Rushing through a busy airport, you wouldn’t expect to see a lush green vegetable garden. But at Chicago’s O’Hare International, that’s exactly what you’ll find. In the airport’s rotunda, travelers can admire 26 vertical towers that house more than 1,000 plants and 44 varieties of vegetables, herbs, and leafy greens.
Replantable aims to be a hands-off modular indoor growing device for fresh homegrown produce, year-round. The future of fresh homegrown food may be an indoor one, at least in the cold season and for those without garden space, and although I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to gardening, it’s fairly obvious to me that there are plenty of situations where growing food indoors makes sense, even if it entails buying yet another plugged-in appliance.
“Ron Finley, a resident of South Los Angeles, received an arrest warrant for planting vegetables in front of his house. The city required he manage the property and this is how he chose to take care of it. His gardening group, Green Grounds, took a stand and created a petition and enough community support that
The Los Angeles Times highlighted his story, which went viral. Because of the global attention, the local city council revoked the warrant and changed city policy. Under the new law anyone can create a free gardens next to sidewalks.”
“As the sun rises, the glowing lights in the huge rooftop greenhouse dim. Here, lettuce never sleeps. It grows, quickly — much more quickly than it would in a farm field. And there is a lot of it, as well as other types of salad greens and herbs.
At nearly two acres, this greenhouse atop a soap factory in Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood is enormous. Its owners, New York-based Gotham Greens, claim there is no bigger rooftop greenhouse in the world.”
“What happens if war or global warming threaten the key plants that the world depends on for food? A consortium of scientists is running what it believes is an answer: a deep-freeze for thousands of seed samples that is meant to serve as a back-up to cope with the worst-case scenarios. The Global Seed Vault is buried inside a mountain on the Arctic islands of Svalbard and science editor David Shukman was allowed inside.”