Want Big Veggies? Pee in Your Fireplace Ashes

Just about anyone will tell you that pee and food don’t mix. The idea of someone urinating on your food before it makes its way onto your plate is probably enough to make you feel a little nauseous – but, surprise! Piss can make veggies grow bigger and tastier, especially when mixed with wood ash.

It’s common knowledge that urine is good for compost – some gardeners even install toilet seats above their compost piles to make it easier for women to contribute. Now, a study has confirmed that human urine mixed with wood ash can produce as many high-quality tomatoes as synthetic fertilizers without risks to human health.

From Science Daily:

In the study, Surendra Pradhan and colleagues point out that urine, a good source of nitrogen, has been successfully used to fertilize cucumber, corn, cabbage, and other crops. Only a few studies, however, have investigated the use of wood ash, which is rich in minerals and also reduces the acidity of certain soils. Scientists have not reported on the combinaton of urine and wood ash, they say.

The new study found that plants fertilized with urine produced four times more tomatoes than nonfertilized plants and as much as plants given synthetic fertilizer. Urine plus wood ash produced almost as great a yield, with the added benefit of reducing the acidity of acid soils. “The results suggest that urine with or without wood ash can be used as a substitute for mineral fertilizer to increase the yields of tomato without posing any microbial or chemical risks,” the report says.

So, basically, if you want big tomatoes, just pee in your fireplace ashes and then spread them on the soil. Cheap, easy, and your drunken party guests will be more than happy to assist. Gotta love it!

Link [Science Daily]
Photo credit: Flickr user Wonker

Urban Organic Gardener: Self-Watering Fire Escape Garden in NYC

You don’t have to have a lot of outdoor space or cash to start an organic garden – in fact, if you’ve got a fire escape and some plastic containers in your recycling bin, you can grow everything from fresh greens and tomatoes to a wide array of herbs. Just ask Mike Lieberman, who built self-watering containers out of recycled materials so he could grow some of his own food at his Manhattan apartment.

Lieberman proves that small space can still provide a big yield with simple materials like soda bottles and buckets. He grows kale, swiss chard, lettuce, cherry tomatoes, peppers, mint, oregano and tarragon, all on his fire escape.

A second small garden in his grandmother’s Brooklyn backyard fits an incredible variety of fresh herbs and veggies into 16 mostly recycled containers, from cauliflower to cucumbers. This garden is a great example of how easy it can be to grow your own food, even if all you have is a porch or a deck to work with.

“This is my first time growing and the goal is get more people to do the same. To show them that it’s simple, they have the space and there’s nothing to be scared of,” said Lieberman.

Check out his blog at UrbanOrganicGardener.com for lots of tips and photos!

Link [Urban Organic Gardener]

Smart Green Design: Indoor Vertical Gardening for Apartment Dwellers

Sometimes, windows just aren’t enough to grow anything but shade-loving plants. Depending on what side of the building your apartment is on – or whether it’s looking out into an alley or courtyard – you might not get anywhere near enough sun to keep plants alive. So, what’s a wannabe gardening urbanite to do?

If a new concept by Ingela Viks + Liina-Kai Raivet takes off, you’ll have a way to grow all kinds of stuff inside your apartment, even if you’re short on space. The ‘Green Indoors’ is a vertical planting system that provides both light and water to growing plants with space for up to 24 plant pots.

From Inhabitat:

We’ve seen other indoor growing lightpots, but they tend to take up precious counter space. The Green Indoors plant stand consists of a flat metal base fitted with a light filled tube with a matte cover to minimize glare. The stand not only provides necessary light, but also automatically waters each plant individually according to its needs. When there is enough natural light, the plant stand shuts off its light, and it also turns off automatically at night.

Since it provides light, it has a double function as a lamp with that daylight tinge that people in rainy regions can really appreciate. This concept was created as part of the Designboom/BÜSSEL design competition – we really hope it goes into production! Cool green design that brings fresh homegrown food to anyone regardless of where they live = awesome.

Link [Inhabitat]

Gardening, Recycling and Nudity, Oh My

So, we’ve heard of gardening nude… a couple was recently in the news for doing and there’s even a World Naked Gardening Day (link NSFW)… but we’ve never seen it used as a marketing tool. Until now.

Woolly Pockets creates these awesome soft-sided gardening containers made from 100% recycled plastic bottles, allowing you to create beautiful vertical gardens even with minimal gardening skills. And the photos just happen to have naked people in them.

From Woolly Pockets, via Treehugger:

Woolly Pockets are flexible, breathable, and modular gardening containers. They`come in two styles: those designed to be placed on horizontal surfaces, and those designed to be hung on walls for vertical gardening. You can use Woolly Pockets both indoors and out; they have built-in moisture barriers to help protect furniture, and they’re equally at home outside in the elements. They’re perfect for creating urban gardens where you have space to garden but no land to garden in. Woolly Pockets are lightweight and can be folded flat, which makes them very easy to use, move, and store just about anywhere.

Woolly Pockets have two main components: the breathable felt and the built-in moisture barrier. The breathable portion is made of 100% recycled plastic bottles that have been industrially felted. The moisture barrier is made according to military standards for impermeability from 60% recycled plastic bottles. We stitch each pocket together by hand with a double lock stitch and strong, UV-resistant nylon thread.

This is a pretty awesome way to cover an ugly wall or fence, provide more privacy, and get a good yield of herbs or vegetables out of a small outdoor space.

We’ll refrain from making a joke about woolly pockets and naked people. Just enjoy the strange but totally awesome photos.

Link [Woolly Pockets] via [Treehugger]

Mission Seedbomb: Guerilla Gardening on a Massive Scale

Inspired by a story about an America pilot dropping candies instead of bombs into post-World War II Berlin, designer Hwang Jin wook has created a project called ‘Mission Seedbomb’ that would pelt desert land with capsules full of soil and seeds.

Biodegradable plastic ‘bombs’ containing artificial soil and seeds would be dispersed from a bomber aircraft over areas that have fallen victim to desertification due to deforestation. The plastic casing would melt away as the seedling matured, leaving behind nothing but vegetation.

Yanko Design rightly points out that a lot of thought and care would have to go into such a project to ensure that the seedlings could survive in such harsh environments, as well as preventing even more ecological damage through the introduction of non-native plants. Simplifying this concept to ditch the plastic casings and use the same sort of seed bombs that everyday guerrilla gardeners use might be a better idea.

But, it’s a fascinating concept. The idea of ‘bombing’ the earth with a symbol of life and hope instead of with weapons is certainly one that would appeal to environmental activists and fans of guerrilla gardening. With contribution from botanists, this idea could bloom into something fantastic.

Link [Yanko Design]

The Future of Sustainable Food: Are we on the Edge of a New Era?

Following a huge grassroots effort to get a victory garden reestablished on the White House lawn, Michelle Obama made it official last week: an organic kitchen garden is now in progress near the fountain on the South Lawn. As we had hoped, Mrs. Obama is helping to elevate awareness of healthy, locally and sustainably grown food. So, does that mean that sustainable food revolution is about to sweep the country?

During World War II, victory gardens became a necessity as the government rationed foods like sugar, cheese and meats and labor and transportation shortages affected the ability to harvest and transport fruits and vegetables to markets. The government asked citizens to shoulder some of the burden of food production, and what resulted was a nation where nearly every yard supplied fresh produce. But, it didn’t last. Once the war was over, we went back to our lawns.

The importance of sustainable food can’t be overstated. Our food system is a mess. The vast majority of the foods we consume are grown thousands of miles away from our homes with liberal use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, processed heavily and then shipped to our local supermarkets. It’s hard to even tell where the foods we eat come from anymore. We’re so far removed from the source of our food, it’s really kind of disturbing. Children hardly even realize that food comes from nature, as opposed to the store down the street.

Food recalls are becoming more and more commonplace as farms and processing centers cut corners and fail to properly oversee operations. Contamination is widespread and has reached stomach-turning heights in recent years. Most of what’s found in grocery stores is loaded with empty calories, preservatives, sodium and fat. Conventional farming practices are robbing our soil and our food of nutrients, polluting our waterways and causing vast oxygen-deprived ‘dead zones’ in our oceans.

People are beginning to realize the value of authentic food – thanks in large part to a receptive First Lady and skyrocketing interest in the green, eco-friendly lifestyle – but making the dream of a sustainable food revolution into reality on a nationwide scale is a gargantuan task, and one that may still take many years to be fully realized.

Advocates of conventional agriculture – including, naturally, the powerful National Corn Growers Association – are pushing back, arguing that organic farming can’t provide enough food because yields tend to be lower.

From The New York Times:

“We think there’s a place for organic, but don’t think we can feed ourselves and the world with organic,” says Rick Tolman, chief executive of the National Corn Growers Association. “It’s not as productive, more labor-intensive and tends to be more expensive.”

Although some people argue that there are hidden costs to cheap food, from environmental damage caused by factory farms and fertilizer runoff to the health costs associated with eating highly processed, calorie-laden food, the fact remains that commercially produced food is relatively inexpensive.

As the Obama administration took over in January, many advocates of organic, sustainable food had hoped to see an ally appointed as secretary of agriculture and were angry at the appointment of Tom Vilsack, who has been called a Monsanto shill. Obama’s choice to put Vilsack in charge of the USDA was seen as a devastating blow to the movement.

From Counterpunch:

“Vilsack’s nomination sends the message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically engineered crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration,” said Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director of Organic Consumers Association. “Our nation’s future depends on crafting a forward-thinking strategy to promote organic and sustainable food and farming, and address the related crises of climate change, diminishing energy supplies, deteriorating public health, and economic depression.”

Vilsack has taken to fighting that perception, turning a patch of pavement outside his headquarters into a “people’s garden” and claiming sustainable food as one of his main priorities. Among his stated goals are improving the quality of children’s school lunches, helping small farms develop regional distribution networks and overhauling agriculture and food policy to place an emphasis on nutrition and fighting climate change.

Sustainable food activists are wary, and take Vilsack’s statements with a grain of salt given his past, but they’re still hopeful that sweeping changes in the way things are done could push local and sustainable food into the mainstream.

Still, even the most ardent of sustainable food advocates warn that the movement isn’t ready for its closeup. Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and supporter of diversified, regional food networks, told The New York Times “The movement is not ready for prime time. It’s not like we have an infrastructure with legislation ready to go.”

But, momentum is building all the same, and across the country, thousands of people are turning back to that World War II-era tradition of growing their own food. This time, there’s even more at stake – so we’ve got to make sustainable food a reality. Luckily, our fortunes have changed dramatically since the Bush administration left office with its collective tail between its legs. We’ve got friends in powerful places – even Oprah is speaking out for sustainable food.

So, what can you do to help? For starters, consider following Michelle Obama’s example and plant a kitchen garden, start some potted herbs and veggies on your balcony or even take over an abandoned lot. Learn more about growing your own food no matter where you live with our guide to urban gardening, and get more info about the sustainable food movement at SustainableTable.org.

Link [The New York Times] + [CounterPunch]

Photo credit: Slow Food Nation & The Huffington Post

Who’s Who in Green: The Dervaes Family

In response to genetically engineered food, grown thousands of miles away from where it will be consumed and doused in chemicals, a rallying cry spread across the country – a homegrown revolution. People have begun to realize that the ultimate way to take control over their own food is to grow it themselves – even if all they have to grow on is 1/10th of an acre in a town like Pasadena, California.

The Dervaes family – father Jules, son Justin and daughters Anais and Jordanne – have inspired people around the world to start their own urban homesteads with their ‘Path to Freedom’ project, which has transformed a humble home with a small, concrete-covered lot in the suburbs into a prolific organic farm that not only grows enough food to meet the family’s needs but to sell to area businesses, as well.

It all started with a simple goal: to reduce the family’s water bills. Jules Dervaes, who had previously grown food and raised bees on family properties in New Zealand and Florida, decided to rip out the dead front lawn and replace it with thick mulch and wildflowers in response to the severe California drought of the 1990s. Slowly but surely, the family began ripping up more grass and replacing it with edibles instead – fruits, vegetables, beans, herbs and nasturtiums.

Soon enough, the family began to see the project as a challenge: how much food could they grow? How much money could they save? They took on a voluntarily simple, self-sufficient lifestyle, dedicating themselves to living green. Today, their little homestead in the city – which boasts solar panels, a range of hand-powered appliances, a solar outdoor shower, a cob oven and an enclosure full of goats, ducks and chickens – serves as an inspiration for millions of people interested in starting their own urban homesteads.

The Dervaes homestead produces an amazing 6,000 pounds of food annually in their 66’x66’ backyard. They grow over 350 different vegetables, herbs, and fruits, gather honey from their beehives, and eat the hundreds of eggs provided each year by their chickens and ducks. The family’s carbon footprint is impressive – they brew their own biodiesel (for a car that rarely gets used), consume just 6.5 kWh of energy a day, eat seasonally (and vegetarian), make their own compost, buy secondhand and make almost all of their food from scratch.

Their website, PathtoFreedom.com, offers tips and information about small-scale farms as well as a journal that documents the goings-on at the Dervaes homestead. They have also created the site FreedomGardens.org, which offers freedom gardeners a place to gather, share photos and information and network with each other. The Dervaes also have an online store, the Peddler’s Wagon, where you can purchase many of the items they use themselves on a daily basis, and they’ve started their own seed company as well.

The family is also the focus of a new 52-minute documentary called Homegrown, which will be screening at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and has made their own 15-minute film entitled ‘Homegrown Revolution’ that will be screening at the Green Lifestyle Film Festival in LA (March 13th-15th). Check out the trailer, below.

Jules, Justin, Anais and Jordanne have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s entirely possible to subsist on what your own tiny parcel of land can provide, no matter where you live.

Dervaes Family’s Green Score: 38,998

Start Seedlings Indoors with Recycled DIY Grow Boxes

March is the month that many people start seedlings indoors to transplant into their outdoor gardens once it’s warm enough. Seed starting can be intimidating, especially when you consider the expense of purchasing special grow lights – but hey, guess what? You don’t need that pricey stuff! The Cheap Vegetable Gardener came up with 2 awesome ways to start seedlings indoors with stuff you might already have laying around.

If you’ve got a rubbermaid storage container and some leftover LED string lights from the holidays, you’re in business for this first project. You simply drill holes into the lid of the bin, insert the LED bulbs and hot glue as necessary. The Cheap Vegetable Gardener mixed red and white LEDs (Check out this post to learn how color spectrum affects plant growth).

When the plants get larger, you could follow The Cheap Vegetable Gardener’s example by turning an old PC case into a grow box. This is certainly an innovative way to recycle those old cases! All it takes is an extension cord, lamp timer and socket plug adapters.

Check out the full instructions over at The Cheap Vegetable Gardener.

Link [The Cheap Vegetable Gardener] via [The Huffington Post]

Urban Gardening: You Can Grow Food, No Matter Where You Live

(image via: Flickr user iamterris)

Gardening is regaining popularity as a pastime for all types of people across the world, with gardens popping up in the most unexpected places. While the traditional image of a garden may not exactly fit into the reality of most urban environments, the fact is you can grow your own food whether you live on a rural farm or in a tiny Manhattan apartment. Urban gardening is all about using space wisely to regain a closer connection with your food and beautify your home or neighborhood.

There are a handful of different types of urban gardens, and the ones we’re going to focus on here are indoor gardening, container gardening, community gardening and guerilla gardening.  Perhaps you’ve got a tiny townhouse yard, a balcony, a south-facing window – or perhaps you live in a basement apartment that won’t support anything but mold. You can still grow enough of your own food to save a considerable amount of money and enjoy the freshest, healthiest produce possible.

Container Gardening – Growing Food on a Small Scale

(images via: Technology for the Poor)

Container gardening allows urban residents with small yards, patios or balconies to grow practically any plants in practically any container that will hold soil. One of the most fun parts of growing food in containers is that you can get incredibly creative with coming up with new uses for old junk. Wine barrels, used tires, feed sacks, kiddie pools, buckets, leaky watering cans and even shoes are among the items intrepid container gardeners use – and that’s just the beginning. You can also build your own self-watering containers, as illustrated in the video below.

(images via: PathtoFreedom.com)

Raised beds make a great alternative to containers and allow you to grow a lot more. Like containers, they can be placed on hard surfaces like concrete slabs or rooftops and are great for smallish spaces or yards where the soil quality isn’t so great. Raised beds are freestanding structures typically made from wood, stone or concrete that are filled with soil and compost. Most often, they’re constructed of planks of wood screwed or nailed together in sizes typically ranging from 3’ x 8’ to 5’ x 20’ and are between 8” to 3 feet in height. They keep soil warmer, provide better drainage and require less maintenance than traditional gardens.

For amazing eye candy, inspiration, tips and info about growing food in raised beds on a small lot, check out the journal at PathtoFreedom.com. ‘Path to Freedom’ is the urban homestead of the Dervaes family, who grow almost all of their own food – plus enough to sell to local restaurants – on just 1/10th of an acre. They also raise goats, chickens and ducks, keep bees, brew their own biodiesel and basically live as self-sufficiently as possible on their tiny parcel of land in Pasadena, California.

Beginners and experienced urban gardeners alike will also enjoy FreedomGardens.org, an online social community of gardening enthusiasts “digging their way to a free and secure food future”.

Indoor Gardening – Apartment Dwellers Can Grow Food, Too!

(image via: Flickr user ramsey everydaypants)

Okay, so growing pumpkins, corn or zucchini indoors probably isn’t all that feasible. But, any window that gets at least 6 to 8 hours of sunlight a day can support leaf crops like lettuce, endive and arugula as well as small-crop tomatoes, peppers, root crops and even bush beans.

Growing vegetables indoors requires different soil requirements, watering, pollination, and pest control techniques than doing so outdoors. You must also consider things like air circulation and ambient temperature. You may need supplemental lighting – cheap shop lights from the hardware store work just as well as expensive grow lights.

If you’re a total novice and growing veggies in your kitchen window seems intimidating, try herbs first. Chives, basil, parsley, oregano, cilantro, peppermint and rosemary are among the herbs that do well indoors and they’ll add lots of fresh, pesticide-free flavor to your meals.

For tips on indoor gardening, including planting requirements, potting media, how to hand-pollinate with artist brushes and which varieties will be most successful, check out GardenGal.net and this article by the Virginia Cooperative Extension.

Community Gardening – Rent a Plot in Your Neighborhood

(image via: Flickr user jeffschuler)

If you don’t have any space at all to grow plants, community gardening may be your best bet. Most cities have some kind of community garden program, where residents can rent a plot of land for a nominal fee (it’s even free in some places). There are an estimated 10,000 community gardens in the U.S. alone, allowing people who don’t have land of their own or who simply want the community experience to grow food, relieve stress, connect with the environment and interact with other members of the community.

In community gardens, residents share the responsibility of maintaining and managing the garden. Some community gardens are communal instead of divvying up land between members, so everyone shares in each others’ efforts.

To find out if your city has a community garden or to start one, check out the American Community Gardening Association.

Guerilla Gardening – Who Cares if it’s Someone Else’s Land?

(images via: Flickr user ubrayj02)

For those with no access to land at all, or people who would just prefer to put their efforts into beautifying forgotten public spaces, guerilla gardening will satisfy your impulse to dig in the dirt. Guerilla gardening is planting vegetables, fruit, herbs or any other plants in land that’s not yours – whether it’s a vacant lot, a park, a median, the side of the highway or those sad little strips of dirt between streets and parking lots.

Also called ‘pirate gardening’, the essential goal of guerilla gardening is to improve public spaces and make sure perfectly good land doesn’t go to waste. Some guerilla gardeners surreptitiously sow and tend patches of vegetables or flower gardens under the cloak of night, ready to run for it if cops or the property owners appear. Others get permission from landowners or the city and openly garden in spaces that aren’t technically theirs.

There are lots of different ways to guerilla garden. Some people secretly plant food – like strawberries, melons, zucchini or tomatoes – among ornamental plants in city-tended gardens. Some take over vacant lots altogether, or simply throw ‘seed bombs’ anywhere that plants could potentially take hold. Seed bombs are little balls of soil, clay and seeds – check out our video below to learn how to make them yourself.

GuerillaGardening.org is a great resource for anyone interested in greening up their neighborhood on the sly. Get tips, see photos of guerilla gardens around the world and meet fellow guerilla gardening enthusiasts in your area.

Who’s Who in Green: Tom Szaky

When TerraCycle co-founder and CEO Tom Szaky was 19 years old and a freshman at Princeton University, he entered a business plan competition with a friend that would change his life and lead to one of the most inspiring, truly eco-friendly companies ever created. Little did he know at the time that despite not winning the contest – he came in fourth – Szaky had taken his first step on a relatively short path to the top spot at his very own multi-million-dollar company.

So, what was Szaky’s bright idea? Worm poop. What would become Szaky’s breakout product actually grew from a need for a better fertilizer for his pot plants. It turned out that worm castings did the trick, and Szaky was encouraged by the fact that what most people consider garbage could be so useful. So, he dropped out of Princeton and decided to give entrepreneurship a shot. TerraCycle worm-casting fertilizer was packaged in used soda bottles with spray tops donated by companies who didn’t need them. Soon, it was picked up by Home Depot and Wal-Mart in Szaky’s home country of Canada, earning nearly half a million dollars in sales in 2005. By 2006, TerraCycle debuted in the U.S. and earned over $2.5 million.

Despite the fact that he showed up at important meetings with big-shot head buyers of mass merchandisers looking like he just rolled out of bed, the young CEO charmed his way to success with passion and an intimate knowledge of the product he had created. It helps, too, that TerraCycle offers retailers huge margins on its products due to the fact that, as Szaky has said, worms don’t charge for their labor, never take a day off, produce their body weight in waste every 24 hours and double their numbers ever three months.

TerraCycle has since expanded to offer a range of products including reusable totes made entirely from recycled plastic bags, rain barrels, bird feeders, deer repellent, composters, potting mix, seed starters, natural cleaners, school supplies, eco-friendly fire starters and other items created mostly from post-consumer waste. Even the cleaners come in used 2-liter soda bottles. The plant food made from worm waste is still TerraCycle’s flagship product, and it’s all-natural, all-organic, absolutely goof proof, cheaper than conventional products and actually works better as well.

They’re products made from waste, packaged in waste, and the production process produces virtually zero waste itself. Technically, TerraCycle could be making even more money by being paid to haul away the garbage that the worms eat. Right now, they don’t – but if they choose to go that way, it could mean even more success. Szaky parlayed garbage into useful, eco-friendly products – it’s a win-win for everyone involved.  As the CBS evening news said in a profile of TerraCycle, “[the] story is a reminder about following your dreams. The pot of gold may require dealing with a ton of crap.”

Szaky is hoping to inspire others to create environmentally responsible business models with his musings on ‘eco-capitalism’, which can be read on the TerraCycle website. Given the success that TerraCycle has achieved, people should definitely take notice – we could all learn a thing or two from Szaky’s innovative ways of doing business.  He has provided a model for all eco-entrepreneurs to emulate, and we hope that it’ll inspire an army of new green businesses ready to change the definition of capitalism in the United States and across the world.

Tom Szaky’s Green Score: 72,945

Low-Tech Vertical Farming in Garbage Bags

The awesomeness of vertical farming just got even less expensive and easier to start and maintain. This weekend at Gothenburg’s Gunnebo ‘castle’ Future Gardens exhibit, giant yellow trash bags with holes poked in them poured forth an abundance of edible goodies including lettuce and corn. The construction debris bags were turned into vertical farms by designer Topher Delaney.

From Treehugger:

The orange and yellow Big Bags used in Gunnebo’s gardens are familiar to any large town or city dweller in Sweden – these polypropelene bags (which are recyclable) fill the streets near construction sites yet are less intrusive and more easily picked up for transport of construction debris to recycling facilities than the trash containers used in other countries.

They also seem to make fabulous planter bags – and lots of curious attendees (including this TreeHugger) at the weekend farmers’ market and exhibit at Gunnebo stood snapping pictures of the bags, eager to try this at home – the bags and organic compost were sold on site. Unlike some higher-tech vertical alternatives, this one was just $15 for the bag! But BYOD…

Benefits to this idea abound… like no weeding, total control over soil quality, and great moisture-retaining abilities. They take up barely any space yet are capable of producing so much food. They may not be the prettiest gardens ever, but way to recycle an old bag and use it in a fab new way. Smart.  Green and smart!

Link [Treehugger]

Indoor ‘River Ecosystem’ Aquarium and Hydroponic Garden

French designer Mathieu Lehanneur has created an incredible item that serves as an art installation, aquarium, fish hatchery, hydroponic vegetable garden and home décor at in one. The refrigerated aquarium houses freshwater fish, with vegetables growing in glass pods on top. The vegetables get their water from the tank, and then filter and purify the water for the fish. It’s its own little mini river ecosystem indoors.

I don’t know about the snakes, but all in all this is a pretty sleek and sexy design, and an interesting approach to dealing with the global food crisis. Check out the video of the installation below:

Via [Inhabitat]

Foldable Modular Greenhouse Makes Gardening Easy in Small Spaces

Cool new gear for people living in apartments, condos or other places where green space is impossible to come by: there’s a new ‘foldable greenhouse’ that takes up virtually no space at all when it’s not in use, but expands to become a garden bed with a protective covering.  Designer Daniel Schipper created this lightweight, flexible modular greenhouse specifically for places where garden space comes at a premium.  It’s frameless, and built from recycleable plastic.

This product isn’t yet available retail, but the designer is looking to produce it for the masses.  If you can help, send him a message through his website.

Link [Make] + [Daniel Schipper]

Awesome! Rainwater Harvesting Vertical Garden

Now here is a really cool and smart bit of green designing! Ontario College of Art and Design student Michael Tampilic created this rainwater harvesting vertical terrace, which has been entered into the Rocket 2008 Industrial Graduation Show and Competition. The way it works is pretty brilliant: it connects with your gutter downspout and stores water in a tank, which waters the greenery you plant in the planter boxes. Cotton wicks transport the stored water to the plants.

From Rocket 2008:

Vert is a rain terrace: a rainwater harvester and vertical garden. This project establishes sustainable water practices through the harvesting of rain, and brings the advantages of a living wall to the backyard through vertical gardening. Vert alleviates a homes reliance on public utility systems while beautifying unused vertical space.

How cool would it be to have one of these to grow food in? Talk about a smart use of space and water! Vertical gardening is definitely a smart idea for urban areas, and with this cool design, you can harvest your own herbs and veggies even if you live in a tiny apartment, as long as you have just a bit of outdoor space and a gutter downspout available. Plus, it’s pretty. We likey.

You can read more about how it works at the Rocket 2008 website.

Link [AzSustainably] + [Rocket 2008]