Describe Sack gardening

Bag/Sack gardens, also known as “vertical farms or gardens”, are tall sacks filled
with soil from which plant life grows. This concept for a small, portable garden is good for areas where the gardener may have to continually relocate, as well as for areas where there is little or no healthy soil (as the soil in the bag is contained). Due to their vertical nature, sack gardens are also fairly efficient in terms of using water.

Most of the initiatives and projects concerning sack gardens have been or are being
conducted in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, where the lack of appropriate farm land
combined with the very low incomes and employment rates of families and individuals,
as well as natural disasters such as landslides, result in very poor food security.
Several initiatives aimed at providing and training in the use of these sack gardens have
reported high levels of success in terms of improving nutrition, food security, and
income.
One has to note that sack gardens, although suitable for areas with traditional
gardening challenges, can hardly compete with conventional kitchen gardens when they
are feasible. The term “sack garden” is sometimes also used to describe horizontal bag gardens,
which are simply bags laid on one side with their other side cut open, so that the bag
functions like a pot or trough.

Opportunities for applying sack gardens
The main advantages of sack gardens are their portability, low size, low cost, efficiency,
productivity, and contributions to food security. These traits make them ideal in
situations such as:
- Where investing in a traditional garden is too risky due to fear of expropriation or where individuals have no legal right to their land. By having a garden in a sack that one can move and put wherever they want, it becomes a more stable investment.

- Where population density and scarcity of arable prevent traditional gardening.
- Where contaminated soil is present.
- Where there is a high chance of natural disasters such as floods or mudslides.
- Where there is not enough ground-level sunlight to grow vegetables.
- Where drought is common or water very limited.
- Where there is a food crisis. Small scale homestead vegetable growing can
greatly alleviate pressure from relief efforts.
- Where there are community development initiatives and programs aiming to
address community vulnerabilities.
- To complement school garden initiatives with non-traditional urban gardening
techniques.
- Where there is a little adult labour available. That is, child and female headed
households, elderly headed households, households with chronically ill adults.
Sack gardens are advantageous here due to their low physical requirements
(they do not require ploughing or weeding, and the only heavy lifting involved is
in moving the sack garden should the need arise).
- Where unemployment rates are high and the selling of even a small amount of
plant life and seeds can improve household income

The disadvantages of sack gardens
- Requires a sack.
- Requires disposal of the sack (which is made of oil-based plastic) after usage or
when damaged.
Excluding the flat top of the sack, plants cannot grow from seeds in a sack garden. This
is because of the contained nature of the garden where a physical membrane (a sack)
contains the soil, and the plants growing in the soil can only penetrate through specific
predetermined holes. As a plant growing from a seed may choose not to grow through
one of these holes and instead be stuck inside the bag where, without sun, it cannot
grow. The only way to ensure that plants will is to transplant seedlings into said holes so
that they already escape the sacks and are exposed to the outside

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Titany answered the question on November 4, 2021 at 13:15