The Windowfarms Project

The ways and forms of gardening and farming are abundant. Vertical gardening (link, link, link, link, link, video, video), 3-D barrel gardening (video), old-tire gardening (video, video), roof-top gardening (link, link), square-foot gardening (link, link, link, book), indoor gardening (link, link), ... and now window gardening. Conceptually, window farming is not new, it is just a specific application of vertical farming. It uses indoor gardening technology, combines it with vertical gardening ideas and geographically moves it to the window to take advantage of sun light. The way of communicating and spreading the idea of window farming is open source at its best. It is a grass root movement, and instead of just spreading the idea, people got together, tried various designs, and put together a design kit of the best known reliable solution. In other words, they went one step up in the food chain (pun intended). The second step up is that the the idea was taken commercial and pre-packaged parts kits are now on sale for do-it-yourself home assembly. It has received a lot of public exposure lately. It was on national public radio. The key idea is outlined in this brief video. The official Windowfarms Project site is less than 1 year old, but already people around the globe are imitating, copying and reusing the idea, applying it and and feeding improvements back. A tiny window farming community and ecosystem has been created. People blog about it. And the easiest way of telling that it is becoming a success is that the term "Windowfarms" has now been trademarked.