestrouph

Here’s an innovative solution from Suzanne Forsling to grow food in Alaska at her home. She couldn’t grow food well in her backyard because the ground was too cold since she lived fairly close to a glacier. The best sunny spot to grow the food was up the side of her house so she bought a couple eavestroughs and installed them on the side of her house. She plants them with edibles and she can eat fresh salads during the summer months straight from her own vertical garden.

Fresh Salad

Vertical garden eavestrouph