permaculture

[Katherine Steele <kat@steelemoon.com>]

Title: Re:  Permaculture Apartment

Hello Fellow Permies-

This info is mostly about food but there are some other gems on this site. Cardboard furniture http://www.journeytoforever.org/edu_cardboard.html#armchair and  my favorite is the Toyota Corolla Garden...they call it "creative conversion of parking places".
http://huizen.dds.nl/~autotuin/autogarten.html

~Kat Steele
Urban Permaculture Guild
Oakland, CA

http://www.journeytoforever.org/garden_con.html

No ground? Use containers

Bushbeans in a special square foot basket, light and easy to carry -- ideal for schools with no grounds to start gardening projects. You can grow plants in virtually anything that holds some soil and has holes in the bottom for drainage. It's only bounded by your imagination -- a chance for some really creative recycling.

We use old bathtubs, 20-litre plastic containers with the tops cut off, baskets of various sizes lined with garbage bags to hold the water in, milk cartons for seedlings, anything that comes to hand. We almost used some dumped toilet bowls, only we didn't like the color (pink).

-- "You can raise a surprising amount of food on your roof, deck, patio or windowsill. The rewards can be large, even if your space is small" -- Chuck Crandall and Barbara Crandall, "Movable Harvests"

Growing columns --  Grow a pillar of vegetables -- 12 square feet of growing area on only 1.2 sq ft of ground.  http://www.journeytoforever.org/edu_cardboard.html#column

Windowbox.com -- all the information and supplies you need to grow flowers, vegetables, and herbs in any container on your porch, deck, terrace, patio, or windowsill. Good resources and advice, expert-system answers plant questions, site search.
http://www.windowbox.com/

Harvesting sweet potatoes from a bathtub
GardenGuides' Container Gardening Guide Sheets are a useful source of instant information: 21 different guides. The two-page basic Guide to Container Gardening covers Choosing containers, Growing mixture, Sunlight, Fertilizer, Watering, What to grow? on the first page, while the second page deals with vegetables: common vegetables listed with type of container and recommended variety, linked to references on each vegetable covering types, conditions, maintenance and harvest, pests, recipes and useful links. The website has hundreds of other guides on all aspects of gardening, and further resources. 
Guide to Container Gardening:
http://www.gardenguides.com/TipsandTechniques/container.htm
Guide to Container Gardening (Page 2):
http://www.gardenguides.com/TipsandTechniques/container2.htm



> Today's Topics:
> 
> 1. Permaculture Apartment (Charles Knoles)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 00:38:07 -0500
> From: Charles Knoles <charles@growfood.org>
> Subject: [permaculture] Permaculture Apartment
> To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.0.20030607001718.00a17e30@sidemail.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
> 
> Hey Y'all
> 
> Russ Grayson raised a question a while back about how to do permaculture in 
> urban settings like apartments and such.  I thought it was an interesting 
> design challenge but it got lost in the mix with the recent drama.  I've 
> been thinking about it and I thought maybe we could all throw in our two 
> cents worth about how it might be done.
> 
> There's at least two types of situations that we could think 
> about.  Firstly an apartment that has already been built that an urban 
> permy moves into. Therefore windows are not necessarily aligned to the sun, 
> conventional trash disposal procedure, flush toilet etc.
> 
> The second situation is where an apartment is designed from scratch to 
> be permacultural, sky's the limit, dream away! Let's assume though that 
> there isn't any growing space around the base of the apartment building.
> 
> Russ said something like: "don't assume it's all about food".  Russ, can 
> you expand on that so we know what other things you were referring to?
> 
> On the other hand if there are cool ways to make food in that 
> circumstance, all the better. --> Raising guinea pigs for meat, fed on 
> mushrooms perhaps????
> 
> Peace Out
> Charlie Knoles
>