Garden Project Urban Sustainability

  After a year in, other gardeners took interest, and trellising began to appear. Suddenly experiments with squash, beans, peas and gourds were able to be supported by a handmade infrastructure. As you can see in this photo, everything became a skeleton in the winter months. It also allowed park users who shared our fence to see that grownups were doing something a bit different that involved growing food. While this is a photo of early days in the development of the garden, the low key optimism that this generated was something I cherished in winter months. 

  The idea of a modular unit has been in my thoughts since the beginning. I needed to find something that would grow a large yield on a small number of feet. The issue was that urban gardens often look compelling from a distance, but are “hobby projects” rife with vulnerability to squirrels and other rodent "gatherer" species, and vegetable growers are always at the mercy of so much exposure in city parks. Potential vandalism can occur and there are many further challenges around pests and damage. However, I wondered if a modular unit that was fenced in was a different container all together. I already knew work had been done on container gardens for balcony growers, but at 2 Phin I decided to upcycle and create a model that would move my idea forward. I went to work on a pair of barrel gardens, designed using models I could see online but never afford. Here I begin with a food-graded barrel that I picked up cheap with use of a friend's truck and then cut open to begin it