I’m so excited for spring and have just spent my Sunday afternoon sowing seeds for my balcony and starting to organise the two beds I have in a community garden next door to me.
It was November 2018 when I moved in with my partner in Dublin after an internship on an organic farm in Kilkenny. The internship was a life changing and inspiring experience; organic gardening and farming is something I’m really passionate about and inspired by and goes hand-in-glove with a love for the environment, the natural world and environmental conservation.
So I knew that even though, my circumstances in life aren’t that I currently have a garden or large amount of space to grow in, I still wanted to find a way to carry on growing. As I am lucky enough to have a balcony with a little bit of room, and towards the end of last year I made contact with a community garden who kindly let me use two of their beds for my own, there’s a lot of room to experiment with urban gardening and growing.
I’d like to introduce you to my experiments in urban gardening and growing in tiny spaces.
The Balcony
My balcony is a very compact space. At the beginning of last year (2019) I planned it out with a certain amount of pots on the floor space and on the rails, a mix of veg, herbs and flowers. I was delighted with the cornflowers, spinach and rocket which all grew well. After a bit of a tiny fly infestation (may have been thrips) in my tomatoes that were inside the flat I made an emergency decision to get a tiny greenhouse that fitted on the balcony. In total last year I grew chives, rocket, cornflower, tomatoes and chard, as well as strawberries and Leucanthemum, which didn’t flower or fruit because it was their first year. So fingers crossed I’ll have strawberries and flowers too this year.
In the Flat
Last year I used the windowsills in my flat to propagate my seedlings, including strawberries, tomatoes, basil. This worked really well, and I got so much joy out of seeing all the seedlings popping up from cotyledon stage and evolving into their true leaves, especially with the strawberries. As stated above, the tomatoes were intended to stay indoors, but I couldn’t let them stay inside with a fly infestation in them. So this year, I am going to keep things minimal indoors. At this point the only thing indoors is the chilli seeds that I just planted, a thoughtful gift from my partner’s lovely cousin, and an Echeveria, a gift from one of my besties. Things might have to change if things don’t germinate in the greenhouse though!
In the Community Garden
After feeling a bit more settled in, I looked up community gardens and allotments around Dublin and came across http://cgireland.org/ and I discovered that there was quite a few near me. I managed to get in touch with one that was luckily right beside where I live. An award winning comminity garden by a small residents committee in the posh apartments next to mine, they kindly invited me over to have a look and I instantly fell in love. They have made incredible use of the space that butts up against the trainline and they’ve incorporated lots of ingenious upcycling elements. The beds are stepped as the garden is on a steep incline. They generously offered me the use of two of the beds and I was and am delighted.
In October I planted some onion and garlic sets in my top bed, with Phacelia and vetch between the rows as a green manure to add a bit of nutrients as I’m not sure what was in there before apart from ‘weeds’. In the second bed, I gently weeded and sowed just Phacelia and vetch, instead of leaving it bare over the winter.
Today the green manure was cut and turned into the soil in the bottom bed.
I’m looking forward to this year of growing and to getting more flowers on the balcony and putting into practise some more elements of vegan organic growing where I can. Watch this space!
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The Greedy Herbivore 