How to make a sack garden

A garden in a tall sack is a simple home project and a good solution for city homes that don’t have much outdoor space. We made one for the first time in a couple of hours, leaned it against the side of a house and planted it with hot peppers, basil and sweet potatoes.

Sack gardens can work in any city, but they can be especially important in developing countries and urban slums. Growing superfoods like kale, spinach and root crops not only cuts grocery bills, but infuses otherwise poor diets with vitamins and other nutrients. Woven plastic feed bags, food aid sacks burlap and other large bags have been converted into upright gardens in cities in Kenya and Uganda, schools in India, communities in Mozambique, South Africa and the Philippines. A good example comes from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which published notes from an interesting discussion of a garden program in Kibera (link down), Kenya, by the French non-profit Solidarites International.

We took tips for our how-to guide from Appropedia’s and Gardens for Health’s bag garden pages (link down) and Send a Cow’s video tutorial for making a bag garden in Uganda (link down). This is how we did it