Sunday, April 17, 2011

Living Strawberry Wall...

Living Strawberry Wall...
This was inspired by a thread on Simple Savings... Thanks for posting the question Aaron & inspiring me to have a go...
A few weeks ago I ordered 8 Strawberry "Joy" runners from Green Harvest with plans to plant them into a ½ a 44 gallon drum we found... Unfortunately I was so impressed with the way the Worms ate through the Horse manure compost that I turned it into another Worm farm leaving no place for the Strawberries until a came across the above Simple Savings thread...
I think vertical gardens are great idea.  We have grown Strawberries vertically, with limited success in the past, using 90mm PVC pipe in a Hydroponic garden we had many moons ago... I do think that this method of vertical growing will prove to be a much better way to grow in limited space & can't wait to harvest our 1st bowl of fruit...



We had most of the bits left over from other projects for the frame except for the zip ties...
We did have to buy a 15L bag of Vermiculite (Left), 3 x Coconut coir blocks (Right), & use 30L of potting mix we had under the house to fill the grow box as well as about 30L of our own Worm castings...
The Coconut Coir was soaked in a Seasol solution to help add nutrients into the mix...


Bellow is the estimated/invoiced prices...
2meters of chain $16.00
Zip ties $2.40
Vermiculite $14
Coconut Coir $8.50
30L Searles Premium potting mix  $14.00
8 Strawberries, "Joy" + delivery $16.45
1 Strawberry, "Pink" $4.00
 Grand total of..... $75.35 AU
At today's prices for Strawberries, $5.00 per 250g punnet (as seen the local Stupidmarkets), it works out that we need to harvest 3.77kg of fruit for the wall to pay for itself... May take a while but I am hopeful that it will pay for itself before December...
Will post walk through up date before Wednesday hopefully...

Have a great one...
 : )»

2 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed this post, found it fascinating in regards to how you went about building your wall. Will have to show it to hubby later too.

    Looking forward to when you do an update as to how its all progresses!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Whimsical... The next one will be a lot easier now... Will be posting updates in the walk through vids as I do them...
    Have a great one...

    ReplyDelete