cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/8068330

This is a 50sqm balcony/terrace on the 2nd (3rd American) floor of a rental apartment building. I immediately knew we had to take the apartment, because having a balcony garden was my number 1 wish. In that sense, we definitely got super lucky.

This is year 4 of the garden, and it feels like we’ve reached “routine” with it. In the first year, we lugged about 2.5 cubic meters of soil up there to fill all the pots. From June-October, this space is enough to fill 100% of our (two people) vegetable needs.

Unsurprisingly, this is way too much to water by hand every day, not to mention when we’re not home for some days/weeks. The balcony is also south-facing, and it gets hot in the summer (seriously, I have burnt my feet on the stones before).

Unfortunately, there’s also no water outlet on the terrace itself, and the landlord said “no” to putting one there (which was expected, the way the house/apartment is built is not really suitable for that).

Our solution has been to put two 300l rain tanks on the balcony (atop of load bearing walls). They get filled by a hose from the kitchen tap whenever required. The barrels are connected by a second hose. In the one in the greenhouse, a rain barrel pump sucks water out, into a watering computer and optionally to a hose for manual watering.

From the watering computer, two watering circuits start; originally the plan was to distinguish between plants that constantly needed a bit of water, and ones that preferred a lot of water occasionally (e.g. the citrus plants); in practice, it turned out to be easier to just always water everything a bit. Oh well.

The watering computer itself it pretty dumb / not connected to an app or the like; it just opens the valves every 8 hours for (in the summer) 3 minutes each time. That’s mostly OK. On super hot days, I sometimes start a fourth round of watering in the early afternoon.

The pump is however plugged into a Zigbee-enabled smart socket, which is controlled by an automation via HomeAssistant (so, all-locally, thankfully). The main purpose of this is an automation that disables the pump when there has been a lot of rain in the past 24hrs, or a moderate amount of rain in the past 8 hours. Not that important when we are home, but usually extends the number of days we can be away from home by 2-3 days for a full filling of the tanks.

Finally, here’s some pictures and a video from the past couple of years. I think this year is the first year where no new pots were added, and we needed to buy hardly any new soil (the compost bin has really been worth it in that regard, as well!)

Happy to answer any questions!!

  • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    13 天前

    Would you mind posting close-ups / in-depth on your compost bin and rain barrels? I’m really curious to see what they look like and how you support them - looks like you have them on some sort of crate or other support system. I’m trying to work out where and how to set up composting and rain water collection in my limited space - I have a small yard (~400 sqft) w/ a small deck (~400 sqft). Seeing how you’ve done it might inspire me. I’m super jealous, thank you for sharing!

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      2·
      11 天前

      Sure thing!

      For the barrels, they were simply sold with the bases. Didn’t see a reason not to use them, and also allowed me to drill the hole for the hose connector as close to the bottom as possible (used both for filling water in and for leveling between the two barrels, since the pump is only in one of the barrels, see last picture). I don’t remember what the barrels cost exactly, but it wasn’t too much and I’m happy with the sturdiness.

      For the compost bin, we could have gone a bit more expensive tbh. This one was <25€, and as you can see, it’s not exactly shaping up to be a paragon of longevity. It sits on some slabs that were already in that corner, and I though it might help drain excess water…? Not sure though, I don’t think it does anything. The compost bin is also too small (and unsturdy) to go in with a shovel from the top and dig the compost over, which would really be beneficial. But still worth it. We put all our kitchen scraps in, almost completely eliminating residual waste bad usage for us, and I pull about 70l of compost out of it each spring.

      If you have a place where you can place the bin in the garden rather than on the deck, dot it, I’d say. Take a look around youtube or something, there’s some really cool composting systems.

      Good luck! Hope the pictures help. Sorry for being so slow to respond.