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acqua garden
Harvest festival Your table will groan under the bounty you can grow in the Acqua Tower, a modular, vertical, self-irrigating garden that’s the brainchild of former London lawyer Jonathan Martin. Text: Abby Trow
Pictured above: Acqua Garden uses a coir growing material, provided in the kit Left: Acqua Garden is modular and can be set at a height of 3ft up to 5ft. The base of the product is filled with water which is pumped up to the top of the tower so it cascades down through it to water the plants.
Interest in gardening, or more particularly interest in helping people with limited space to garden, is, thankfully growing as fast as grass and ivy do in summer. Whether it’s prettier pots for indoor and outdoor plants, herbs for the windowsill or hydroponic LED kits so you can grow herbs and salad leaves on your kitchen table, it’s good to see that the garden sector is acknowledging that far more of us have little to no outside space than have rolling lawns and abundant herbaceous borders at our disposal. And the recent quarantine conditions we’ve been living under as governments struggle to get the corona virus under control has seen a rise in people interested in growing their own fruit, veg and herbs - in part because they want to go into shops as little as possible. Enter a man who can help turn wishful thinking into reality. He’s former corporate lawyer Jonathan Martin, who became so entranced with growing his own chillies and tomatoes in particular (not to mention strawberries, lettuces and flowers) that he used his ingenuity and design skills to develop a self-contained urban
garden small enough to fit on balconies, patios, in handkerchief back yards and even in a kitchen albeit you would need a reason able-sized one. ‘I love gardening and growing things, always have,’ says Jonathan. ‘I am interested in eating fresh foods and having a healthier diet, as well as cutting my carbon footprint, so I got to thinking about how great it would be if there were a way for people who don’t have much space or experience of gardening to grow lots of food for themselves.’ (And he means plenty, not just two small strawberries and a lettuce..) ‘So I set about designing an easy to use, all-in-one garden system that keeps itself watered. We now have the Acqua Garden, which is for everyone - kids to older people and people in wheelchairs or with disabilities who often feel excluded from gardening.’ Watering Crucial to Acqua Garden’s appeal is that you don’t need to water your crops every day. That’s because the base of the system is a reservoir you fill with water approx every three weeks. In it is a
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