Our Urban Food Garden - 2014 | Page 5 | Food Production and Preservation | Forums

31589 said:
Does anyone have any ground cherries to share?

If you are looking for seed to start from PM me your particulars and I can pull some seeds from our packet!

Christmas came early, and you are getting a bean wall!

Well technically a pea and bean wall, with some lettuce and chive at the bottom, but it does not have the same snap to the name.  Today was one of the first beautiful weekend days so my better half and I spent the afternoon in the garden.  This year I really wanted to build an additional trellis so our beans and peas could go as vertical as possible as well so to provide shade to a south western facing portion of our home.  By stacking these functions in space we are providing food as well as cooling.  Bill Mollison would be proud, and if Bill is proud so am I. 

Below is the site for our bean wall.  This wall faces south west, so it soaks up a ton of solar energy during the day and radiates that into the house.  Instead of using that solar energy to heat our home in the summer we decided to use it to grow food, and do so as vertical as possible.  The six feet between the glass block window and the utility pipe will become our trellis area.

Below you can see the area zoomed in a bit.  Note the trench in the sand that denotes where the water falls off the overhang.  To be as efficient as possible, and to respect water for the life giving resource it is, we will build our bed far enough off the house in order to capture this precious resource. 

 First I built our three side garden box out of some 1x6x6 cedar we picked up.  I attached stakes to the open sides to keep things from pushing inwards but promptly removed them as the hard packed back fill around the house made it impossible to pound them in. 

 Next I dug out the sand and gravel back fill around the house so I could put the bed in place as well as do a sort of double dig to break up the back fill below the bed.  I remove the first four to six inches of fill to later replace with top soil.