I can’t figure out how to tag the ‘pages’, the things along the top of this webpage, but there is A LOT of information on how to get all the supplies you need for free, and I’m worried it’s being over looked.
On another note, my broccoli sprouted this morning. It’s terrifying how quickly it came up. The kale came up too but I covered it over with some more potting mix because you could see the fuzzy bit of seed poking out and I was afraid of the seed rotting in the light and air. Also, two birds visited my balcony today. I put out a bird feeder (I filled a saucer – the kind that goes under the bottom of large pots – with water and then put a small bowl with nuts and seeds in it) and they seemed to like it. One bathed in the water while the other attacked my peas. He viciously ripped off one of its small branches then sat taunting me with it. cheeky bastard.
The bird feeder on the balcony now brakes rule #3 of my apartments regulations. I’m hoping to break all of them before the summer is over.
- Residents are only allowed a ‘resonable’ amount of plants in small containers – reasonable is subjective… so is small.
- No non-patio furniture is allowed on the balcony – I have an old wooden table I picked up down the street, one plastic bucket filled with rotting seaweed and a square plastic bin for rain collection
- No bird feeders
- Do not dry your clothing on the balcony – depending on how many plants I have out there I might not be able to do this… they might win this one.
They’re trying to create an aesthetic I’m not comfortable with.
So now that we have started our seeds we should prepare for the time when they will need feeding. Since I’ll be growing all of my plants in containers, and not in the earth, they cannot gather nutrients from surrounding soil and will quickly eat up the nutrients in their containers, so I’m going to make a combination of organic liquid fertilizers and compost to feed my plants.
I won’t need to feed my plants for a few more weeks, right now the seedlings are being fed by their endosperm inside the seed. This endosperm provides enough nutrients for the seed to grow a set of primary leaves and start the plant off on the right foot. Once the primary leaves are established the endosperm has been used up and the plant now needs to get nutrients from the sun and the soil to grow. Once this happens I will need to repot the seedlings into live soil and begin feeding them.
There are three basic nutrients that commercial chemical/synthetic fertilizers supply; Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potash (Potassium), listed in that order on the packaging. Chemical fertilizers contain extremely high levels of these nutrients, 10-10-10 or 20-20-20. They do this because it makes the plant grow quickly and look lush and healthy, unfortunately such high levels of N-P-K not only destroy the food web in the soil but the rapid plant grown leads to weak, watery, plant tissue that is more prone to insect and disease attacks. The levels of N-P-K your plants actually need are much smaller; 6-8-6.
Chemical fertilizers also fail to provide the other nutrients that your plants need to be healthy and happy. While nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium are important so are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, magnesium, copper, cobalt, sodium, boron, molybdenum, and zinc. If you only give them high doses of NPK then you aren’t giving your plants (and subsequently your food) all the nutrients they need to be healthy. The fertilizers I will use, compost, seaweed and fish fertilizers, supply all of these nutrients in varying amounts. By using all three in combination I’m ensuring that my plants are given the best possible chance in their containers.
Anyway, now is the time to start making compost and your liquid fertilizers.
Compost:
Once again living above ground presents an issue, but not a large one. Since I can’t toss my kitchen scraps outside and let them biodegrade on their own I use vermicomposting and compost inside my apartment with the help of red wiggler worms. You can easily buy vermicoposters (from anywhere from $40-$140), or make you own (I made mine for $15).
To make mine I bought two 40L tupperware boxes, drilled large holes in the bottoms for drainage and small holes in the sides for airation. I took the lid of one bin and put it on the ground, I then took bin number one and sat it on top of the lid. I then lined the bin with mesh and filled the bottom with 50% peatmoss, coir, or leaves %50 1” strips of black and white newspaper. Cover the bin with the lid from the second bin. The second bin won’t be used until your worm bin is full and your worms are ready to move on to greener pastures (ie more food scraps in the new bin). And TA DA! What you now have is a lovely little home for your worms.
You can buy a pound of worms (if you know where to look) for about $40, which is stupid since worms exist in nature and multiply like mad if given the right conditions, so dont buy them, go meet your neighbours and ask them if they have a composter and if you can have some of their worms. You wont need many, worms can double their population in 4 months. Once you have your worms put them in your bin. Start collecting all of your kitchen scraps (but not meat, fish or dairy products) and every few days dig a hole in your bin fill it with your scraps and cover it up. When you have more scraps dig a new hole.
The Compost Education Center of Greater Victoria has tons of information on composting, and a very helpful PDF on vermicompost. Here is a video link for how to make your own worm bin, mine isn’t like theirs but it’s not a bad design either.
A few things you might be concerned about.
1. Worms. Don’t be silly, they are lovely, no need to be concerned about them.
2. Fruit flies. I don’t like them either, however if everything is going well with your worm bin, there will be no fruit flies. If you have them it’s because your food scraps are not covered well enough, just toss some shredded newspaper on top and you’ll be fine.
3. Smell. There will be no smell. My worms live in the bathroom and go completely unnoticed.
I heart composting. Once your compost is ready you can use it as is or make compost tea.
Compost tea:
Basically your compost dissolved in water. Fill a container loosely with your aged compost. Fill the container with water. Stir mixture every day. After a week, your tea is ready to use. Sometimes if your vermicomposter is wet enough some will drain out into the lid your bin rests on. If so, wonderful, the work is done for you. Just pour that on top of your plants and they will love you.
The only downside is that composting is that takes a little while. A pound of worms can eat 7 pounds of food scraps a week, which is pretty amazing, however not fast enough for my plants. So instead I’m making seaweed fertilizer.
Seaweed Fertilizer:
Collect your seaweed, some people say certain kinds are better than others, but I’ll take what I can get. Wash your seaweed with fresh water or let it sit in the rain for a few days. This helps to get rid of the seaweed’s salt deposits. You don’t want to be pouring salt all over your veggies so this is an important step.
Fill a large, topless barrel with equal amounts of seaweed, and water (an important note: Any time I say the word bucket or barrel, know that I got this for free from a restaurant and there is no way you should ever have to go out and buy one. Restaurants go through these buckets like it’s going out of style. Just walk up and ask for any empty buckets they have. If you don’t take them, they’re going to the land fill. So for the love of peatmoss stop buying them!). Let sit for eight weeks, stirring thoroughly every two or three days. After 8 weeks strain the mixture and pour over your plants (In a garden you can use the seaweed as a slug deterrent. Place the seaweed around your plants and let it dry there, the slugs will not crawl over the dried sharp edges.
Now I’m going to warn you, seaweed smells terrible. I keep mine on the balcony and have been keeping a lid on it to keep the smell in, but I’m worried that it needs to be left uncovered, so I’m experimenting to see how badly it makes my balcony smell and if that smell will drift inside…ew. But ultimately I think it’s worth it. Commercial seaweed fertilizers are insanely expensive, and making it is easy.
Fish Fertilizers:
You can make this too, you just need to collect dead fish carcasses and let them sit in water… or something like that. I haven’t tried and I don’t think I’m ready to yet. If I do I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time I’ll buy it. Unfortunately if you are going to use either seaweed or fish fertilizers you should use both. The levels of nutrients they have individually would off balance your plants, but together they give them a balanced level of the nutrients they need.
I’ll upload pictures of my seaweed fert. and my compost soon.
Hope that was helpful. If you want more info on soil and compost check our the resource section of the blog. I’m posting links there and some of them go quite indepth.
So I seeded all of my plants today. Depending on where you live, and if you have a green house, you will plant at different times. I’m a little behind right now for my climate. My cool weather plants should have been planted the last week of Feburary/the first week of March and since I’m starting my plants indoors I could have planted my heat loving tomatoes/peppers/basil a month ago. If you were planting in a green house you could plant your heat lovers at the same time as the cool weathers but with bottom heat – a heating coil under sand on a table with your seed containers on top. Since I’m starting all of my plants inside my heated apartment this division doesn’t really exist for me, and this might be a problem… one of many I’m hoping to sort out.
This will be my second crop this year (the reason I’m a month behind). My first crop was leggy (starved for sunlight and thus tall and gangly) and ended up getting nitrogen poisoned due to an over zealous fish fertilizing by myself and a friend. I now realize that despite having floor to celing south facing windows my plants do not get enough light. I’m trying to solve this issue two ways. 1. I broke down and bought a growing light. If I run it 8 hours a day, every day, for the next year it should cost me $7.84 on my hydro bill, but I dont see that happening. And 2. I found a giant mirror on a street corner in December and being a compulsive hoarder of all things free, I took it not knowing when I would use it… Ta Da! I’ve found it’s use. It now rests against a chair (that I also picked up off the street) and reflects the light from the windows back at the plants.
Now the heat problem. So far I’ve succeeded in forcing my kale to bolt – go to seed – at a shockingly young age. My apartment is far too hot for these plants. I’m kind of stumped on this one. I open the door to let air in but they just sit in the sun inside the apartment and bake all day. Since I’m out of the house most of the time I can’t move them in and out as the weather dictates. Days when I know it will be nice I can put them out, but sometimes it rains really hard and until the plants are ready to be hardened off – outside during the day and inside at night, not matter what the weather is like – I don’t feel comfortable doing that. So this problem has yet to be resolved. Hopefully they’ll cope. We’ll see.
So the plants I seeded today are (H = heirloom, if you want info on what ‘heirloom’ means look at the ‘seeding supplies’ on the right hand side):
In 1” pots
- Everygreen Long White Bunching – H 1880. These might not sprout. This seed is 3 years old and from a seed sanctuary. Onion and Carrot seeds only last a year. I over seeded these instead of doing a germination test… this was probably a bad idea as over seeding leads to weaker starts and can make them tough to separate… oops.
- Ledniky Lettuce – H from Czech Republic
- Dr. Dukat Dill – H
- Celery
- Siegfriend Frost Leeks
- Russian Kale
- Rainbow Chard
- Butter Crunch – H
- Broccoli – H (unknown name, got it in a seed trade)
- Scarlet Nantes Carrot. Like the onions, these seeds are very old. Not sure how they will do.
2” pots
- Ardwyna Past Tomato – H
- Swallow Pepper – H Russian origins
- Oregano
- Cilantro
- Sweet Basil
- Muncher Cucumber. I grew these 3 years ago in Ontario and they didn’t do very well. It was a very hot summer, we’ll see how they do out here.
- Long Red Cayenne Slim
- California Wonder Green Pepper (your generic grocery store pepper, I grew this 3 years ago and this is my own harvested seed. It’s prone to black spot. I harvested the plants that did not get black spot but we’ll see. It’s not a great pepper, most varieties you find in stores have been killed by over production and are more prone to diseases)
4” pots
- Dragon Tongue Bush Bean – H
- Hubbard Squash
already growing
- Little Marvel Pea – H 1880
- Sweetie Cherry Tomato. Again, the generic store ones… ew. I grew 6 kings of heritage cherry 4 years ago but I didnt seed save… that’s frustrating.
I’ll Post pictures when the first shoots appear!! I should also quickly say, that not all of these seed starts will be grown in my apartment garden. The cucumbers (while they can be trained to climb up walls) would require more space than I have, as well as the broccoli, squash (!! talk about large !!), onions, peas and celery. I’m going to try to get to get the biggest bang for my buck so to speak. I’ve selected highly productive varities to get the most out of each container (except for the seeds I had left over from my old gardens, those I used because I’m a geek who loves saved seeds). The Veggies that I am not growing in my apartment garden (along with triples of the ones I am) will go with my partner, Cel Ery, to a plot down the street to be grown there as our back up crop. Since this is the trail year I’m not gambling with our food security, if all goes well next year we’ll just use the balcony.
That being said, all of the things listed here could be grown without access to the earth. Peas, Cucumbers, Squash, Eggplant can all be trained to grow up walls. Unfortunately the only walls my balcony touches are glass and those plants would have nothing to grab onto and would block out the sunlight from reaching the plants inside, so for me those options are out. However if anyone would like to know how that can be done, I will gladly pass on the theory, but unfortunately I won’t be able to give you any first hand advice. Once those plants leave my house I wont be following them on this blog anymore (I can tell you what you would do if you were to keep them).
I started this webpage because I was frustrated at the lack of information out there for people without access to land and I’m determined to use my training to bring that information to apparement dwellers all in one handy location. I know I’m sick of all the searching, someone else must be too!
The Project: Produce fresh organic veggies 4 stories up. I’m determined to prove it’s possible to live in an apartment and still eat food you’ve grown yourself.
ignore the disturbing patriarchal message in the photo.
The challenge: Do it on the cheap, using recycled, free, or found materials.
This summer I’m going to see how much food I can produce on a 12 ft by 4ft south facing balcony and the first 2 feet just inside my apartment. When I decided to do this I started looking on the internet and library for information on vegetable container gardening. Surprisingly there is very little information out there. I’m a trained Organic gardener so I thought why not, through trial and error, create my own website that would track my progress and provide information on exactly that, apartment container gardneing.
I want to see if it is possible for people without access to land to grow fresh organic produce on their balconies and inside their homes. I’m using found/salvaged/built containers to grow my veggies in. At each step I’ll post detailed information on the supplies I’m using, the problems I’m facing, the solutions I find and the results I get.
This project is rife with problems, not the least of which is the possibility that my balcony will rip itself from the building due to the weight of the wet soil (1sq ft of wet soil weights 100-150 lbs). But I’m determined to make it work! So follow along, join me, create you’re own apartment garden and post questions and advice.
