garden planter Archives - Sustainable Design

Farm-to-Table is a home run for Boston at Red Sox Fenway Park

Boston’s Green City Growers working with Recover Green Roofs and the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park brought Fenway Farms to Red Sox Nation!

Installed and launched for opening day of the 2015 season, Fenway Farms’ 5,000 square foot roof deck over the Front Office provides fresh, organically grown vegetables and fruit to Red Sox fans dining at Fenway Park’s EMC Club restaurant.

Not just for show, a meaningful 5,900 pounds of fresh produce – everything from kale to broccoli to hot peppers – are harvested each growing season at innovative Fenway Farms to give back to the community!

Green City Growers partnered with Recovery Green Roofs, to bring farming to the roof of Fenway Park. Recover Green Roofs is the Somerville-based green roofing company that installed Fenway Farms. Recover Green Roofs was responsible for getting the soil on the roof, garden design and the sophisticated labor and water saving irrigation system, while Green City Growers is responsible for the farming operation. Donations to the community are handled by Lovin’ Spoonfuls.

Around the corner on the Strega Deck, more produce is grown in an upscale event space behind the private corporate suites. DeepStream Designs, founded to provide an alternative to the wasteful use of tropical hardwood lumber, was selected to provide the light-weight, cost saving multi-section aluminum planter frame system fitted with recycled HDPE lumber planks, recycled from milk bottles.

Large Rectangular Garden Planter — Large Commercial Garden Planter

These attractive planters have an internal plastic liner and hide drip irrigation lines, and their aluminum structural design ensures the planters will last for decades. The liner-within-the planter design also provides a thermal break so that the root systems never overheat from solar gain.

Large Restaurant Planter — Large Modular Restaurant Planters are more economical than standalone planters and have waterproof liners with advanced drainage and hide drip irrigation and wiring for lights and speakers.

The Strega Deck opened in 2016. It is a Fenway Farms-inspired event venue that is rented out as part of ticket packages and for special events. The produce grown on the Strega Deck is donated to the community by Green City Growers’ food rescue partner, Lovin’ Spoonfuls.

DeepStream Designs is a Miami-based design and manufacturing company using American craftsmen to build these durable planters, as well as recycling and trash bins, and a host of custom products, all of which feature a Lifetime Structural Warranty.

DeepStream has partnered with Trees for the Future to plant 50 trees for every planter sold and 100 trees for every bin. DeepStream has now planted more than 375,000 trees through this extremely efficient non-profit. For more information check out Trees.org.

While wood-on-wood planter construction will last 3 to 5 years, DeepStream’s Mariner garden planters are engineered to last for decades, giving the lowest cost of ownership over time, and are backed with a Lifetime Structural Warranty.

If your ownership or responsibility for the building where planters will be placed will last more than five years, give serious consideration as to what it will mean in terms of cost and disruption to go back and replace or repair planters, especially on rooftops and balconies, every 3 – 5 years.

The Mariner test planter shown below, with only an initial waterproofing at our workshop, has been exposed to the Miami sun and rain for with no maintenance for seven years.

The same planter shown below after sanding .014″ off the face of the planks and re-waterproofing and wiping down the proprietary marine-anodized legs with mineral spirits.

Wood-on-wood planter construction uses carpentry techniques that fasten wood to wood, and planters tear themselves apart with the expansive forces that wood exerts through repeated wet and dry cycles.

Why? Each wooden plank is cut from a different part of the tree or even different trees. This means each plank has its own differential rate of expansion and warping when wetted. This makes dimensional stability using standard wood-on-wood construction in two dimensions impossible to maintain over time, and shipbuilding techniques and maintenance are far too costly for planter construction. In addition, most wood planters lack adequate isolation from the soil and the deck or sidewalk, which promotes fresh water rot.

For centuries, wood dowels have been inserted into holes drilled into rock, then soaked with water. The expansion force of the wood is thus harnessed to crack blocks off marble and granite for construction, even though the blocks are hundreds of times thicker than the thin wooden dowel.

DeepStream uses proprietary marine anodized legs and stainless steel fasteners to clamp the wood and direct the expansionary so that the wood can expand and contract at different rates without affecting the planter’s structural integrity. The commercial grade rigid plastic liners, mounted on an independent aluminum frame, contain the soil and prevent contact between the soil and the wood.

Aluminum legs are protected and galvanically isolated from a wet deck by using plastic, HDPE, feet. Even stainless steel fasteners are galvanically isolated by using a proprietary dielectric paste so that they may be removed easily years later to replace parts or refinish the planter easily as shown in the before and after pictures below of a 7-year-old planter that only had the original coat of factory waterproofing and no maintenance. This “fresh” look was achieved by sanding off just.014” of the planks exterior.

Comparison of planks after sanding and before waterproofing shown below.

The near flawless proprietary marine anodized leg, show below, after cleaning with mineral spirits. Disassembly for sanding was easy thanks to the proprietary dielectric paste used to prevent corrosion between the stainless steel fasteners and the aluminum leg.

Tag: garden planter

Farm-to-Table is a home run for Boston at Red Sox Fenway Park

Wooden Garden Planters: 7 years after