Make your own Green Wall

Ever since I saw a show Botanist, artist and creator of the Vertical Garden, Patrick Blanc on TV I have been fascinated by green walls, vertical gardens, green roofs, living walls – whatever you like to call them. Patrick Blanc the original inventor of the vertical garden was here in Sydney this month launching his new and tallest project Treo on a residential building in preparation for his other more ambitious green wall project in Australia.

Generally, I struggle to keep anything alive myself (no natural green thumb), but the thought of being able to grow your herbs on the kitchen wall, create a green space in a store or hotel or commercial property, adds a really earthy mood to an otherwise sterile or blank surface and can apparently boost productivity by 12%! My Cloudland post urged me to further investigate green walls and write a post on the topic:

General Pants - Melbourne

Accenture – Pyrmont by the Greenwall Company

Gazebo Wine Bar – the first green wall built in Australia by Ed Wharburton from Greenwall Australia.

Apparently they cost between $900 - $1800 per metre to have them custom made which sounds a little on the high end – I read somwehere the Gazebo Greenwall estimated to have cost around $23,000 – probably not everyone’s budget. 3-4 story high walls could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

OK – lets start small, ELT, a US based sustainable garden company has DIY kits for as low as US$395. The ones I like best are from gro-wall and they are sold by Lushe for around $250 per kit. These look simplest to me.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN GREENWALL??

Watch this video of a guy from NY building his own:

Just to make it clear, I am NO gardening expert and have never done this before. I spoke to my mate Damon who is a commercial landscaper for Coordinated Landscapes and he reckons as long you you find a DIY type product it is doable. They use a company called Elmich but he thinks they might be a little expensive  but check out this video, makes it sound like quite a DIY system. The main thing he says is to get the irrigation right – especially if it is a north facing garden because there is not a lot of soil in a green wall and it doesn’t stay as moist as the garden. He reckons you can get cheap irrigation products from Bunnings and set that bit up quite easily perhaps with a tray at the bottom to collect the water and a small pump to move the water up. Also, food and plants can be mixed together eg. strawberries, herbs, tomatoes etc.

Here is some great information to help you create your own if you are brave enough to give it a whirl!

Check out this video.

Read a lot of information on the topic eg. Lushe Urban Gardening has some good DIY info and ideas for green walls, Gardening Tips tries to improvise, check out how Nick in NY made one on his apartment wall and other posts.

Other interesting posts: Inhabitat Green Roofs,  Read this SMH article, Green Roofs Australia, ELT.

I would love to create my own but will need some help (hopefully Damon will give me a hand) and if we go down this path I’ll be sure to blog my progress. In the meantime, if you want a quick and easy version, why not this crazy idea?

If anyone has created their own green wall I would love to hear about how easy/hard it was and how you went about it.