This Sustainable House

This weekend we were blessed with the most incredible weather and it seemed a shame to waste it. It’ll be very cold all too soon!

So this weekend was spent pottering, doing a few homey things such as planting seeds, chopping wood and building strawberry towers. In fact, the strawberry towers are what this post is all about…

So what is a strawberry tower? Well in this case it is a length of PVC drain pipe (100mm diameter x 1400mn length) with a series of small holes drilled in the side (24 in all). The bottom of the tower is capped, the cap having drain holes drilled in it, and the top is hung by chain from the verandah fascia.

The strawberry crowns are planted in the holes, into enriched potting mix, and are watered by a central ‘weep’ line down the centre. The top section, where the chain joins the pipe, is then filled with clean straw to minimise evaporative losses.

The concept is that the strawberries grow against the clean PVC outer, allowing one to just pick and eat. They are also at an easy height for picking without bending, are kept free of the ground and therefore snails and slugs, and take up very little floor space (the strawberries are growing in the vertical space like a vine). In fact there is still room beneath for a pot of herbs, say mint, which cab collect the drainage water from the tower.

This concept of ‘stacking’ is very important in all permaculture designs as it allows us to significantly increase the yield from all available space. For example, if I planted the strawberries in the garden (using the same area of about 30cm diameter) then I’d have room for 5 plants yielding about 1.75Kg of strawberries (~7 punnets). However by planting the strawberries in the vertical plane I have managed to squeeze in 24 plants which should yield about 8.4kg of strawberries (~33 punnets) AND a herb crop such as mint from the pot underneath. All up this is an increase of yield of over 400% which is just phenomenal.

A fact sheet detailing the design/construction of these pots will be available on the Green Phoenix Permaculture website in the next few weeks, so if you are interested in creating some strawberry towers then head over to there.

UPDATE

Today I noticed a ‘fault’ with the irrigation system. Essentially the piece of ‘weep hose’ which watered the towers has failed leaving the plants dry, and some dying. Unfortunately I think I’ll lose about 6 crowns due to the failure, but they can be replaced.

I had honestly thought that this might be a problem, the chance of the tubing clogging with small particles was always pretty high. As a result the ‘back up plan’ was to place a dripper in the top of the tower, and let gravity do the work. So that’s exactly what I have done… I’ll let you know how it gets on.

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