A maze of deliciousness
February 23, 2020 3:44 AM   Subscribe

The romance, the practicality, the energy efficiency: the fruit wall. Or, how one grows peaches in Northern France and the Low Countries during the little ice age. Come for the low tech, stay for the romance of wandering a warm orchard.
posted by dame (16 comments total) 61 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks for sharing this article, it was really fascinating.

It's a bit like the heat island effect of cities but localized.
posted by nolnacs at 6:29 AM on February 23, 2020


This is so neat.
My yard backs up to the neighbor's, which is a good fifteen feet higher than mine, thanks to New England ledge. There's a masonry wall for most of that height. Now I'm eyeing it and thinking about a passive solar greenhouse.
I mean, the vegetable garden is already right there...
posted by Adridne at 6:34 AM on February 23, 2020


Oh man there was a BBC documentary about Victorian gardens that spoke about these (and grape storage techniques that would keep them fresh for months on end via special bottles/cutting techniques) but I don't remember it.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:46 AM on February 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


I spent some of my teenage years working in alternative farming, especially with some permaculture people, and there's a **LOT** to be said for passive solar. It works. It's not as efficient as burning gigawatts of fossil fuel generated electricity, but it's sustainable in a way that the fossil fuel produced electric alternatives aren't.

The downside is that it's space intensive, and we humans are occupying a lot of space and crowding out other species. In an ideal world we'd be growing our food in vertical farms, or underground, to minimize our space needs, but that's impossible due to the energy requirements for those approaches today. Technically we could do it, but the CO2 cost would be unforgivable.

So we're looking at a trade off, lower electrical input vs. more space occupied.

I will observe that we're still not really using land and water in the most rational way. Take the Colorado River. Per the Colorado River Compact fully 50% of the water from it must be used in cold, barren, infertile, states where it is squandered producing a pittance of grain. If we're going to use irrigation, we should be using it where it can produce the most benefit: California or even Arizona. Instead we waste it in Montana and so on and get a tenth the calories per cubic meter of water spent that we could if we'd been using it elsewhere.

Transportation energy is an issue, but in many cases we'd be vastly better off growing our food in the optimal climate and shipping it around rather than trying to grow our food in places that never should have been farmland.

Since currently electrical generation doesn't factor CO2 into energy costs, we're seeing an artificially low electrical cost that's encouraging us to use things like full glass greenhouses instead of the lower output but cheaper by energy methods described here. It's a problem.

One last thing to note: In colder climates full glass greenhouses may turn out to be less energy efficient than indoor vertical farming relying entirely on artificial lighting. The heating bill is greater than the lighting bill would be. And that's ignoring the possibility of using passive fiber optic light pipes to bring sunlight into a fully insulated (or underground) farm to reduce artificial lighting costs. People tend not to run cost analysis using newer tech and instead just roll with how they've always done it.
posted by sotonohito at 6:47 AM on February 23, 2020 [8 favorites]


I am sad I don’t have a brick wall in my yard to try this out. Chain link fence has the lamest thermal mass!
posted by Maarika at 6:55 AM on February 23, 2020


Fascinating and entirely unknown to me. Don't miss the second part! It's about how it's done now in China - with earthen walls instead of heavy masonry, double polycarbonate insulation and automatic nighttime curtains for better energy effficiency.
posted by hat_eater at 6:58 AM on February 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


When we moved to our current place in south London seven years ago my sister gave us a very small peach tree as a moving-in present. We stuck it in the ground against a SW-facing wall in honour of our SW postcode, and called it the 'peach stick', and assumed it would never grow.

It grew. Two years later it produced three pool-ball-sized nectarines. Last year that was more like fifty. Despite the poor soil and the slugs and something that makes its leaves shrivel up and losing a branch to Storm Dennis and the fact we are indolent and incompetent gardeners, it's thriving. The nectarines have an excellent flavour and make a splendid jam.

I should probably give it a good prune before the sap rises.
posted by Hogshead at 7:39 AM on February 23, 2020 [16 favorites]


All of the high tech indoor farming operations that I have read about produce basil, spinach and perhaps some other greens. This makes sense because these are very quick growing and used in small amounts. But consider other vegetables like peppers, tomatoes, carrots, beets, etc. They take a long time to mature, occupying valuable "garden space". And you would still starve. Calorie crops like grains, legumes and potatoes take an enormous amount of acreage and would never be economical indoors and fruit trees take years to bear. I am afraid that vertical farming can never supply more than a few luxury crops. And its complexity makes its unresilient with too many failure points. like interruptions to water and power and artificial nutrient supplies.

I have been reading Low Tech Magazine for years and love the historical examples. I think some of them still sound useful as they bypass the energy loss from conversion to electricity and back like windmills (as opposed to wind turbines) but most of them need to be very close to the point of use which would be difficult to fit into modern land use and urban design.
posted by Botanizer at 7:41 AM on February 23, 2020


Related: Trombe Wall...
posted by jim in austin at 8:26 AM on February 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


> BBC documentary about Victorian gardens

The Victorian Kitchen Garden?
posted by Leon at 9:47 AM on February 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


Ha-- the only brick wall I have to grow things against, the balcony wall, faces southeast. I guess this is why the Ikea lemon tree I inherited from a friend is still alive and blossoming despite spending the London winter outdoors?

I was doubtful about its prospects, but took the tree for love of my friend, who had to leave the country quickly due to Brexit. She's now in Italy, where the lemon tree would have been far happier, if it could have gone with her. Maybe that's what it would have chosen. Nobody asks a lemon tree what it thinks.

I gave it a bigger pot and put it against that southeast-facing wall-- the bricks are whitewashed, so probably don't gather as much heat as they might. I was fully prepared for it to die, but it has kept most of its leaves and has one or two little blossoms on it, even now.

They say not to let your lemon tree bear fruit the year you transplant it, that the amount of energy required to produce the fruit will stress the plant. So I spent all year pinching off every flower-- I let them bloom for the bees, then pinched them off when the tiny lemons started to appear below.

My friend has been gone a year now. This spring, I'll let the tree flower and see what it bears.
posted by Pallas Athena at 1:52 PM on February 23, 2020 [22 favorites]


this is awesome - thank you! I've been telling people about it all day.
posted by jb at 8:43 PM on February 23, 2020


This is amazing! I have read the article several times and I just love those images of walls. There is a little thing, though. The article claims that all glass heated glass houses didn't appear before the end of the 19th century, which is wrong. Paxton's first great conservatory at Chatsworth was built in the late 1830's and of course, The Crystal Palace is from 1851.
I can understand that someone who is not a gardening geek would not know about Chatsworth, but the Crystal Palace must have been know all over Europe.
posted by mumimor at 12:09 AM on February 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


Wonderful post thanks, also mummimor there's also Sion Conservatory Dome by Fowler 1827 I think. I spent a day there a few years back, seems huge when you're inside.

But yes stone\masonry\earth walls, compost as a heating system, Detroit glasshouses, all simple, direct energy routes for living and growing food.
posted by unearthed at 1:59 AM on February 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


BRB, putting a fruit wall labyrinth in every fantasy city.

I'm glad to learn the world 'espalier' for that growing a tree against a wall thing, which I most recently saw in Mon Oncle looking very repression-y.
posted by fleacircus at 4:51 AM on February 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


Finally got around to reading this article, which is very close to my apricot-loving, 60-degree north-living heart. The single brick serpentine walls are genius, may have to give that a go. I rescued some 30 square meters of polycarbonate from a dumpster last fall, should probably get around to making some cold frames of them as planned.
posted by St. Oops at 2:09 AM on February 28, 2020


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