Written by on April 9, 2021

How to green your balcony with little effort

Creativity

Would you like to contribute to cooler, cleaner and more biodiverse cities? Why don’t you start with greening your own balcony? Taking care of plants can be time-consuming and cost-intensive. Doing it the wrong way, can even be more harmful -rather than beneficial. But with a few tips and tricks you can green your balcony with little to no money, very little time investment and with benefits for the environment.

Our little kumquat tree became our christmas tree during the confinement 2020.

1)    Chose your plants wisely.

 I think this is the most important trick. Don’t only chose by what you totally want to have, but think about what conditions you have on your balcony. Does your balcony lie in the shadow or in the sun? Do you want to water your plants every day or only every 3rd day? I think we let ourselves way too often fool with these nice images of people harvesting a huge amount of tomatoes from a single plant on the balcony. I personally have never achieved this in Lausanne. But now I got a feeling which plants are rewarding and which ones aren’t. Lausanne can be quite hot in summer with only little rain and springs can sometimes be even stormy. On the balcony this “climate” becomes even more extreme. Therefore, plants which grow very well for me are Mediterranean plants and herbs that do not require a lot of watering, like rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, kumquat. I mostly grow these now, making me self-sufficient in terms or herbs and tea. I also like these plants a lot because you can easily propagate them. If you have two of them, it doesn’t hurt if one dies. Furthermore, you can go around and look for plants that grow wildly in your area. Some of them can be perfect balcony plants. I have for example dandelion, wild thyme and daisies on my balcony. I use them for my salads, they grow really nicely and guess what: their flowers are actually very beautiful if you give them the right space.

2)    Reuse water! 

If you have a green balcony, it will require water. In summer or during heat-waves they need even more. Although water is still very cheap, recent heat-waves have in some areas depleted the ground water. To reduce the pressure on our water stocks, here are some tricks to save water and use it efficiently: I collect all the water that I use from washing vegetables and fruits and give it to my plants. Besides, left-over tea, coffee or water from cooked vegetables (if no salt or sugar was added), are a good water and fertiliser source for your plants. Try to not use chemical fertilisers. They use valuable, finite resources that we rather need for food production than for our plants. Besides, the “fixation of nitrogen” requires enormous amounts of energy, leading to very high greenhouse gas emissions.  Never water your plants during the afternoon when it is the hottest. Give enough water so that the water reaches the roots. Depending on the plant, you do not have to water them every day. I usually chose varieties that are more heat and drought tolerant.

3)    Chose the right gardening soil.

Peat should not go on your balcony. It should stay in the peat-lands. Read more about the loss of peat land here. Look for gardening soil that is peat-free. By now there are a lot of options to choose from. Maybe your plant will originally not look as perfect as on peat – but it will adapt and become nice after some time as well. You can also ask someone who has a compost to give you some soil. If the plants stay outside, compost is often very useful. If you do use compost make sure that you add some stones and sand to the bottom of your pot and maybe mix in the sand also into the compost soil itself. Otherwise, the soil-wetness could kill your plants.

4) Pots

Plant pots can be very expensive. I actually did not want to use any plastic on my balcony and instead used terracotta pots. They can however be heavy and give only very little space for planting. I then bought some wooden boxes with holes on the sides and below. I lined these boxes with straw and then filled them with compost soil mixed with sand. Voilà, I have my gardening pot for only 9 francs. It can be even cheaper if you reuse some boxes used in supermarkets for vegetables. However, they tend to be small and dry out quickly.

Our wooden box gardens

5) Let your creativity guide you!

Although gardening centres often have the “perfect” solutions for everything, I think letting your own creativity go is actually the best and can be very cheap. Just think about all the things friends or family would like to get rid of and try to upgrade it for your own balcony. Often, old stuff is very useful as plant pots. Also, get inspired by all the DIY ideas on Pinterest.

 

Thanks to all the photographers for providing images on Unsplash.

For German speakers, please click here to get further information for creating biodiverse niches on your balconies.

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1 comment

  • Andreas Näger has written:

    Hallo Nils,
    eine wirklich interessanter Artikel und eine schöne Idee mit eurem Kumquatbaum.
    Hast du auch ein paar Ratschläge für Stodara, deren Wohnung keinen Balkon hat? 🙂
    Unsere Zimmerpflanzen sind leider schon allzu oft einem “Ungeziefer” aus der bösen Natur zum Opfer gefallen.
    Der Mikrokosmos Wohnzimmer ist einfach sehr anfällig gegenüber Spinnmilben und Krankheiten.
    Dennoch ist die Sehnsucht nach etwas Grünem und Buntem in der Wohnung groß.
    Über ein paar Tipps fürs Wohnzimmer und die Küche, würden wir uns sehr freuen.