Edible Marsh | Kate Rutland

What can the High Street offer that the Internet can’t?

The high street is all about the experience: sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. Every environment is unique like our fingerprint, not two are identical. My proposal allows all these senses to be explored through the life cycle of a vegetable, from seed to plate and compost.

Edible Marsh provides fresh and sustainable vegetables to the local community of Lower Marsh in Central London. The vegetables are grown on the tree shaped structure via a hydroponic system that only requires a nutrient solution and water for the plants to grow.

Why vegetables?

Close to the site is an existing gardening club called Edible Marsh. They meet twice a month for two hours at lunchtime at the Leake Street Pocket Park. The club is free and is aimed at anyone in the area who would like to learn how to sow seeds and grow edible plants.

The site where the club is located is very open to the public and doesn't have a secure area to grow the vegetables or to store equipment. This suggests that the vegetables can be tampered with and become contaminated which would be a threat to the consumers and gardeners health. Also the organisers will have to keep carting the gardening gear back and forth, which is not efficient.

The proposal provides a safe, secure space for the club to grow vegetables both traditionally with soil and also via a hydroponic system.

Find out more about Edible Marsh gardening club:

https://www.lowermarshmarket.com/edible-marsh

Where you can buy fresh vegetables and produce.

Why use a Hydroponic system?

Hydroponics is the growing of plants without using soil. The seeds are planted in a growing media and supplied with a nutrient rich solution, oxygen and water.

Main attributes:

90% more efficient use of water than the traditional growing method of soil, water is reused.

Rapid growth: crops can be produced twice as fast.

Stronger yields: production increases 3 to 10 times in the same amount of space.

Superior quality: time between harvest and consumption is decreased which increases the nutritional value of the end product.

Urban/Indoor farming: farms can exist in places where weather and soil conditions are not favourable for traditional food production due to having a climate controlled environment.

No chemical weed or pest control products are needed.

What is going to happen to the vegetables after they're grown?

Some of the fresh vegetables grown are going to be sold in a shop on site. This allows fresh vegetables to be available to the local community. Currently the closest location to buy fresh vegetables is 1.62km away at Borough Market which is around a 20 minute walk or tube journey.

The rest of the vegetables are going to be used in the onsite kitchen to prepare meals that can be bought to eat in the restaurant. This provides homemade, homegrown, healthy meals to the community, which adds something different to the food market along Lower Marsh.

Life Cycle of a Vegetable...

The vegetables are distributed between the Shop, Restaurant and Cooking workshop. This ensures there is no veg wasted. If there is left over veg, then it shall be donated to a local food bank.

Edible Marsh provides a space to learn to cook and prepare the vegetables and ingredients so the community has first hand experience and knowledge to create dishes at home.

Edible Marsh also provides a connection from Lower Marsh to Station Approach Rd via a route which leads them through the centre of the structure where the vegetables are grown.

The structure that the vegetables are grown on. I got inspiration from a tree and a seed. Which reflects on a life cycle. Everything starts off as a seed of some sort and it grows into a organism.

The two trees create unity by forming a circle at the centre. I extruded one of the arches through the site to get the correct form. This allows the arch to be seen from Lower Marsh and makes the space more open and bright.