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Posts tagged vertical garden
Living Wall in Getafe, Madrid, Spain
May 9th
Getafe is a city in the southern zone of the metropolis of Madrid, and is one of the most populated and industrialized cities in the municipality. These pictures were taken two months after planting. This living wall is on all four sides of a ventilation structure over a supermarket. Local residents had complained about the look of supermarket’s roof and they chose a living wall as the best solution to improve the roof’s aesthetics. While there’s a mini courtyard on the supermarket’s roof, the living wall is not accessible to the public.
Living Wall
Living Wall
Moss on the living wall
The challenge was building a vertical garden on all four sides of the vent. Each side had different lighting and required different plants. From Urbanarbolismo – Spanish
Valcent’s Vertical Vegetable Garden
Apr 26th
VertiCrop™ is a High Density Vertical Growing System designed to efficiently produce high amounts of fruits, vegetables and herbs relative to its footprint. Valcent has taken a massive leap forward in the ability to grow a large amount of crops in a small space literally anywhere in the world.. all the while sequestering carbon. While it can be setup in a standard greenhouse, it differentiates itself by outproducing traditional farming methods using the same square footage. For example, the average person in the UK consumes 206kg of fruit and vegetables each year. Using traditional farming methods, it would take 17 sq meters of farm land to feed that one person. Using Valcent’s Verticrop, that number drops to 1 square meter.
Plants are grown in multiple trays suspended vertically on a track. The track allows the trays to rotate in the greenhouse. Rotating the plants allows them to get equal amounts of light which in turn makes the produce ready to harvest simultaneously. The plants pass through a feeding station on the track which means the water and nutrients can be kept in one place with just the plants moving.
Vertical farming is the next wave in farming. It’s perfect for urban settings where space in limited and output per square meter is very high and the distance the food has to travel from production to your plate is very small. Because of the controlled environment, the use of pesticides can often be eliminated.
VertiCrop™ was listed in Time Magazine’s Top 50 inventions of 2009. It came 16th behind such inventions as NASA’s Ares Rocket (first place) and the AIDS vaccine.
To run a VertiCrop™ conveyer uses around the same amount of electricity as using a home computer for approx 10 hrs a day (will produce around ½ million lettuce a year).
Because VertiCrop can grow the same number of crops in less space, the energy costs associated with irrigation and environmental controls in a conventional greenhouse layout are greatly reduced, typically 7 times less energy used to produce the same number of plants. There is also potential to use renewable energy sources.
