Permaculture Gardening at Focal Point Gallery – A Step by Step Guide to Creating A Self Watering Indoor Container Garden

Back in March 2016 I was approached by Focal Point in Southend on Sea, one of the most prestigious art galleries in the South Essex region, and asked if I could build ‘an indoor permaculture garden’ as part of the installation of ‘The Peculiar People’, an upcoming exhibition about ‘Radical Essex’ and its history….

“When do you need it by?” I asked.

“Well the exhibition opens in four weeks time” came the reply…

“Sure no problem”, says I, with fingers crossed behind my back and already working over-capacity with all the other projects and courses I’ve got on the go… So with plenty of blagging, scrounging, solutions thinking, googling, creative collaboration with Project 49 (a local hub for adults with learning disabilities where I work part time) and lots of co-operation and communication with the Focal Point tech team, we created a series of self-watering containers full of tomatoes, squashes, chard, basil, peppers and other herbs in time for the grand opening night, which until the beginning of July will be on display to the public in the gallery window…

The design for the actual containers is very simple, basically consisting of a series of two 80 litre plastic storage boxes, one inside the other, with a few holes drilled in it. The gap between the inner and outer boxes acts as a reservoir, whilst the inner box acts as the growing container, using osmosis to draw up water to the plant roots via a wick. These are then boxed in with pallet wood to give the display a ‘rustic’ appearance. The water butts at either end of the display are purely for ornamentation, and don’t serve a practical purpose other than being somewhere to hide left over compost and tools.

Considering the time frame involved, minimal costs (about £120 for the plastic containers, soil and plants mostly) and the general air of ‘winging it’, I think it looks pretty cool, and it’s a bit of an honour to be displaying work alongside the likes of Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher of Crass, Colin Ward, Ken Worpole, Eduardo Paolozzi, Allen Sorrell, Henri Chopin, Alfred Hitchcock and Christian Nyampetay to name but a few! And if it inspires passers by and visitors to maybe start to grow a few of their own healthy veggies in their own gardens and balconies, that’s got to be a good thing too! I’m also thinking in terms of this being a bit of a prototype for something more planned and ambitious next year… Who’s for a pop-up allotment in Southend’s Forum square and a containerised orchard in Victoria Circus by the station??? Maybe even Hundertwasser style vertical gardening up the sides of the Civic Centre???

Anyway, below is a step-by-step guide to how we did it…

Step 1; We drilled five 20mm holes and one 32mm hole in the bottom of one box. We took care when drilling not to push down too hard in order to avoid splitting the plastic.

Step 2; We gently pushed a 46cm length (sufficent that the end of the pipe will be a few cm above the level of the soil) of 32mm plastic waste piping through the widest hole. This will be the tube that will be used to fill the water reservoir at the bottom of the container.

Step 3; We then inserted 20cm lengths of old cotton towelling through the other holes. These will act as absorbent ‘wicks’ to draw water up from the reservoir to the plant roots.

Step 4; The prepared containers were placed inside the other containers of the same size. There is a gap at the bottom between the inner and outer container which will act as a reservoir space. We Filled the inner container with soil and compost, pulling up the towelling ‘wicks’ as we went so that they rise vertically about 8” into the compost. We blocked the watering tubes whilst filling the container in order to avoid accidentally getting compost into the reservoir.

Step 5; Once installed at Focal Point we carefully filled the reservoirs with water via the watering tube, using a funnel to avoid too much spillage.

Step 6; We planted up our boxes with an assortment of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, courgettes, chard, basil and other herbs.

Step 7; Finally we added a thick (approx 3”) layer of composted bark mulch to minimise evaporation and drying out from the soil surface.

And there you have it – All ready to go in time for the exhibition’s grand opening night! As I type the exhibition still has a couple of weeks to run. The plants have been watered only a few times, but have run riot, described by visitors as ‘a beautiful and lush green jungle’ as they sprawl beyond the confines of their containers in a most unruly Essex-like fashion!

This is an extract of what the Focal Point Gallery have to say about the exhibition:

The Peculiar People’ is an exhibition and event series tracing the history of ideological and social-political communal living experiments throughout the 20th Century to the present day. These include the pioneering industrial worker estates at East Tilbury and Silver End, as well as the many alternative ideological communities such as the Tolstoy-inspired anarcho-naturist colonies; each revealing Essex as a place where utopias were imagined, traditional ways of living were challenged and revolutionary politics, art, architecture and literature were born and flourished.

Graham Burnett

The Peculiar People exhibition runs at Southend’s Focal Point gallery until July 2nd 2016. Graham runs permaculture courses and is the author of Permaculture A Beginners Guide and The Vegan Book of Permaculture. Spiralseed are interested in other projects that explore the edges between art, permaculture, productive gardening and culture. If you are interested in working together with us please drop us a line!