VG Products

The Garden Stick Vertical Gardening Tower

Posted by Max on Feb 23, 2013 in Urban, VG Products, Videos | 0 comments

Vertical Farming Technology Comes to the Backyard Garden or Urban Patio

The Garden Stick came about as a means to efficiently grow strawberries for a large u-pick farm, the Fuller’s Farmers Market in Davie, Florida, which is located just outside Ft. Lauderdale.

This 66″ tall vertical planter, with space for 14 plants, and taking up only 2 square feet, worked so well in their growing operation, the decision was made to sell it to the general public as well as other commercial growers. Nor is it limited to strawberry production, a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, herbs and ornamentals can be grown with it, a list of some among these is available further on into this article.

To give you a look at the Garden Stick in actual use, I’ve embedded a video from the itinerant John Kohler, a noted raw foodist and gardener from Northern California, came across the farm on one of his road trips, and as he so often does, he just had to stop in at Fuller’s, take a look and record a video of what he found:

As seems to be the case so often, John became a raw foodist due to various health problems, including a life-threatening bout of spinal meningitis. He so strongly believes in growing his own food, he converted his entire back and front yards to gardening areas, primarily raised beds, and he made it his mission in life to help others grow their own food and to spread the word about the benefits of eating a raw food diet.

Whether you share his ideas on what constitutes the best human diet or not, he has made a prodigious number (>750) of videos on various aspects of gardening, and has become a great resource for the home gardener. No matter what aspect of gardening piques your interest, it is likely John has made one or more videos about it.

Installation and Dimensional Specifics for an Actual Garden Stick Planter

Below, another video shows you how to set up a Garden Stick planter unit, and lists some of the options and specs for the various models it comes in – just hit the read more button below to see the rest of this article.

The GSky Smart Wall Cabinet Planter

Posted by Max on Nov 16, 2012 in VG Products | 0 comments

Vancouver, BC based GSky, a noted designer, consultancy and installer of large-scale vertical interior (see the image at left of the Whole Foods, NC installation) and exterior living walls has come up with a new product they call The Smart Wall Cabinet.  This new addition to their line of products gives the buyer a self-contained vertical garden wall unit geared to use in residential and office interior environments, at a price affordable to those whose garden wall ambitions may well exceed their limited financial means or budget.

Live Screen Indoor Vertical Garden Graces BMWi Born Electric Tour NYC Venue

Posted by Max on Nov 8, 2012 in Indoor, Urban, VG Products | 0 comments

A 20′ indoor vertical hydroponic garden spanning two floors will adorn the NYC exhibition hall  for the BMWi Born Electric Tour November 14-18. A super-sized sculptural version of Danielle Trofe Design’s Live Screen hydroponic system will liven the introduction of the BMWi Concept Spyder hybrid car and the fully-electric BMWi Concept car in what constitutes the North American debut for these carbon-fiber-based vehicles.

The Born Electric Tour began in Rome in June, 2012, and continued on to Dusseldorf and Tokyo before its arrival in New York City. BMWi paired up with local designers and businesses in each city the tour enters with an eye on presenting a motif focused on the idea of sustainability and future mobility. The Live Screen self-watering system allows the indoor gardener to grow various vegetables, herbs and decorative plants, a mating of hydroponics and beautiful design.

If you will be in the NYC area during the Tour’s run, and would like to attend, here are the particulars:

For more information about Live Screen, see our earlier post on the Live Screen growing system.

Faux Bois and Vertical Gardening

Posted by Max on Jul 7, 2012 in VG Products | 1 comment

If you have never heard the term “Faux Bois” before, it refers to the art of constructing cement-based structures specifically designed to mimic  the appearance of the branches, trunks and occasionally leaves of trees. A steel framework is put together by cutting, bending and welding steel to the desired shape. Cementaceous layers of concrete, mortar and grout are then applied over the framework which is then colored, sculpted and worked to produce an end-result that looks very much like real wood. Almost all faux bois  creations adorn gardens or parks in one fashion or another.

Live Screen: Indoor Vertical Gardening Using Hydroponics

Posted by Max on Jun 27, 2012 in Indoor, VG Products | 0 comments

Live Screen is designer Danielle Trofe’s sleek, modular, elegant, and beautiful solution to growing your own year-round indoor garden, a solution derived from ideas developed from the crude (but cheap and usable),  recycled plastic bottles based WindowFarms DIY hydroponic system project, a true case of a sow’s ear spun into a silk purse.

The video and pictures below demonstrates this (click on the “Read More” button below) :

Living Walls the Urbio Way

Posted by Max on May 3, 2012 in Indoor, VG Products | 0 comments

Sleek design, sturdy support, modular, easy and clean to use or water: all terms that apply to a new product from Urbio indoor gardeners will love, but what really caught my eye was the use of rare earth metal you would only expect to come across in the technical specs of the latest 2 gigabyte hard drive or NASA’s newest Mars rover: neodymium.

Who’d have thunk it! Gardening with neodymium.

Urbio Now Available on Amazon

Shipments of Urbio have finally started rolling in, and you can check pricing :  Urbio On Amazon

Where do I find pumice for my Urbio planters? Try Black Gold 12-Quart Pumice Soil

Well, in a stroke of genius, designers Beau Oyler and  Jared Aller, that’s who. The two came up with a design and obtained financing for product development and tooling through Kickstarter.com, a platform for crowd sourced funding for artistic and innovative projects.

Mounting shelves, planters , and wire hangers have all been used for ages, but Urbio employs neodymium, alloys of which number among the strongest magnets known, to attach containers of various sizes and shapes to powder-coated modular steel plates mounted via brackets to the wall. Neodymium is embedded into the back section of each container in a form that mates to special indentations molded  into the steel plates. In the video below, Beau demonstrates the Urbio system: