Comment by jsilence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsilence | Hacker News Reader

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The limited area you have at your disposal will not be able to actualy feed you. With intensive farming one would need around 200 - 500 m² to produce the calories required.

So with balcony farming I'd recommend focussing on greens that make your meals better. Microgreens are easy to do and add a lot of flavor to your salads and meals. For the rest herbs and leafy greens are the way to go. Herbs as perennials can be grown in soil pots. The plants in pots you can get in the supermarket usually do not last long. They are produced for maximum harvest yield at market time and usually have a hard time when trying to keep them. Get some heirloom seeds or cuttings and make soil from coco coir and perlite. For leafy greens hydroponics can make sense. Jeb the gardener on YT is funny and informative. It is easier to automate hydroponics than soil culture. Chili Chump on YT has a good series on that.

Consider running a bokashi indoor compost. The liquid collected from that is excellent organic fertilizer for the coco coir and the hydroponics.

Start small. Scale up as you gain more experience. Microgreens have a 10 - 14 day culture, so starting with those will give you a fast turnover and quick iterations for improvement. Try to purchase seeds in bulk, otherwise cost will be prohibitive. Organic seeds for commercial growers come in larger quantities at a reasonable price. Try to source those.

Most important of all: Have fun!

edit: fixed typo.

Very good information!

Me and my wife have grown stuff on the balcony, but the main reason that we don't anymore is that we go away for four weeks during the summer where there is the most need to water. We can grow things in the spring and in the autumn, but we miss the warmest period in the middle.

We bought four large clear plastic containers from IKEA that are intended to store stuff under the bed, drilled holes in the bottom of two of them for drainage, and put them in the other containers. We filled them with LECA pebbles and dirt, and watered with large PET bottles. It was all very easy.

One summer we grew kale in one container, but were discouraged when we harvested it and only had enough for one pie. Your first sentence triggered this memory, which is the point of my comment. Growing kale on that small scale was terribly inefficient, and the amount of work to water it far surpassed the joy of eating the pie.

Another summer we had curled leaf lettuce that was much better than kale. It grew so quickly that we could continuously harvest it and still have more growing. Of course you can't eat it for the calories, so it's just for fun.

We've also had windowboxes on the inside of the balcony railing with flavorful sallads and herbs, like rocket sallad, basil, chives, and so on. As you say, those add a lot to a meal without taking up too much space, and are easy to start with.

Maybe you mean square feet instead of square metres?

Less than 50 sq m (approx 500 sq ft) per person using conventional row gardening would be the norm - and with intensive gardening, that same plot could support a 4-person family.

Yea, but there's one problem I have with this estimate. It requires near perfect efficiency. There's almost no buffer here for poor crop yields, less than ideal climate conditions, weeds overtaking, pest destruction, wrong breed of crop for conditions, soil/hydroponic management, etc. For 500 sq ft to be viable for 4 people, it needs to be taken care of in a very regiment fashion.

Not saying it's impossible. But that number shouldn't be advised for beginner homesteaders or people with less than ideal time to spend on the garden. It's great if at least one person out of four can devote a good amount of their time everyday to it and are already well experienced (hands on experience, not just internet articles) in horticulture.

Plus, you generally want plenty extra to harvest so you can jar, can, preserve however you want. That way in case you do happen to have a bad next yield, you still have something. Don't forget about seed-saving too. Most plants you have to sacrifice from eating to some capacity so you can plant again next season. Let's not forget the compost pile too to help re-fertilize soil and some rest time for the soil if you can't properly maintain it.

Oh and back on climate. Here in Florida, yea, I could probably figure it out with 500 sq ft. I have like a 10 month growing season here. Easy. Throw up a greenhouse with a heater that only needs to be ran maybe 10 days out of the year, at most, then I have 12 months. I can compost small piles fast all year round. It's near perfect here. Michigan? Ha! I know there are certain types of greenhouse designs that extend the growing seasons in places like Alaska to a certain extent and somewhat efficiently. But that's a lot more effort and work that most people aren't willing to do.

Long way of me just saying, that 500 sq ft for 4 people year round needs a heavy asterisk of "Under ideal and perfect conditions".

But my rant also requires an asterisk. I'm not saying that if you can't grow all your food, then don't grow anything. I think everyone should grow at least some of their own food in a manner that fits their wants, conditions and lifestyle. Just... have realistic expectations. I hate to see people have unrealistic expectations with gardening and be disappointed. Misses the point to the whole venture. There are downsides too. As a kid we grew our own tomatoes for fun. Nothing serious or wide scale. Like 10 plants a year. Problem with that (besides caterpillars), I absolutely hate most store bought tomatoes, even 20 years later. I have to have organic farmer's market grown or my own. Anything conventional store bought is just red-dyed, solidified water.

Oh yeah, no doubt. That 500 sq ft would be for 1 under normal circumstances, and would need to be heavily optimised for supporting 4 people.

As it stands US Department of Agriculture says that 120 sq m is enough for a family of 3 - thats using conventional gardening techniques.

The USDA recommendation is just to provide the small amount of vegetables a family normally eats, not to provide all their calories. 50 sq m is absolutely tiny, and even with the most calorically dense crops like a 300 bushel/acre corn crop, that 50 sq m is producing less than 1000 calories a day, it won't support anyone.

I think you are talking about two different things. He said "With intensive farming one would need around 200 - 500 m² to produce the calories required." You seem to be talking about producing some vegetables and still getting the bulk of your calories from the store.

Yeah, fair point. I was just reciting something I read recently - clearly without understanding the context.

I actually mean square meter. If you can feed yourself on 50 m² of conventional gardening, fine, go ahead. Not my experience. Put up a blog, don't buy any food anywhere else, post your body weight on a daily basis.

But the OPs question was about balcony / window shelf gardening anyway. I don't think a lot of people living within cities have a >50 m² balcony.

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