Home Gardening Just Got Greener!
Utah Company uses Recycled Plastic and New Technologies to “Green-Up” the Gardening Experience.D’Vine Designs of Salt Lake City markets on its website,
www.GardensUp.com , a system for growing a highly productive vegetable or melon garden in a yard or patio area as small as four feet by four feet. As implied in the website name, its customers cultivate a vertical garden. Garden vines are guided upward to fill to the top a seven-foot-high structure and bear suspended fruit and vegetables that are then harvested at eye level.
It seems environmentally “green” enough that their garden system minimizes the wasting of water and fertilizer, and allows people who may have very little space for a garden to grow some of their own food, but beginning March 9, 2007, the D’Vine Designs vertical garden structure, the ”Harvest Highrise,” is being manufactured using primarily recycled plastic.
“Our company has always used recycled materials where possible,” says Steve Townsend, D’Vine Designs co-founder, “and now the structure itself is made primarily of recycled PVC plastic. This is great news as we are able to pass this savings on to our customers, but it also makes our product more environmentally friendly.”
Mr. Townsend also speaks of using recycled plastic when manufacturing what he calls the “Hook & Hammock” suspension systems used by vertical gardeners. “Many of our customers use their vertical garden to grow melons, squash or pumpkins, and our suspension system cradles a heavy watermelon, cantaloupe, butternut squash, etc. in midair until it is picked at perfect ripeness,” he boasts.
The Harvest Highrise structure is now manufactured using primarily recycled plastic thanks to a new manufacturing technology called co-extrusion. As this structural tubing is being extruded from a locomotive-size machine, two extrusions are taking place simultaneously, creating a tube with an outer shell of furniture-grade material for a beautiful exterior appearance, color and UV resistance, and the remaining wall thickness of recycled plastic. The miracle is that the finished tube is tested to be as strong as if made of 100% furniture-grade material.
The D’Vine Designs website,
www.GardensUp.com , is worth viewing, even for non-gardeners. It is rich in colors, a slideshow, a gallery and other gorgeous graphics. There is also a wealth of useful gardener techniques and thought-provoking prose regarding ones participation in and partnership with nature. A favorite GardensUp page ventures into the meaning of a “green thumb,” and another tells how use of their Soil Warming System may extend one’s growing season by several weeks to ensure a harvest before fall’s first frost.
All in all, D’Vine Designs with its website and vertical gardening system seems intent on awakening us to new possibilities for greening of our lifestyles. Oh, and yes, to elevating our “joy of gardening to new heights.”
