MEETING THE URBAN GARDEN DEMAND

The urban food garden is no longer just for the penny-pinchers. These days, people from all walks of life are adopting ‘kitchen gardening’ as a lifestyle marker. The trend is here to stay, with productive green spaces now deliberately integrated into residential, commercial and public developments. Landscapers need to provide solutions to service the demand from domestic, commercial and local government clients.

The professional landscaper continually scans the market to find more efficient, innovative solutions for their client projects. Because urban food gardening occurs in such a variety of contexts and on different scales, landscapers also need to connect the right product with client’s particular needs.

As city populations escalate, dwellings become smaller, private backyards disappear and communal resources are prioritised. This shift has redefined the way people can grow and access their own food. Available garden space is often limited to modest footprint areas such as balconies, rooftops and common grounds. Using wall space is often the only option for growing a kitchen garden.

Martin Kellock Pots & Planters' Vicinity Greenwall is the only vertical garden that is fully scalable from a 20-plant wall right up to large installations spanning 10m wide by 6m high. The system enables landscapers to offer clients a productive, low-maintenance vertical garden scalable to any size space. With as few as 20 pots, a tap and a simple irrigation system, you can have a domestic client up and running with their own kitchen garden in a couple of hours.

With offsite pre-planting of pots the system can be deployed rapidly, taking one person only four hours to build an eight-square metre wall. This is the only greenwall system with a substantially reduced installation workload, making your business more efficient and profitable.

As the most flexible and easy-to-maintain vertical garden system on the market, Vicinity Greenwall presents landscapers with a plethora of new business opportunities.

Local councils - Greater funding is being channeled into designing and building shared green spaces, including streetscapes and community gardens which are valued as a hub to bring locals together. Communal gardens seek to maximise planting areas to increase harvest volume and community involvement. Vicinity Greenwall can achieve this effortlessly and can even be installed around poles and pylons to make use of otherwise wasted vertical space.

Schools - Many primary schools have established kitchen garden programs, but consistent maintenance can be a problem. Vicinity Greenwall’s easy tank irrigation system recycles water through the plants, ensuring thriving edibles for the kids to harvest in every season. Dedicated ground space isn’t required as the product can be mounted to existing building walls.

Residential common areas - Beyond the qualities of improved wellbeing and aesthetics, introducing vertical gardens to rooftops, common yards and thoroughfares can give apartment residents unprecedented access to urban kitchen gardens.

Retail and commercial – Restaurants, hotels and cafes can grow food for use on their menu in a space-efficient, low-maintenance manner.

Institutional – Places where in the past only decorative garden beds might have been considered, can now be turned over to food-producing green walls as a way of serving communities. This could include police stations, correctional centres, universities and libraries.