Living Walls and Vertical Gardens » trellis

Vegetable Furniture

Gavin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:50:22 +0000

Judy Hoysak has an interesting take on building indoor gardens. She made one garden with the idea that the climbing vegetables like beans and tomatoes would grow vertically indoors while taking up little space. She says:

“The Bean Screen is a room divider that grows beans.

Traditionally, vegetables gardens are thought of as utilitarian, and the potential beauty of vegetable plants ignored in favor of non-edible ornamentals. I use existing negative space opportunities within the home to minimize the footprint of these products.

These pieces are using ready-made self-watering planters and T-5 fluorescent plant grow lights and the structure is made from Plyboo Strand and aluminum.”

Indoor vertical vegetable garden

She has taken a fairly common idea of using glass as a table top and gave it extra functionality by growing plants right underneath it. It’s a great spacesaver idea. If you need a coffee table anyway.. in a room with lots of light.. her design makes a lot of sense. You can see in each of the designs a small pipe.. maybe PVC? but that pipe will be used to fill up the water resevoir in the bottom of the planter. The great thing with this design, is that it wicks the water up through the dirt in the planter. Water can wick 12″ or 300 mm high, so it ensures the plants get all the water they need. As the plants use the water, the soil dries up, and more water is wicked from the reservoir. Then to fill it up, you just need to pour water down the PVC pipe to fill it back up again. It reduces the frequency of your watering quite a bit, greatly lowers the risk for root rot, and takes the guess work out of watering since the plants let you know when they’re thirsty.

Indoor coffee table vegetable garden

Sustainable Vertical Garden Design

Gavin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:55:16 +0000

Here’s an interesting set of vertical garden designs from Sustainable Garden Design in Perth, Australia. As you can see right away, there’s an interesting choice of plants for the vertical garden due to the climate and the designs are really unique. Using a combination of rocks and interesting building materials, these living walls really stand out… and somehow still work with the landscape.

Unique living wall

Rock Tower Living Walls

Vertical garden as a garden screen

Green wall garden screen close up

Unique Vertical garden

Vines without trellises – A green wall

Gavin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:11:43 +0000

Melia Veradero is a hotel in Cuba. I went there on vacation a while back and I’ve gotta say, when you’re standing in the lobby there looking at the green vines in the atrium, it looks pretty amazing. They’ve got a fountain around there so you can hear running water in the background and it made a nice atmosphere.

This is another cool take on how to build a green wall. When you’re up on each level there, you can see planter boxes with irrigation pipes sticking out of them. They put planter boxes on each level of the wall, so it’s not one long vine from top to bottom, but rather multiple vines that start on each level and slowly grow into other levels.

Using planters at multiple levels to make a living wall is the way to go if you’re using vines.. otherwise it would just take way to long to get those vines to grow enough to fill in. And making them grow from top to bottom allows you to drape the vines rather than have them be attached to something like a wall.