cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/8068330
This is a 50sqm balcony/terrace on the 2nd (3rd American) floor of a rental apartment building. I immediately knew we had to take the apartment, because having a balcony garden was my number 1 wish. In that sense, we definitely got super lucky.
This is year 4 of the garden, and it feels like we’ve reached “routine” with it. In the first year, we lugged about 2.5 cubic meters of soil up there to fill all the pots. From June-October, this space is enough to fill 100% of our (two people) vegetable needs.
Unsurprisingly, this is way too much to water by hand every day, not to mention when we’re not home for some days/weeks. The balcony is also south-facing, and it gets hot in the summer (seriously, I have burnt my feet on the stones before).
Unfortunately, there’s also no water outlet on the terrace itself, and the landlord said “no” to putting one there (which was expected, the way the house/apartment is built is not really suitable for that).
Our solution has been to put two 300l rain tanks on the balcony (atop of load bearing walls). They get filled by a hose from the kitchen tap whenever required. The barrels are connected by a second hose. In the one in the greenhouse, a rain barrel pump sucks water out, into a watering computer and optionally to a hose for manual watering.
From the watering computer, two watering circuits start; originally the plan was to distinguish between plants that constantly needed a bit of water, and ones that preferred a lot of water occasionally (e.g. the citrus plants); in practice, it turned out to be easier to just always water everything a bit. Oh well.
The watering computer itself it pretty dumb / not connected to an app or the like; it just opens the valves every 8 hours for (in the summer) 3 minutes each time. That’s mostly OK. On super hot days, I sometimes start a fourth round of watering in the early afternoon.
The pump is however plugged into a Zigbee-enabled smart socket, which is controlled by an automation via HomeAssistant (so, all-locally, thankfully). The main purpose of this is an automation that disables the pump when there has been a lot of rain in the past 24hrs, or a moderate amount of rain in the past 8 hours. Not that important when we are home, but usually extends the number of days we can be away from home by 2-3 days for a full filling of the tanks.
Finally, here’s some pictures and a video from the past couple of years. I think this year is the first year where no new pots were added, and we needed to buy hardly any new soil (the compost bin has really been worth it in that regard, as well!)
Happy to answer any questions!!
Where do you get that kind of forecast?
I tried Météo Canada’s long term forecasts but it’s quite confusing or hard to use.
AccuWeather has a monthly view on the website. I’m sure it’s flawed. But good enough to make me gamble!
We had a rando light frost @ 0C this am. lol, the thermometer at the back corner of my place seems to always be about 5 degrees colder than anyplace else in town. Everything that’s out there has been thru colder. I was giving till early May to put anything new/ tender in the ground. And will still use ‘water walls’ and cold frames. Might even set up the hoop house. Weather is definitely weirding 'round these parts. And even in normal times, it wouldn’t be unheard of to have one more snow.
Oh no… Well, you’re certainly more careful than myself. I meant it in the title, it’s a gamble. Last year I also could have planted out in April, but was cautious and waited for mid May. This year… Well. Let’s hope climate change is for once good for something /s
You have a lovely garden!
Thank you kind stranger 🙂
Your set up is so cool! I’m looking at it to see what i can learn. That grid support system looks great. What plants do you like to use it for?
Thanks :) Ah, you mean this one?
I built that last year specifically for our paprika (capsicum? never sure what the English word is. Web search says “pointed peppers”? Not hot though).
The previous years, every time around August the twigs would be full of large, heavy, but unripe fruit. Inevitably, we’d get windy weather and a third of the twigs would break off. The soil in those pots is not very deep (15cm, ca), so the trellis needed to be able to stand on its own. I really like the outcome, no breakage last year :)
The original idea came from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFWNV1V0x3o, adapted for our situation. The twigs end up kind of laying atop the supports.
Oh, and throwing a plastic foil over it in February/March also worked quite nicely to create a make-shift coldframe!
I’m so slow to reply. But yes! That is the structure I was asking about. It looks very sturdy and dependable. I might have to try something similar eventually. I’m in a climate where a cold frame is very useful as well. I hope you have a successful gardening season this year
paprika (capsicum? never sure what the English word is
In US English, paprika usually refers to the spice made from dried, ground-up peppers.
When in doubt, we usually just call anything in the capsicum genus a “pepper”, or if it’s spicy, “chili”. Specific varieties might be called out, often named after the region they come from (e.g., Hatch peppers from the hatch valley, Anaheim peppers from anaheim). The US has a huge Latino influence for obvious reasons, and Latin America is where peppers are from, so we generally have a huge variety of peppers available in our stores, many of which we use the
spanishLatino name for (names are often based on indigenous languages).In a normal supermarket, we might have a dozen fresh pepper varieties depending on time of year (bell, jalapeño, habanero, poblano, Serrano, wax, banana, shishito, Anaheim, fresno, birds eye, etc), a handful of pickled (peperoncini, jalapeño, etc), a handful of canned (hatch, Chipotle, etc.), and a handful or so dried chilis (pasilla, guajillo, arbol, cascabel, ancho, mulatto, etc).
I think some English dialects use “capsicum” as a name, but here that would confuse most people.
Thank you, I appreciate the explanation! Have never had in lain out like that before. This actually explains the source of my confusion as well:
In German, there is a strict separation between what is meant by “Paprika” and “Chilli”. Above, you said you have lots of pepper varieties in stores, and then listed both things like bell peppers, which are Paprika here, and lots of Chilli varieties. In German, it would just be wrong to call e.g. a habanero fruit “Paprika”, or a bell pepper “Chilli”, and I think that’s were my hesitation comes from: I always feel like I’d be misunderstood if I just say “pepper” 😄
So, just for clarification: everything in the trellised beds are sweet, non-hot peppers.
Very cool setup! When my partner and I moved out on our own our first garden was on an apartment balcony, but our balcony was quite a bit smaller. We still had it covered in pots. Watering was a bit of a chore, but IMO it was worth it.
Very nice! Yeah I think you can do a lot with limited space. Ours also for sure isn’t as full as it could technically be. Have you upgraded to a “proper” garden then, I take it? 😄
We moved into a house about 10 years ago. Our garden current consists of 4x 3m2(4’ x 8’ for fellow Yanks) raised beds separate by 1ish meter (4’) paths. We’ve also spilled into a fifth in ground bed for things that are more deer resistant like onions. I added DIY drip irrigation, also use a hose timer, etc and the four raised beds are pretty dense thanks to leaning on things that climb to get more garden volume.
We could expand the garden more if we want to, and likely will in the future, but it sounds like your garden is larger currently.
I am pretty jealous of your setup from an everything else perspective. We have to have a fence around our garden to keep deer out, but it can’t block sunlight for the plants. This means the fence is pretty lightweight and that makes it easier for the kids to break. The space between the garden beds has always been a struggle to maintain. Mowing grass was annoying, so I mulched between the beds two years ago. Now I have another area to weed. Not using containers also means that if we plant… borderline invasive things like raspberries they try to escape the raised beds. I might pull them all out after the harvest this season as they’re getting more ambitious with their escape attempts each season.
Not that I can really complain, I’m happy to have a reasonable veg garden :)
Maybe this is a case if “the grass is always greener on the other side”, but I’m definitely a but jealous in return, haha. Raised beds with room to expand sounds like a dream.
Sorry to hear about the troubles with the deer and raspberries, but I guess such is nature 😄
![Forecast says no more frost this year, so I took a gamble and already planted and sowed everything out last weekend. [more pictures + drip irrigation details in the post]](https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/9b2bf840-4025-46c6-a5e9-814aa525a01a.jpeg){kind=link}