Initial problem

Our school garden has a box with about 5 strawberry plants in it. Over the last year, instead of producing strawberries, the plants have been reproducing asexually by sending out runners (stem that grows sideways and has another strawberry plant grow off of it). The strawberry plants were very successful and now we have far too many strawberry plants. They are currently sitting beside the greenhouse in small pots.

Solution(s)

Green team has been looking into ways to get rid of or store the many strawberry plants.​

One plan that we have not acted on is selling the strawberries. They are mostly in small pots and could easily be sold, but planning the sale and getting people to come would be more difficult. While selling the plants would get rid of some of them, and bring in funding for the green team, issues with planning this have prevented us from doing this.​

The plan we are going with now is to create a planter box to contain the strawberry plants, but in a more efficient way. This has lead to the designing of a strawberry tower, a form of vertical farming.

Initial Designs

Before any plans could be made, their needed to be some basic design options for the green team to decide between. If you search for DIY strawberry tower designs on the internet, these 3 designs are the first to show up. For each one I have a brief description of it and the pros and cons of the design.

Design 1:

This design appears to be the simplest. Depending on how large/nice looking it is there would have to be more effort put into it, but the basic design seems too just be a rectangular prism made of planks, with a few hole drilled into them. However, the holes are quite big and would likely have to be cut out not drilled. I did a basic design drawing done to show (roughly) what it would be like if we built it.

Pros:

• Simple design
• Can pack many strawberries into a small space

cons:

• Difficult to hook up to watering system
• Is filled with soil (may require a large volume of soil)

Design 2:

Many examples of towers are in the form of a ladder. This design would be a bit more work than #1, but it looks a bit nicer, would be easier to move and could be used for something else if the strawberries were removed. I have a rough drawing done to show what it would be like, and what parts it would need.

Pros:

• Moveable
• Could have multiple uses
• Cute

cons:

• Difficult to design/build

Design 3:

This is the fanciest and most complicated design I have found. I think it looks very nice, and it would allow for the strawberries to still send of runners, but it is too complicated for our garden. I did not draw anything for this, as there was very little to no chance of this design being used.

Pros:

• Looks very nice
• Could hold many plants

cons:

• Requires a large quantity of soil
• The process of designing and manufacturing would take too long

Reviewing Designs

After many failed attempts to set a green team meeting, Ms. Myles decided that any design would be fine as long as it could be hooked up to the watering system and the cost was reasonable. This quickly stopped designs 1 and 3, as design 1 would require an elaborate system of tubing to be watered automatically, and design 3 would be quite costly in both wood and soil. Design 2 seemed simplest, but could not store many plants, and they would be quite shaded. A different design was needed​

I cannot remember my inspiration, but I started working on a forth design. It was more so layers of beds, with an angle on the bottom of each bed to avoid too much shade. As I began to flesh out the design, I used the wood sold at home depot as an example of what I could build it out of, and quickly saw that it would be far too expensive, as well as the design being complicated and a bit confusing.​

As Ms. Myles pointed out to me, the best way to cut costs, as well as make the process more environmentally friendly would be to use recycled wood (pull apart something and reuse the wood). Magically, while trying to find something that I could build from, I noticed that there were many weird palate things upstairs in the tech Ed. Area. With the help of Mr. Betts, I was able to take measurements of the wood which I used to make my final design with.

Final Designing Process

After I got measurements from the palate, it was easy to see what I could make with how it was already cut up. From this I created a few 3D models of the design and drawings on both paper and AutoCAD. But even in the final design there were many layers of progress.

Final design (stage 1):

I started with making boxes based on the way some pieces were already cut. Similar to how the forth design, I stacked the boxes and experimented with how they were arranged. ​

After settling on a spiral I thought the design was already looking good, but I realized a problem. How it was now the boxes were loose, and I had no idea how to secure them, leading the second stage of the design.

Final design (stage 2):

The only thing changed between stages 1 and 2 is the adding of a frame to secure the boxes. While this would add stability, it still clearly had issues, leading to the final stage of the design.

Final design (stage 3):

In this design the boxes are still there, but the frame is now a shelf which the boxes can slide in and out of.