Photo: Karen Botes
Growing traditional African vegetables on modular living walls increases the crop’s feasibility and resilience because they can tolerate the climate, have a high nutritional value, don’t need much irrigation or chemicals, and are resistant to disease. During the spring of 2021/2022, landscape architect Karen Botes spent six months in Pretoria, South Africa, studying modular living wall systems to see which works best and comparing traditional African vegetable crops with a mainstream crop. She compared the Vicinity wall, an all-in-one system, and the Eco Green Wall, which is made up of interlocking, lightweight blocks of recycled polystyrene aggregate-and-cement mixture. She found that growing traditional African vegetables in modular living walls saves space compared to standard soil-based food production on a household scale, and produces larger yields than conventional soil-based agriculture.
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