Living Walls and Vertical Gardens » herbs

Greenscaped Buildings Creates an Edible Greenwall

Gavin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:05:33 +0000

Edible Greenwall

Finished herb vertical garden

Greenscaped buildings has created two gorgeous greenwalls with Tournesol’s products. Above is the Pizzeria Mozza wall in Hollywood, owned by Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group. The first shows the installation process – they finished installing February 24^th, and the next image from is a follow up. You can see all the edibles growing upwards in the second one! The wall has several variations of sage, geraniums, parsley, mint and lettuce, along with Italian dandelion, bull’s blood beets, pansies, rosemary, Chinese celery, chicory, spinach and hon tsai tai. It’s been a pretty successful project overall and in a few weeks, they’ll be adding two rows of ornamentals to the top of the system.

Also, last month they finished an ornamental wall for a local law firm who just moved into a high-rise in Downtown San Diego. They have a great courtyard area at the end of their 22^nd floor of their building. You can see the dramatic effect the wall has on the space in the second picture down, and how it helps frame the amazing view they have of the harbor! The picture immediately below is a close up of the left panel. Some of the ornamentals we used include bromeliads, bird’s nest ferns, imperial red philodendrons, spider plants, sword ferns, pothos and nephytis.

Close-up of the Greenwall

San Diego Greenwall

There are more pictures of both on their blog – greenscaped.wordpress.com.

Here’s Chris Lyon from Tournesol showing how the system works:

Garden Grunt’s DIY living wall

Gavin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:04:58 +0000

The Garden Grunt has a great DIY living wall made for her deck in her backyard. It’s a great example of how living walls help to get a vegetable garden going in limited space. Her husband made the frame first. Then the frame was stained and rain gutters were installed. Next, she put dirt in the gutters and planted it. For edibles, she used peppers, basils, sage and cilantro.

Living wall wood frame

DIY Greenwall

DIY vertical garden

Joe Zazzera and Tournesol making another great Living Wall

Gavin — Mon, 17 May 2010 14:54:57 +0000

Joe Zazzera used Tournesol’s VGM living wall panels to create another living wall at the back of the Plant Solution’s building. Joe takes us step by step through the pictures below.

Tournesol living walls

Here’s the Tournesol VGM product prior to planting. We had originally received some side panels that did not fit properly but thanks to Chris and John at Turnesol, we found a simple solution. We used a Ball horticultural mix for our soil, the inner bags filled easily, with the boxes complete, we were ready to begin planting.

Tournesol VGM closeup

Joe and company bought and planted organic material from our local company “dream with colors” they are the same vendor that supplies Whole Foods. We used leaf lettuce, curry, chard, red cabbage, green cabbage, yellow peppers, basil, chives, Stevia and even a few cherry tomatoes. My friend Jim Mumford was surprised at the tomato choice, I said what the heck.

Planted vertical garden panels

We moved the garden to my house for a minimum of 4 weeks so the plants could root well and allow us to turn them up vertical when they were ready, also since it was my pet project I thought it best if I didn’t burden the employees with the maintenance just yet….

Planted living wall growing in

This is the location that the wall will be mounted. It is on the backside of our building in Arizona. It gets plenty of morning sun, in fact we are a little worried about the heat from the block on the building but there is an air gap between the VGM and the building, which will help.

Measure twice, drill once

Photo 276 Measure twice, drill once. We wanted to be sure our mounting hardware was perfect so every time we installed a rail we hung a panel to check our accuracy. We never had a problem, thanks to Mikey. Once all the rails were in, we washed all of the dust from grinding and drilling off of the wall.

Installing the modules

After 8 weeks, we brought the panels back from my house, we have a few caterpillars in the cabbage and the Stevia didn’t make it. I will replant some rosemary in its place. Always a good herb in Arizona.

The completed living wall

When the wall was complete I watered it, since I wouldn’t be attaching the irrigation system for a day or two; I wanted to make sure it was well watered. Another successful design and install. Now time to bring all of our restaurant clients out for a tour.

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.