Who would have thought Barbary Apes would be eating our greens?

Our search for better ways to provide our ever growing populations with nutritious foods by finding new ideas and novel approaches – some seem similar, in ways, to the ancient methods of searching in the hedgerows.

Weeds – as they used to be known – are making a comeback .. the “simplers” searched for, tried and tested the plants we perhaps know as weeds today – nettles, dandelions, burdock, sorrel, wild mustard, watercress and many other herbs or beneficial weeds that have become a part of our daily kitchen and garden lives.

Paignton Zoo - photographic montage

This Garden of England that we live in – the Garden county of Kent in the south east, the Vale of Evesham, along the River Avon in Worcestershire, both originally home to orchards and market gardens supplying a vast range of fruits and vegetables.

I was surprised to learn that in the 1960s they started growing Chinese vegetables, which were relatively uncommon forty years ago; however now the Evesham Vale grows vast amounts of kai choi, pak choi and beansprouts – I’m sure most of us who purchase these ‘new’ vegetables would not have realised they were grown here, especially as the farms were started by Italians!

This is not a Barbary Ape, but is obviously so enjoying her greens - part of the BBC Devon article

People have become more open to new foods as we travel the world, which have changed our tastes and thus the opportunity to try out and cook these for ourselves. It’s all very well for the market gardens to supply our food – but we have a new kid on the block so to speak – Paington Zoo is growing food for their animals, trialling a new method of vertical farming that could well be rolled out to supply our ever insatiable appetite for greens.

We have already got living walls, as I wrote about in this post, which will I am sure take off as more and more of us get easier and cheaper access to these wall units or this different vertical farming method being trialled at Paington Zoo.

The system designed by a Cornish firm uses solar power or wind energy so that it is ‘eco-friendly’, while the water used to grow the plants is recycled. This system could be taken into the cities and towns, grown on small brown field sites, warehouses, on flat-topped rooves – providing a sustainable solution to getting our greens – while at the same time making better use of available land.

In the meantime in 2009 the Zoo together with a commercial partner (Valcent (EU) Ltd) installed the first of a new generation of innovative plant growing systems to support the growing of food for its animals in an energy efficient, local and nutritionally controlled way – so the Rock of Gibraltar, or Barbary, Apes get to act as ‘simplers’.

To begin with the Zoo will grow a whole range of herbs, leaf vegetable, as well as baby tomatoes and strawberries, which will reduce their food bill a little, as the animals scrunch, crunch and munch their way through a total of about £200,000 worth of fodder per year.

The 100 sq metre machine, like the one installed at Paignton Zoo, can grow up to 11,200 plants, which apparently is 20 times more than could be grown conventionally in a field covering the same area. The new rotating system has been installed in the first public vertical hydroponic display house – and so can be seen along with the other zoological and botanical exhibits.

Paignton Zoo was one of the earliest combined zoological and botanical gardens being run as a wildlife conservation trust, with a large emphasis on education and scientific collaboration around the world. So apart from the zoo itself, there is a wonderful themed botanical park through which you can to wander stimulating other senses: Medicinal Garden, Economic Garden, Wildlife Garden and the new venture of the vertical garden in its special display house.

c/o This is a picture from Patrick Blanc's Inhabitat site: Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Garden System can be implemented anywhere: indoors or out and in any climatic environment, as you can see!

The zoo may seem like an unlikely location for a groundbreaking project, but zoo directors understood the benefits of promoting vertical farming technology to the public as well as to growers. As a botanical garden, Paignton Zoo is keen to educate people about all aspects of horticulture, particularly new, environmentally friendly implementations such as this.

The world population is growing, food supply is shrinking, water supplies are becoming more limited, food production is competing for land with housing and the production of fuel crops. We have to make better use of available land.

However the Barbary Apes (the Macaque monkey) kept at the zoo, normally to be found in North Africa and on the Rock of Gibraltar are mostly herbivorous and will relish having the extra home-grown salad greens, as too will the other animals, birds, reptiles and insects be delighted to be sprinkled with salad leaves - as sorrel here.

Those weeds of yesteryear are becoming the seeds of choice today, or were so carefully selected by our ancients, when conditions about 13,000 years ago changed dramatically leading, in the face of starvation, to the cultivation of the best seeds available today.

This first collection of wild grass seeds actually sown on newly cleared land in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, set up a chain reaction of crop cultivation through the rest of history – so we now have the best of both worlds ... forgotten weeds and adaptable seeds .. letting us feed Barbary Apes our greens, while perhaps in due course creating the 21st century’s own Hanging Garden on Babylon.

Dear Mr Postman .. Spring is very slow and it is still fairly cold. My mother seems to be settled, quiet and at peace - which for Good Friday is the best way to be. Happy Easter to all.

Hilary Melton-Butcher

Positive Letters Inspirational Stories