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I was a little bit lax in my gutter cleaning duties last year. I just didn't do them. This year there were all these tiny maple and Japanese elm trees growing in them.
Got me to thinking that the gutters could be reinforced and used to grow trailing fruits and flowers in a specially designed liner
. The soil filled liner would prevent leaves and detritus from plugging the gutter while still allowing excess water to drain. Some of this water could be held in a trough reservoir to be used by the plants over time.
For watering during dry spells a standard hose fitting runs the length of each downspout for filling the trough reservoirs.
Gutter Gardens
http://www.google.c...40&q=gutter+gardens
Unfortunately, as good an idea as this may be and certainly worth embellishing, a simple Google check of the concept shows that variations on the idea have been well-explored, documented, and photographed. [jurist, Jun 13 2010]
[link]
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would be interesting until the roots start pushing
their way under the shingles, snaking into the living
room strangling your mother-in-law whilst she's
knitting on the sofa...sorry too much sci.fi. |
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//would be interesting until...// What do you mean until?
It'd get even *more* interesting at that point. |
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It would be a BOON to all the spiders living in our attic! |
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Good find jurist, but those are recycled gutters and no longer function. I would like to see this for existing gutters. |
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I like the <link>: you could water it from the roof (rain won't hit them on a vertical wall). |
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For existing gutters you'd probably have an overflow problem; surely the ones sold in your area are sized depthwise to carry water from a roof away without overflowing and putting a couple inches of soil in would mitigate that. |
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What sort of plants would you be thinking of ? Considering that they'll be flash-flooded every time it rains, but you can only put in a couple inches of soil so there's little/no retained water. |
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It would look really nice though but I think you'd need deeper gutters. |
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An idea would be to find a fast growing plant with an extenisve root system to seed your gutters with, so when cleaning it all comes out in one pull instead of in many handfulls. |
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Sell the seeds in packets called Easy Cleaning Eavestrough Seeds. Try pouring clover in there. |
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I had seen the used gutter pics in my search but not the one in that second link which makes this soooo close to baked, but if you look they have installed a guard to shunt rain water away from the gutters. |
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//a second, shallower drain mounted above// which is planted with smaller plants? And protected by aaaaaa,,,,,,,,........___ |
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