Introducing the "Wine and Dine" Bottle Garden: Recycled Wine Bottles with Dinner Herbs (and a Side of Art) UPDATED TWICE

So I see these Grow Bottles (where the top of a cut wine bottle is inverted to create a hydroponic growing system) for 35 bucks and, remembering I had a bottle cutter when I was a teen, I wonder if I can make something like this.  I look online (where cutting a bottle in this way is something many people have done) and find a bottle cutter (just $25, and eco, to boot!), and then hint to the family that that would make a nice holiday gift.  After receiving it, I ask a few friends to save wine bottles for me.  One owns a restaurant.  Another runs with a wine-tasting crowd.  The bottles start coming in cases. 

So this idea starts growing, that maybe we could figure out how to make something like this (I purposely don't read exactly how Grow Bottle does it so that our system is not a copy of it), sell them, and raise money for micro-grants for food pantry clients to start their own gardens at home (about which friends of mine and I have been talking since our community garden opened two years ago--we already started a separate garden specifically for them so they can harvest every single week when they come to pick up food at a local church food pantry), or to fund that beautiful little garden that miraculously provides fresh food to about 20 families each week, even when it looks like it's been picked to death.  Somehow it always provides.  Here is a photo from this week, in January, for goodness sake.

So I spend a solid month trying to create a prototype, with many emails back and forth to my friends Bob and Angela, who both have bottle cutters now, too, and to Nicole, who is as insatiably curious as I am and is a terrific researcher.  I burn myself.  I cut myself.  I break many, many bottles, with a zero success rate of a clean cut.  I keep at it, goggles on, teeth clenched.  I view online videos.  I switch methods.  I get better at applying just the right pressure during the scoring process.  I pour boiling water slowly, slowly, slowly, and start to know when it's time to stop (if I pour too long or too fast, stress fractures appear).  I even pray a little.  And finally, finally, it works.  I scream and run around the house pronouncing this.  And then more of them (but not all of them) work.  I'm only at a 33% success rate, but I'm heading in the right direction.

I see hydroponic systems use little clay balls, which cost something like $50 for a bag.  I don't have $50 for hydroponic clay balls.  I live in Georgia.  I have red clay outside my door.  I make clay balls. 

I ask the local grocery store manager where I can find food-safe string, and he gives me 50 feet of thick butcher string for free.  I rig a wicking system, anchored by a clay ball in each bottle (I'm up to seven bottles now). 

After painting flowers on the front of the bottles, I realize they'd be way cooler if really good artists, professional artists, painted them instead, and I start thinking about who to ask right about when an artist friend of mine, Nancy, volunteers, and the church's food pantry leaders, Kathy and Mary Louise, tell me they have a big artist community and an upcoming art retreat at which they'll try to recruit more artists.  I get another idea, a big idea, but I don't act on it . . . yet. 

I plant herbs that I uproot from my home garden (lemon balm, cilantro, peppermint, and spearmint are all growing right now, with oregano just a week or two away) and tuck them in with county compost.  

I fill the "bottle reservoir" with water and some organic liquid fertilizer to provide nutrients to the plant via the wicking system (or at least that's the theory).  

I recruit people (Bob, Angela, Nicole, Mary Louise, Kathy, Page, Rebecca) to be "foster parents" to these prototypes and start to deliver them, with the simple instructions to see if growth appears healthy, if the water seems like it needs weekly changing, and if anything "funky" starts to grow anywhere in the system.  In the meantime, a team of six people in less than 12 hours have volunteered to "de-label" cases of bottles (and I get in trouble for using the community garden Google group to ask for volunteers since this is not a "board-approved" project--ouch.  Lesson learned while pouring boiling water--know when to stop).  I quickly relocate the project "home" to the church where the food pantry garden exists, and instead of having the bottles delivered to the community garden, I arrange for them to be left there to be picked up.

And now I wait.  I wait for clean bottles.  I wait for results of the foster parent/prototype test.  I wait for oregano.  And I wait to see, as always, what else is possible?

UPDATE: The first de-labeled bottles arrive and I can cut a deeper "grow space" as a result, which seems to be an improvement (see comparison in photo between 1.0 cut and 2.0 cut).  Plus, I start cutting bottles with stress fractures below the fracture (hence, recycling the recycled bottle) to create vases, which we'll fill with fresh cut herbs for sale as well. 

I have created a separate site specifically for this project as I think it's going to have a life of its own. 

My dream?  People all over the world do this as well to raise money for vegetable gardens at food pantries in their communities and micro-grants for food pantry clients to start their own gardens at their homes.

UPDATE 1/25/12: The first prototype results are back and they reveal some, shall we say, flaws in the system.  See details (and next steps) here.

Introducing the "Wine and Dine" Bottle Garden: Recycled Wine Bottles with Dinner Herbs (and a Side of Art) UPDATED TWICE

Metamorphoses (Arts, Urban Spaces, Lives) UPDATED

I sat there transfixed, beside a 4,000-gallon pool on a stage at the school where my older daughter attends.  She appeared as several characters in this high school's performing arts magnet's production of the Tony Award-winning play, Metamorphoses, which is a contemporary retelling of eight classic Greek myths.  As "Hunger," she transformed so completely that it was frightening (and sort of ironic considering I just published a book titled Food for My Daughters).  She and her fellow cast members (such as those pictured, which is from the program's cover) embodied a total of more than 100 characters, many of whom dissolved seemingly-magically in the pool, which acted as its own character in truly shocking ways throughout the production.  In two-hours time, an endless number of "metamorphoses" occurred, including mine. 

Hunger.  Hunger.  I keep thinking of Hunger.  Insatiable hunger was a curse placed on a character, which ultimately led to his tragic demise.  And yes, hunger engulfs thousands of us close to home and around the world every single day. 

Yet . . . .

This week alone I saw three examples of what is possible: 

1. Repurposed shipping containers that are capable of growing more than an acre and a half of lettuces in 48' x 8' at a business named PodPonics.

2.  A year-old inner-city urban farm that is feeding stomachs, minds, hearts, and souls.

Upper left: Uri; Bottom left: Fred

David Skoke, Don Converse, Bob Lundsten, Robert Wittenstein

3.  And an unloved, unused piece of land for which I've been, yes, hungry, for over two solid years now that, unbeknownst to me, was a mere hour away from being ready (thanks to a great team of guys who helped me) for cultivation by the middle school class that will now resume coming to the community garden after completing their previous project (which doubled the size of the food pantry donation effort) (see The Exciting Return of Open Garden).  The row (two 40' rows end-to-end, actually), coincidentally, is the exact same square footage as the growing space in one recycled shipping container (we had marked it off several weeks ago, before I visited PodPonics). 

As I sat in one of the 170 seats around the pool right on the stage, I heard the narrator say these words, as my daughter appeared, her hair covering her face wildly, her costume ragged, her body contorted:

There is a place in far-off Scythia.  Nothing grows there, no wheat, no grass, no trees.  There you will find, huddling together, Cold, Fear, and Gaunt Hunger.

Driving home, my mind swirling, I though of the food we have coaxed from the land over which we've served as stewards: our home garden, our community garden plots, the food pantry garden at the church, the school gardens. 

I thought of the gritty piece of parking lot where affordable, pesticide-free local lettuce for chefs and retail sale now grow (with an expansion to eight condemned acres under way, right under the flight paths of planes leaving the world's busiest airport). 

I thought of the site of an old housing complex, now serving as home to four acres of food right in the shadow of the King Center for Nonviolent Change (this photo shows the contrast between now and almost exactly a year ago), where every time I go a new expansion patch is being planted. 

Photo from 9/09. I have taken at least 100 similar photos

And I thought of a "back row" that was there, always, waiting for us, just waiting, patiently.

And I wondered, yet again, what else is possible.  How else can we satiate the hunger of humanity?  How else can we change--how else can we morph--for the better?

UPDATED:  1/20/12: Here is a segment filmed by the local NBC affiliate about the play (complete with pool).

Metamorphoses (Arts, Urban Spaces, Lives) UPDATED