by Gisli
Construction Materials – Synthetic vs Natural
1:57 pm in Materials and Resources by Gisli
I’m new to this and have yet to make my own windowfarm; born, bred and living in Reykjavik, Iceland. The idea of using my time and resources to grow my own vegetables, greens and fruit is very exciting to me.
But after researching the articles here a little, there is one BIG thing bugging me about the whole thing. Why use all those synthetic materials to grow food? Why not try to design a system that uses natural materials like glass, wood etc. as much as possible? Best would be to use only natural materials, of course! Don’t know if that is practical though.
What are your suggestions and ideas on this issue? I would love to get some feedback on the use of natural materials only.
See this post
http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/11/27/toxic-window-gardens-pete-dehp/
It links to other posts on the subject.
The problem with natural products is they are difficult to work with in a lot of cases; ie glass. James Nutter has a few glass farms, but not everyone can cut glass the way he does…
I think you might be able to use porous baked clay pots or something like the old baked clay drainage pipes. They are “nearly” natural and they might be porous enough to let air in. A thing I have in mind is mixing hydrated lime (building material, and linen (you grow the flax, break the stems and harvest the fiber) and make long or tall light-weight pots from that mixture. So you end up with limestone pots that have natural fiber reinforcement. I have no clue how good it would be. (should be fairly lightweight). You could pour the mixture into forms. Limestone is a buffer to keep the ph at a certain figure and it is a plant nutrient too. Usually contains lots of calcium and magnesium but I don’t know the proportions of the 2 minerals. I do know that some hydrated lime has different proportions than other types. Brian
I just posted a link to this video elsewhere, but I am posting it here as well in hopes you might find it useful. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but if it works as well as it seems then everyone can easily cut glass bottles for use in their farms.
This is an excellent method for cutting glass bottles. I can’t wait to try it out; looks very promising. Thanks Jennifer.
What about coconut mesh http://www.ehydroponics.com/?action=product_list&cid=166
I’m going to make mine with glass bottles since we don’t buy plastic water bottles ever. We have loads of olive oil bottles though. Exciting