It’s a proposal to reuse multistory carparks as mushroom farms until they are demolished and replaced with something more usefull than inner city parking.

There is more detail on the VEIL site about the project.

“The Mushroom Carpark”  – Ben Doherty
This exploration offers an innovative approach to redesigning car parking stations into transitionary resources which could be used for mushroom production. Ben suggests that in the short-term future there will be reduced car use due to high fuel prices and the subsequent uptake of car-sharing schemes and cycling. The ensuing reduction of car use will provide a new wasted space – car parks.

So, for those of you who I haven’t told (and as I assume that nobody else actually reads this, that’s nobody) I’m doing an elective called meals in metropolis. It examines urban agriculture and it’s implications for cities and a load of other stuff as well.

Of course being me, i haven’t read much of the stuff on the reading list, but i have just finished reading this. The revolution will not be microwaved is actually pretty good. There is a awful lot of hippy arm waving and associated corporation bashing that harks back to the bad old days of the no logo anti establishment clones, but if you can get past the fact all of this, it’s actually a very well researched book with a broad range of examples related to each ‘underground’ food movement.

There was a bit of a culture shift to deal with in understanding the motivation for a few of the topics from my perspective, but i think that’s because I’m already interested in food, so grasping how dire the monoculture practices of US supermarkets actually are was tricky.

I found somewhere to buy raw milk today which is pretty cool. i absentmindedly drank 2 litres of it over the day, and if i’d done that with pasturised milk i’d be well on the way to being dead! check this out – real milk

my self watering setup seems to have worked, and the tomatoes have had a bit of a growth spurt while i was away in germany.

mint and rocket next!

I really need to find tht camera charger so I can stop taking pictures with my webcam.

I’ve been talking  about this to anyone who will listen for ages now!

I have an enormous bay window in my living room that gets blasted by the sun between about 5am and 1pm everyday. it seems a shame to waste all that energy on the two ropey plants that came with my flat, so I’ve got myself a grow bag and some seeds and I’m growing tomatoes. I’ll keep a tomato update going over the summer as they progress.

I think there is  probably room for another 2 bags in there, so I’ll grow a few mint plants, in one, but I’m still searching for ideas for the other one.

This  takes the idea of local food to a whole new level!