Yes, food grows on walls, rooftops, balconies

Don’t mind the mess,” says Eve Sibley, 34, moving a huge nearly done painting from the doorway as she swings open the door into the balcony of the tiny root-top apartment in Bangalore. “This is my greenhouse.” For now, adds the American, who wants to turn the world into one giant cross-pollinating ecosystem filled with food gardens.

“I know, I know,” she says, aware of the mud spilled all over the floor. It is just two weeks since Sibley, the artist-turned-activist food gardener began work on her next project — a “wall of salad” for Jagruthi, an NGO that helps street kids.

Rocket, brinjal, bell peppers and tomato seeds have sprouted tiny saplings already, and soon she would be planting them in special panels to be fixed on the walls. In a few months time, the organisation would have living, edible walls!

Sibley was an art student who felt the world could do with some changing when she began community work in Brooklyn. To the activist in her, urban food gardens were the perfect scheme to make the world a slightly better place to live in. “It’s perfect for cities with a space crunch. It’s more beautiful to look at, and it can feed you,” she says.

It is estimated that by the year 2050, close to 80 % of the world’s population will live in urban areas and the total population of the world will increase by 3 billion people. This would require a big leap in food productivity, an impossible scenario given the available agricultural land. “Vertical farms, if designed properly, may eliminate the need to create additional farmland and help create a cleaner environment,” says a 2009 report on urban agriculture, The Vertical Farm Project

Eve Sibley now masterminds World Food Garden, a project to help individuals grow small food gardens worldwide. “Given today’s inter-relationships between food transport, carbon emissions, and oil dependence, we believe that much of the world’s environmental and economic issues could be alleviated if everyone in the world tended their own small food garden.”

What’s the trick?
Getting the soil mixture right is the trickiest part. That’s where home composting comes in. However, urban gardens needn’t be all soil-based. “Vertical gardens can be soil-based, hydroponics (where nutrients are added to the water), and aquaponics (where the water is sourced from a tank with fish in it. The fish excreta give plants their nutrients),” Sibley says. Irrigation is then the tricky part.

“All a plant needs to grow is sunlight, water and nutrients, which can come from soil or through nutrient-injected water.”
Sibley is now planting on pre-built vertical vegetable garden panels made by ELT India Enterprise, a Pune-based venture by Pradeep Barpande who has been working in the field of horticulture since 1987. They call these panels “living walls”, which are easy to install and maintain. Each living wall panel has 45 angled cells which keep the soil and plants in.

The roots of the plants also spread throughout the panel, securing the plants in place. They are designed to allow water flow from cell to cell within each panel, and then from panel to panel in a complete wall.

If cities can change from being just consumers to producers of food, they would be contributing to sustainability, improved health and poverty alleviation too.