Alex Mitchell - The Edible Balcony: Growing Fresh Produce in Small Spaces

Its the ultimate escape from the urban buzz. Imagine sitting in a Mediterranean-style haven surrounded by grapes, tomatoes, lemons, and greens so fresh that they squeak while the traffic roars around you. From a few pots on your balcony or fire escape to an entire orchard on your roof terrace, the possibilities for growing fruit and vegetables off the ground are endlesseven if you live in the heart of the city or suburbs. Not having a garden doesnt mean you cant be eating delicious, organic greens, herbs, vegetables, and fruits every day of the year.

Urban buzz: beehives and crops co-exist happily on a city rooftop

From simple fire escapes and window boxes to sleek, decked roof terraces with a view of the city skyline, your own little bit of outdoor space has always been something to covet, but now more than ever were embracing the chance to green up our environment. Home farming is a trend that seems here to stay, with seed sales reflecting our growing enthusiasm and plants appearing in the most unusual places. These budding balcony gardens are not just growing flowers, eitherafter all, why just fill the space with geraniums when you can grow fruit, vegetables, herbs, and greens and benefit from delicious fresh, organic food at your fingertips?

Balconies are ideal places for growing edible crops, as they are often very sunny and high out of reach of pests such as slugs and snails. Many crops grow very well in containers and a surprising number are beautiful toofrom lush fig trees to silver thyme, yellow climbing beans, and frilly lettuces. You can gather strawberries when theyre properly ripe, not picked hard in order to be transported. You can eat peas and carrots before their sugars have turned to starch, and pluck tomatoes still warm from the sun. Get growing yourself and you can fill your space with unusual crops you cant easily buy in the storesstriped tomatoes, beautiful flecked rose beans, or tangy bucklers leaf sorrel.

Whether youd like a few herbs or pot after pot of carrots and potatoes, a balcony is the ideal place to get growing. You may not be self-sufficient, but youll enjoy delicious fresh food picked straight from the plant, and know exactly how and where it was grown. The average green has traveled 1,400 miles to reach your tablegrow it on your balcony and you can reduce this to a few yards.

In cities all around the world, people are discovering how wonderful it is to grow fresh fruit and vegetables, and realizing that you dont need a lot of space to do it. Urban residents, many of them young and with no experience of growing food, are discovering the pleasure of eating their own produce straight from the plant and marveling at how they can grow it right there outside their window.

Outdoor spaces may be small, but that inspires people to find creative ways to use every available bit of them. Whether youre after an exotic feel, a sophisticated herb garden, or simply want to squeeze in as many crops as you can in a glorious mass of fertility, a balcony is a theater set waiting to be dressed. People are finding ingenious ways to grow cropsfrom greens in bottles to herbs in hanging shoe-organizers. Invention, individuality, and expression are the key words for this new breed of urban farmers; rolling acres are not necessaryall you need is a few pots.

The potential for growing food in our cities is everywhere. If you added up all the flat roofs in New York or Chicago or Seattle, you would have room for an awful lot of tomatoes. And even the tiniest of spaces count too. Windowsills and walls are all viable with the right pot or customized container. And why stop at fruit and vegetables? A beehive takes up less space than youd think, so how about producing your own honey several stories up?

Whether its guavas in Mumbai, a Manhattan fire escape of herbs and greens, or olives ripening in the heart of the city, The Edible Balcony mixes inspirational ideas with practical advice to show you how to create a beautiful, flourishing outdoor space. From an easy edible balcony that can be set up over a weekend to individual styling tips using recycled and salvage materials, advice on producing exotic fruit you never knew you could grow and even on making a do-it-yourself green wall, this book is full of ideas to turning your outdoor space into a garden packed with gourmet pleasures.

Your balcony, however small, is a valuable splash of green in a concrete urban jungle, but its benefits are far more than just aesthetic: When you plant produce on your balcony you are not only creating a relaxing haven and a handy source of ingredients for your lunch, but youre benefiting the wider environment, too.

A bare balcony is a depressing sight and a wasted opportunity. Fill it with plants and it becomes vibrant, softening the hard lines of the city and giving you a space to pause and breathe.

Grow fruit and vegetables on your balcony and you can experience the wonders of fresh foodsweet carrots, meltingly ripe strawberries, and crunchy greens. You can also grow produce you cant easily buy, such as purple snow peas and yellow cherry tomatoes. With the merest effort you can be self-sufficient in herbs and never again have to let those plastic packs of parsley from the grocery store turn to slime at the back of the refrigerator.

There is something undeniably satisfying about being able to pick greens from outside your kitchen and know exactly where and how they were grown. When you start growing some of your own food, you quickly learn about and appreciate what is in season and what is local. When you have eaten French beans you have grown yourself, those little cellophane-wrapped green sticks flown in from thousands of miles away dont seem so convenient after all.

Built-up areas trap heat, making average ambient temperatures in cities up to 5 degrees warmer than in the countryside. With global warming set to continue, urban temperatures will only increase. Planting on roofs and, to some extent, balconies, insulates buildings from the heat of the sun by as much as 20 percent, thus reducing the need for expensive and energy-devouring air conditioning. In Osaka, Japan, sweet potatoes were hydroponically grown (that is, in nutrient solution rather than soil) on the roof of an office building and this cultivation method was found to protect the roof significantly from the heat of the sun, as well as provide a useful harvest. In Singapore, Changi Hospital grows tomatoes hydroponically on its roofyielding 440 lb. of tomatoes annually and reducing the heat on the roof. In cold countries, planting on roofs has the opposite effectit traps heat and cuts down on expensive heating costs.