You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Farming in a Bottle’ category.
I have now presented my poster to the class about my window farm. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to learn about window farming. Showing my window farm to people gives me an opportunity to educate others about creative gardening and producing/buying local organic food.
I was asked many times today about what I was going to do with window garden now that the class project is over. My garden will live on so do not worry. My window farm will be moving with me to a Boy Scout summer camp that I run. There it will hang in a window in the dinning hall. With this prime location I will have around 1500 people walk by it during the summer and I am sure that many of them will stop to take a look.
The possibility of having 1500 people learn about local food is an exciting idea that I cannot turn down. Exceptionally sense most of that 1500 will be middle school kids. Teaching kids at a young age is the easiest way to make meaning life changes.
And after camp the garden is moving with me to Chicago where I hope to expand it.
I hope that many of you are think about making your own window garden, and if you do please let me know. Here are a few things that I have learned from making my own can could help you.
First, herbs are the best to plant in a window garden because many of them do not grow to big. This style of gardening is not good for large plants. Also herbs allow you to continually harvest them without completely killing the plant.
Second, do forget to water them. The bottles themselves are not very big and with that they cannot store a lot of water. I have to water my garden every two days or it will quickly dry out. I learned this the hard way and my lettuce has not fully recovered from it yet.
Last, come up with a design of your own. You could simply build one close to mine or you could be creative. Being creative with your garden makes this project such a fun to do. A good friend of mine is now making one out of old sections of plastic plumbing of different sizes. Some of the pipes even have right angles in them so he can be even more creative with the design. He is planting wild flowers in his.
Over all this has been a fantastic project. I have truly enjoyed designing and building my garden and learning about environmental issues at the same time in class.
This last weekend my window garden took a turn for the worse. I had to be out of town to finalize some post graduation plans in Chicago, where I am moving to, and while I was out of town my garden did not get watered. The red lettuce and chives both are not looking so well, but I believe that they will pull through. I have always had plants growing in my room and have seen them look worse then this before and they have always came back. I am hoping that this happens this time as well.
This does bring up a problem with my design of a window garden. The amount of soil in each bottle is small and therefore the amount of water it can hold is small as well. This means that I have to keep up with the watering or the plants will quickly die. I have been watering every other day or so, but over the weekend they went four days with out water. Just these four days made the plants look sick.
The window farming website does have some plans for building an automated watering system for those who are to busy to water everyday.
Also my last post I talked about a new question that I had come up with. I wanted to know how many trees would I have to plant to cancel out my CO2 emissions. That way I could eliminate all my CO2 emissions and be carbon neutral. Here is what I have found from reliable sources.
The average person in the United States emits 10,185lb of CO2 per year. (International Energy Agency 2009) And a tree absorbs on average 48lb of CO2 per year. (U. S. Department of Energy 2008) Which means I would have to plant 212.2 trees, a huge number but doable at the same time. Please note: This is rough average calculation with many variables not taken in to account and this is also for only one green house gas. With that said this still shows an interesting solution.
I find this to be a fun idea to play with in my head, trying to figure out if this is truly doable.
One last thing, last week I had an unexpected surprise come out of my garden. In with my red lettuce I had a foreign plant start to grow. After it got large enough I was able to identify it as a sunflower. A seed must have gotten mixed in with the potting soil. A sunflower is way to big to grow in a bottle, so I am trying to decide what to do with it. This is one of the things that I love about gardening. You never know what is going to happen.
My last post I talked about how unrealistic this project is when it comes to providing food. It is impossible to grow enough food from so few bottles and the amount it would take is huge. Some people did not like this idea that I was claiming that this was not realistic. I would like to clear up a few things.
While the amount of food this system can grow is very little it has allowed me to educate others on the idea of local food. Just before the start of this class I was learning for myself about the importance of local food but did not have a way to share it. This project has allowed me to educate others about this movement will showing them my project. The real value of this project is the education and not in production.
On another note Window Farms have showed up on Weekend Edition on National Public Radio a few weeks ago. I have posted the link to the story at the bottom of this post. A key thing that they talk about in this story is how much fun it is to build and take care of a window farm. In my opinion this plays as equally important role as education. If it were not fun then no one would take the time to build one.
While trying to find out exactly how much this project helps the environment I have came across a bigger idea. I want to know how many trees I would have to plant in order to cancel out my carbon footprint. This way I can sleep at night knowing that I am not making things worst. Worst as in green house gases. I am going to look into this and will blog about what I have found soon.
The biggest question I want to try to answer with this project is whether or not this is a realistic solution for local food in a big city. Every little thing that we do to help the environment helps and we should do everything that we can. A whole lot of little things can quickly add up to something big. So how much does my window garden help?
Two weeks ago we had someone come and talk to the class from the horticulture department. She stated that it would take 0.01 acres for someone to grow all the produce they need for one year. So after doing some very basic math I have found that it would take 2,292.6 bottles to have 0.01 acres of growing space. That is assuming that you can grow large plants in the bottles and that you only grow when plants are in season. Therefore my window garden at peak performance can produce 0.3% of my yearly vegetables or just about one day worth of meals.
So does this mean that this window farm project is pointless? I would argue yes and no. It will never produce enough food to make it worth wild. It has though allowed me to tell friends and family about local food and the importance of it. While this is a pointless garden, it is a wonderful educational tool. It’s also just fun to make and to take care of. It just depends on what you think is more important.
I have posted more photos of my garden so that you can see how well it is doing.
Over this last weekend I built my window garden and installed it in. It was not that hard to build so I am sure that anyone could do it. This is a positive thing for the success of window gardens. If they were hard then many people would not take the time make one.
I spent ten dollars on the system that holds the bottles, which I got and recycled from my roommates. I also spent ten dollars on the plants themselves. These cost a little extra because I bought them from a green house. I think this was a good idea because it upped my success rate on this project.
My garden is made up of eight bottles, and if it is successful I can easily add to it. That is the nice thing about this system, you can add and take away depending on the amount of time you have. It also fits in any window space that you have.
In my garden I have growing red leafed lettuce, rosemary, parsley, chives and parsley. My next plan for my garden is to not kill it. Check out the photo I have posted.
I am always asking myself, what can I do to help the environment. I am just one person with not a lot of time. What I have come up with is gardening. It allows me to not only cut down on the amount of CO2 from farming and shipping the vegetables, but allows me to know for a fact that my fruits and vegetables are truly fresh and organic.
So growing a garden has its problems, I rent the house that I live in and the owners would not like it if I dug up the yard for a garden. This problem is a very common one for people that live in large cities as well.
What I have found to fix this problem was shown to me by Dr. Carroll and her posts on KSOL of some pictures and videos of Window Farms. These are vertical gardens that you make in recycled plastic water bottles and hang in your window.
I have posted an introductory video about Window Farms below along with the website.
So this weekend I am going to be building my own window farm, I will make sure to post pictures very soon. I am starting this project at the start of spring so that I wont have to grow all my plants from seeds; I have waited for the local green houses to start the growing from seeds.
www.windowfarms.org
