Many city dwellers have small gardens, patios, decks or balconies. We often think that this limits what we can do from a vegetable and edible plant point of view, but at the community garden we have developed a vertical and balcony garden that shows what can be done in such small spaces.
The vertical garden:
- uses edible climbing and upright variants, underplanting where possible.
- includes containers that we have built ourselves from reused or donated materials, that are as sustainable as possible.
- shows how to capture and use rainfall for irrigation, powered by solar energy or hand watering.
- includes compost making facilities.
- has bee and bug friendly boxes and hotels.
- is accessible.
We have an extra challenge in that we are on a flood plain (it can flood up to 1.5m high), and the ground is concrete being an old stable yard, so the garden is built on a raised platform consisting of gabion blocks and a wooden sleeper-based frame.
