I'm at the Desert Numerique festival in France this week and here is a link (ongoing, adding more photos daily) of the hanging garden I'm building with Annemie Maes and Anna Allkaemper.
The project follows the design plans of the opensource project
windowfarms.org . Our version is a bit more freestyle and since its outside, we control a lot less elements, for example we don't test the PH of the water and we don't have a constant flow of water but rather periodic pumps to get the water into the top reservoir. Yesterday we got everything flowing but its dripping super fast, the reservoir was empty in 3 minutes. Now we're working to regulate the flow of drops, we want it to empty no faster than every 3 hours.
This is the second version I have made, following the one at the World Social Forum in Dakar in February.
It's interesting to see how people from the village here react, differently to the visitors in Dakar, as their gardening experience, conditions and needs are different. Everyone is interested in this kind of easy gardening, but I wonder if they will really build one and then connect to the online network. For me the online form on the Window Farms website has proved essential for improving my design and really for suceeding overall. The garden in Dakar is still alive, though it would go better with more regular watering and after 4 months I noticed that the plastic of both the bottles and the inner-tubes is starting to break down from the sun and the heat.
I hope we'll find someone here in St.Nazaire le Desert to adopt the farm after we leave on Sunday. Maybe the local school. Right now its hung on the side of the church in the town center, so maybe it could even stay there and some neighbours can just tend to it. We'll see...
more info on the festival:
http://desert.numerique.free.fr/2011/
