Vancouver Company “Patch” Brings Urban Gardening Inside the Home
Patch enables local organic fresh herbs and vegetables all year long with a winning self watering container system that flat packs for easy storage, and ships with a light carbon footprint.
By Claudia Chan
Scout Magazine
Oct 18, 2012
Excerpt:
Patch Planters is an urban agriculture initiative that allows you to grow edible greens and culinary herbs both outdoors and indoors. I like to think of it as a miniature DIY (do-it-yourself) farming concept. It’s a simple, transportable, wholly versatile container box that produces greens just about anywhere – on your windowsill, tabletop, porch, or in your kitchen, classroom, even your office.
Kent Houston, the director of the Vancouver-born company, came up with the idea when his landscape contracting company volunteered with the building of the first SoleFood Farm site at Hastings and Hawks a few years ago. From his experience there, he recognized an opportunity to provide a solution for urban agriculture efforts – a portable container system that would last longer and offer more functional qualities. Instead of using traditional planters that require a lot of wood, eventually biodegrade and go to the landfill, he opted to design a compact planter box that’s fully recyclable made with Tyvex and 60% post-consumerist materials.
Patches come with a built-in sub-irrigation system. In other words, it self-waters.
2 comments
The Patch is made out of a synthetic plastic called Tyvek. It’s a DuPont product. Does anybody know whether it’s food safe? Is there is any potential for it to leech into the garden?
Hi, Tyvek is a HDPE material which is completely inert. There is potential for toxins to be leached into the soil, water, or plants. The original attempts to design this product wanted to avoid the use of plastic, but all organic material would degrade to quickly. So once it was accepted that plastic had to considered we looked for ways to use as little plastic as possible. Tyvek was the optimal material given our range of options.
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