Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Gardening in bottle caps and spirally things
The idea in my last posting on ultra small space urban gardening was quite rightly criticised for its questionable practicality. Will these two ideas fare any better?
Priced at JPY 158 (about £1.20), the Merry Farming Kit includes a tablet of compressed, dry soil that’s just the right size to fit inside a standard plastic fizzy drinks bottle cap along with basil seeds for planting. Urban gardeners need only place the soil in a cap, moisten it, and plant the seeds, as specified in the accompanying directions. After that, all that’s left to do is wait for the seeds to germinate and grow up into full-sized plants.
I'm guessing this fun concept is going to appeal a lot more to the Japanese market and perhaps school kids over here, but consumers interested in growing more substantial crops might be better off with the spirally Whirligro. Targeting those with limited growing space, this contraption uses spiral-shaped tubes to elevate food crops off the ground and enable greater production.
Designed primarily for fast-growing leaf crops, Whirligro uses durable, transportable growing tubes that can each hold three plants. Each Whirligro unit, in turn, holds 10 tubes spiralling around a central post, offering the combined ability to grow 30 plants in an area smaller than one meter by one meter. Plants grow through holes in the plastic tubing, reducing any weeding requirements to a bare minimum; because the plants are off the ground, meanwhile, pests tend not to be a problem, the device’s Scottish maker says. Watering can be done by hand or with a small drip irrigation system. Pricing for the Whirligro ranges from £55 to £40, depending on size.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mr Growbag on
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I'm loving your weekly posts about quirky new ideas for gardening, Hugh. The bottlecap idea is an interesting concept, although the idea of seeds "growing up into full size plants" given the negligible space for roots and water retention in a bottle cap seems unlikely. But, if you want to pay £1.20 to grow a tiny amount of cress, why not! :p
The whirligro is a better idea, although I'm again wondering about water retention. If the tubes are porous, as they look to be, I reckon it would dry out really quickly. The lack of space for roots may well make this a problem even for shallow rooted stuff like salad crops. An irrigation kit (as they suggest) might work better, but splashing out on that too the cost is going to rocket up. If you've got only a small amount of space, a far cheaper and probably more effective option is to buy or build some tiered staging and shove some pots, troughs or growbags on it (you can then also capitalise on the heat which usually leaches from the walls of Haringey's ropily insulated Victorian terraces!)
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Now if we just had some miniature Holstein cows we could inject the Whirligrow tubes with e.coli bacteria, then blame the pepinistas of Almeria's Mar Plastico for any mini-epidemic
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