FOR OUR FIFTIETH BLOG ENTRY, we’ve thrown together a little slide show of images of living walls from around the world: Canada, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea. Just to clarify, these are not living walls that we at Green Apple have built ourselves, but installations built by others that we are impressed and inspired by. Coupled with the Living Walls FAQ that is linked to from the Green Apple Pie Living Walls page (just click on the “living walls” link in the masthead / navigation bar above), the slideshow should provide you with all the impetus you need to get psyched up about building a living wall in your own living room! So when you’re ready to go green, give Green Apple a call!
IT TURNS OUT THAT the Google van rolled through the East Beaches when we were working in the neighbourhood on Kingmount Park Road, and they caught us on film! You can easily identify the Green Apple truck, and even though the software censors have blurred their faces, you can still recognize John, Victor, and Carlos. Ha! Hey, what are you doing there? This isn’t a coffee break! Get back to work! I’m watching you! Just kidding, these guys are real hard workers. I’m sure that the in-house pixel-pushers at Google just Photoshop’d the heavy equipment out of John’s hands. Yeah, that’s it…
WHILE RESEARCHING THE TECHNOLOGIES that enable us to build living walls, I took a look at conservatories, glass greenhouses that are used to grow fresh vegetables. I didn’t think anything of them until a researcher that we were consulting with from the Department of Agriculture at the University of Guelph pointed their importance out to me. Two hundred years ago, prior to the invention of the steamboat, intensive intercontinental trade and economies of scale, some very rich Northern Europeans had home-grown pineapples and other sun-hungry sweet fruits — even in the dead of winter! If it’s possible to grow these kinds of luxury items without industrial technology, then we needed to take a long hard look at how they managed to do it. Surely we too can grow exotic tropical foods in our own time, as well!
GOOD GOING, PETER! Our main man took a test with the Landscape Ontario Horticultural Trades Association the other day, and received another plaque to hang up on the wall. This one reads Certified Horticultural Technician – Hardscape Installation. That means that he was evaluated by the North American industry standard in written and practical testing, and was designated as achieving expertise at the tasks required in the field by a qualified judge. I always knew that you were certifiable, Peter! And now I know, certifiably what! Congratulations…
AFTER FINISHING A THREE-ARTICLE focus on cob construction — building houses, other structures, and furniture out of earth — I began thinking about sod. Cottages are a literal scaping of the land into human habitation, terraforming the very earth into shelters; sod has been used for some of the same purposes here ion North America. The difference between the two is that cob is dry straw mixed into sub-soil, while sod is the first few inches of the topsoil, which contains the rhizomatic roots of the living grass that grows on top of it. So if we can include cob objects in our landscape designs, what’s possible in the way of sod structures?
