IKEA Releases Free Growroom Vertical Garden Plans

IKEA continually proves itself to be one of the most environmentally-friendly companies on the planet. The Swedish home furnishings retailer introduced a hydroponic garden last year that allows you to grow fresh produce in your home without any soil or gardening experience, and the company ditched Styrofoam packaging for biodegradable packaging that you can actually put in your garden to nourish your plants.

IKEA releases open source plans for spherical garden

Growing your own food in an urban environment requires innovative solutions to make the best use of limited available space. One solution is the Growroom, a spherical DIY garden kit from Space10, “an external innovation hub for IKEA.” When fully assembled, the Growroom occupies under 27 cubic meters.

Space10 has made the plans for the Growroom available to anyone interested in building their own spherical garden. The project requires 17 sheets of plywood and access to a CNC milling machine. After the pieces are cut, assembly requires only a few basic tools, and the assembly instructions read much like those for any of IKEA’s flat-pack furniture kits.

The IKEA Growroom doesn’t come in a box but it does go together in 17 steps much the same way the company’s traditional products do. All it takes is some sheets of plywood, some screws, and a bunch of friends to put it all together. You might need to engage the services of a local carpentry shop to make sure the plywood gets cut correctly, but after that its really just a weekend project.

IKEA says

The Growroom can grow enough food to feed an entire neighborhood but is small enough to fit in your backyard. The garden’s plywood slices are designed to allow water and light to reach every level of the sphere. Space10 lab says,

“Local food represents a serious alternative to the global food model. It reduces food miles, our pressure on the environment, and educates our children of where food actually comes from. … The challenge is that traditional farming takes up a lot of space and space is a scarce resource in our urban environments.

“The Growroom …is designed to support our everyday sense of well being in the cities by creating a small oasis or ‘pause’ architecture in our high paced societal scenery, and enables people to connect with nature as we smell and taste the abundance of herbs and plants. The pavilion, built as a sphere, can stand freely in any context and points in a direction of expanding contemporary and shared architecture.”

There are already plans to build Growrooms in Helsinki, Taipei, Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco, according to a press release. If you are up to the challenge, the IKEA Growroom could bring local sustainably grown food right to your neighborhood.

If you’re interested in building your own Growroom, you can find the design on Space10’s site

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/growroom-ikea-garden_us_58a63e74e4b037d17d2654a4?

IKEA Growroom Is A DIY Sustainable Garden For City Dwellers