Growing vegetables on a balcony or patio

For those accustomed to a city or urban lifestyle, a shopping mall is the place to buy everything from soap to rosemary leaves.

The fact that you live in an apartment or you love your green plush lawn does not mean that you cannot grow your own vegetables, fruits and herbs.

Farming is not a preserve of those living in the rural areas with big gardens, you can grow what will be served on your dinner table daily on a small vegetable patch.

Here are your options if you want to eat fresh broccoli sprouts, spinach, mint, coriander, cherry tomatoes, thyme, ginger or rosemary leaves every meal, harvested from your balcony, patio or from that flower pot at the corner of your kitchen.

Integrated farming

You can plant crops and keep livestock on a limited space. The most common kind of integrated farming is growing vegetables like spinach and kales on the same structure where you keep your livestock.

Construct a raised wooden structure to keep either chicken or rabbits. You can also modify two storeys to accommodate both with wire mesh flooring to allow for free air circulation.

Instead of having iron sheet roofing, place a plastic paper over the flat top surface and fill soil mixed with dry compost to grow the vegetables.
The structure can also be placed over a small fish pond.

Container gardens

Plant your pepper, coriander and thyme in flower pots. Pots, thick plastic bags, an old bucket or a basin can be turned in a perfect farm. Small pots can be placed on window sills or on balconies.

Larger pots which accommodate deep-rooted flowers can be used to grow plants like tomatoes which need to be supported with a stick. Like in sack farming, the pot must allow for drainage for the roots to breathe and prevent them from rotting.

Why not replace your flowers with fruits in your house? For example, within two and a half months of growing strawberries in a flower pot, one can start harvesting the fruit.

An old bucket or perforated basin can be filled with soil and used to grow your vegetables. Because of their stable bottom design they are more suitable for use on uneven surfaces.

Apart from placing them on the floor, window sills, the pot gardens can be hanged in places where space is limited.

Sack farms

These can give you bunches and bunches of kales and spinach everyday. Sacks farms are portable and can even be placed on your apartment balcony. You can plant kales and spinach on the sides of the sacks.

To do this successfully, fill the sacks with pebbles at the bottom to give it a base. Fill a cylindrical container open on both ends with rocks and a mixture of loam soil. Then add compost to the sack until it reaches the brim of the container.

Add rocks and soil until the desired height; this creates a continuous core of gravel in the centre for purposes of penetration of water during irrigation.

Transplant the seedlings into the spaced holes that have been made on the sides of the sack and place more seedlings at the top.

Kitchen garden

30-year-old Teddy Kinyanjui, for instance, has creatively used space in his kitchen at his house on Ngecha Road, Spring Valley, to grow herbs, spices and vegetables.

“I started growing these two years ago when I first built my bachelor pad to ensure I have free, clean, organically-grown food,” he says.

His table top is modified in such a way that the middle portion is filled with the soil used to plant the herbs.

“I built it in a hollow rectangular shape with normal building blocks about four feet tall, then halfway filled it with stones, then I covered it with plastic and put some soil mixed with compost before planting the trees,” he says.

READ: Farms flourish in the city

When the trees started wilting due to lack of enough sunlight, he opted to swop one of the roofing iron sheets with a see-through one.

Outside is a jiko with a cooking pot. He is cooking indigenous chicken and he throws in a few herbs that he has picked from his kitchen farm.

He has also grown warburgia ugadensis trees in the kitchen for beauty. ‘‘They are also an excellent indigenous spice and they clean the air,” he says, adding that he moves them to other places around the house with sufficient light.

In his 30 metres by 50 metres patch, he has organically-grown vegetables such as spinach, pumpkin, lettuce and managu.

Keyhole gardens

A keyhole garden is a good option for those who do not want to dig up their back yards or do not have enough space to farm.

The advantage of this type of garden is the active compost pile placed at the centre of a round raised bed.  The bed can be as low as a few inches from the ground to a few feet.  

A walkway to the centre can be made creating an impression of a keyhole in an overview. The walkway is vital as it allows for watering of the compost pile then transfers nutrients to the rest of the bed.  The outline of the garden can be made with rocks or sticks.

First layer of the bed can be made from materials like broken clay pots and large stones that allow for drainage. This layer is then covered with soil and mulch like thatching grass that helps in moisture retention and wood ash added on it.

Another layer of soil is added before top dressing which is a thick layer of mixed soil and compost is added on which the crops can be planted.
The garden is suitable for growing onions, garlic, carrots, beetroots, lettuce, herbs, spinach, radishes and turnips.

Multi-storey gardens

Multi-storey gardens are suitable for urban farming or in areas with limited space and can go up to 10 feet. You can easily make this using large synthetic bags, polythene or light polymer tanks whose tops have been cut out.

To make a multi-storey garden, perforate an ordinary PVC pipe, fill it with pebbles and then place in the middle of the bag or tank for irrigation.

Fill the base with rocks before the soil is layered in a fashion similar to that of sack farming. Make holes with regular spacing on the sides through which the seedlings can be planted.

Dependent on how high you want the vertical garden to go, there is an option of planting it in the hole in the ground for more stability.

Green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, cabbages, carrots, tubers and indigenous vegetables are some of the crops you can grow.