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A Bountiful Balcony Garden
| Article
# : |
13597 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
1,669 Words |
| Author
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Carole Ottesen
Carole Ottesen is an author and freelance writer who
specializes in gardening topics. She lives in Potomac,
Maryland. |
Imagine petunias climbing up to the sky and cabbage enough to keep the whole neighborhood in coleslaw for the summer, and all from your townhouse deck! Gardening can reach new heights with little or no land or space due to an innovative new product.
When this product, called the Living Wall™, is densely covered with flowers, vegetables, or foliage, its construction is invisible; it appears to be a wall of living, flowering, fruiting, green plants. Only after a frost, when the foliage dies back, do its neat, modular building blocks of green polyethylene become visible. The units come in both cubes and cylinders, fit together both vertically and horizontally, and can be stacked as high or as wide as one wishes. Taller constructions are supported by poles. Spaced at regular intervals over the entire surface of the containers re planting apertures, which are fitted with removable coverslips. Plants are inserted or started from seed in holes far enough apart to allow room for them to grow into mature plants. Unused holes remained covered.
A 'problem waiting to be solved'
A 72-year-old engineer from New York, F. Wesley Moffett, Jr., is the inventor of the Living Wall™, manufactured by Curious Research Corporation of Rochester, New York. The inspiration to invent these landless, vertical gardens came to him about twelve years ago on a scuba diving trip off the coast of Honduras, where he saw starving people. "All good land," he noted, "was owned by banana and tobacco companies. All the rest was not arable land. It was very, very steep, next to streams." Being an inventor and the kind of man who signs his letters "The Curious Enthusiastic Happy Optimist," Moffett looked at the situation as a problem waiting to be solved.
His first idea was to take available vines, "weave them together like wicker, and then fill them with sand or earth and send along three or four years' worth of fertilizer, while teaching the people how to compost." After talking to the Honduran people he decided this idea "was too complex. Something needed to be done differently." Thereafter he invented a series of landless gardens.
One promising model was a kit which could be put together in walls or as round containers. This he took to Egypt only to find out that "illiterate people couldn't put it together." Returning home, he set to work designing a model which needed no assembling. The final product, the Living Wall™, is entirely self-contained. To grow and harvest
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