Posts tagged herbs
Herb and Urban Garden makes the Urb Garden
Feb 2nd
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
Alyssa’s Vertical Garden in Washington
Jan 11th
Outdoor vertical garden
Alyssa from http://akitverticalgarden.blogspot.com has made a living wall in Washintgon that allows her to grow flowers and edibles such as parsley and lettuce vertically.
Alyssa mentioned that her game plan was to build a vertical wall of dirt then plant it. They had some questions first such as: How would we stabilize it? What will we make it out of? How thick CAN we make it? How will we water it? Where should we put it where both sides of the wall will get enough sun? How can we make it where the wall with not bow out with all the weight of the dirt and gallons and gallons of water? What could we plant that would grow well on the side of a wall? They tried googling it, but couldn’t find any answers because no one has posted about a garden like this before.
Fortunately Alyssa gave a detailed account of what they did. First they set posts in concrete several feet down. The actual wall is built of hogwire with shadecloth layered on the inside. The shadecloth holds in the dirt. To prevent bowing they completely wired the inside. Once stabilized, they added a whole lot of dirt.
Alyssa notes that you don’t want to plant until AFTER the dirt has settled. She originally tried planting while the dirt was dry and just thrown in. When the dirt sunk it threw all the plants and the holes for the plants off kilter. So the best thing is to water it thoroughly and start planting from the bottom. Alyssa says she needed to replant several Parsleys which were swallowed by the wall as the dirt settled.
Outdoor living wall
Building the edible vertical garden
The structure of the wall is built of three things: posts to support the wall, wire (hogwire and chicken wire), and Typar. The posts were cemented several feet into the ground to support the large structure. On each side of the posts, a foot apart, the sides of the wall were erected. After the sides were thoroughly wired to the posts and to each other, the wall was filled dirt.
Planting the vertical garden
It is very simple to plant in the wall. You need three basic tools: a razor knife, a shovel, and wire cutters. I would recommend wearing gardening gloves because the wires can be rough on the hands. Simply cut the wires and bend them back making ample room for whatever you are planting. Then slit the Typar the appropriate size. Shovel out the dirt and gently place your plant inside. Within a few days your plant will begin to grow skyward. It is very exciting to see watch it grow up!
What kind of things grow well on the living wall?
I found lots of things that grow well in the living wall, especially salad greens. Any sort of mustard, lettuce, kale, pac choi, etc. does exceedingly well. I have grown many herbs (Thyme, Marjoram, Oregano, Parsley) and flowers. Petunias are perhaps the best flowers to plant in the wall. They do a great job of covering and flowing. Any climbing vines or flowers are fabulous! Both tomatoes and chard have done really well in the vertical garden.
Outdoor green wall
How to add nutrients
Use liquid fertilizer (MiracleGro) and to pour small amounts into each hole using a watering can.
How to water
A soaker hose at the top. Not much water is needed as the wall generally stays pretty wet. Each plant is watered when it’s planted in the green wall.
Vertical vegetable garden
Living Wall vegetable garden
Vertical vegetable garden
Gutter vertical garden for food
Dec 17th
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
Vertical herb garden
Dec 5th
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?
