The carrots were quite bitter so they didn’t make it all the way to dinner. The kale was great though.

Last year I had quite an experimental season, trying a large variety of food to find some that worked well for me. Some worked well and some didn’t. This year, I want to a bit a bit less experimental and more focused on efficiency. I really want to see how much of our food we can produce in our apartment. This means that I will be narrowing our focus, most likely to: herbs, potatoes, tomatoes, chilis and leaves (lettuce, rocket, kale). These were the plants from last year which were space-efficient, not too difficult or troublesome in our environment and of course ones we enjoyed cooking and eating.

I will follow up soon with a more concrete plan but for the moment I am concentrating on getting the balcony back in shape – repairing bits and cleaning bobs – so we can start planting in March-ish.

As this is my final year of my PhD however, posts to Eight Square Metres may be less frequent compared to last year but I will still pop from time to time with updates of our growing and, if I’m not here, I’m probably over on twitter .

Before I dig into the data there are a couple of things worth mentioning. First of all I haven’t included the infinite plants. These are the ones who have given me as much as I wanted consistently for the best part of a year, namely the chili plants (varieties: Thai, Lidl and unknown) and herbs (rosemary, chives, basil, oregano, sage, lavender, thyme and bay). As long as these plants are providing me with enough to cook with and are modest in size, I am not concerned too much with maximizing their yield or looking for growing inefficiencies.

The other thing to bear in mind (not “bare” – had to check that!) is that meticulously logging gardening and eating habits over many months is not as fascinating or riveting as it sounds so I have undoubtedly missed some harvest here and there. There are also a number of plants (kale, lettuce, tomatoes) which are still growing and their harvest is ongoing. The data used here accounts for up until about the end of September.

It should also be noted that this is just a bit of fun. Obviously we grow food for enjoyment and so we can enjoy using our homegrown ingredients in cooking. We are not devoted to calories per square metre as a measure success (though it’s 670.275 kcal/m² for our 8 square metres if anyone’s askin’!).

Even though we devoted quite a bit of space to growing potatoes, it is obvious that they significantly outperform any other single plant in terms of mass (kg) harvested. Maybe there is good reason this island was once so dependent on them. Also noteworthy is that although the tomato plants took up 3-4 times the room of the cherry tomato plants, the yield from the cherry tomatoes was 3 times as much. I don’t think the tomato plants quite had the light that they needed to do well. Either way, I think I will be seriously considering concentrating more heavily on cherry tomatoes next year.

As a broad measure of nutrition I used calories (kcal). Though this does not capture the specific nutritional advantages of certain vegetables (vitamins, protein etc.), I figured it would provide a good yardstick to see what kind of bang for our buck we are getting with the various plants. As you can see above, both of the types of beans (green and borlotti) punch above their weight when it comes to calories. The overwhelming winner once again though is potatoes, which provided 68% of our balcony calories.

An optimal vegetable may be thought of one which we can grow the most of and while at the same time providing the best nutrition. I have plotted our vegetable harvest on a scatter plot below to illustrate this. Ideally we want vegetables in the top right (high calories per gram, high harvest). Top left means good for calories but small harvest and bottom right is big harvest but not good on the calorie front. Bottom left means neither did we harvest much of the vegetable nor is it good for calories.

The obvious winners here are potatoes and beans, both of which were delicious to boot. I need to find a way of increasing the harvest of the beans though as our current yield only provides for a few meals (ideas welcome!). I am fully confident I can increase the yield of the potatoes further too by planting them denser having seen how others have been growing them in tight spaces.

An honourable mention should also go to salad leaves and lettuce. Although they weren’t heavy or calorific, we got more mileage out of them than any of the other vegetables in terms of the amount of meals they were used in over about 4 months.  The are also very efficient in terms of soil (15-20cm is fine), unlike potatoes or tomatoes which require buckets and troughloads of compost.

It should also be noted that the total calories is quite low, especially considering an individual should be ingesting somewhere around 2000-2500 calories a day. Still though, I have learned a great deal over the last year and am looking forward to beating this yield next season!

On a parting note, I would like to apologise for misspelling “broccoli” in all of the above charts. I couldn’t face going back to change them all now .

Having succumbed to the standard festival phone battery difficulties, I had no camera to take photos at the talk. I did however manage to grab some photos of the permaculture display which was in the vicinity of the green room. I’ve included some photos I took below.

First is the Green Room which had a pretty cool grass-clod-on-a-stick display outside:

In the permaculture area, there was a tyre-based potato barrel. Note how you can pile up the tyres as you go similar to a technique I described before:

There was also what they called a “herb spiral” consisting of old tins arranged in a vertical spiral to maximize space usage. It was pretty impressive and in practice they used a lot more than just herbs:

They also had a star-shaped bed of vegetables. There were brassicas (kale etc.):

…potatoes:

…alliums (onion-type things to you and me!):

…and here is the whole star:

There was also a compost heap on display. It was actually quite effective in showing passers-by the variety of things that can go into compost. I immediately regretted throwing my banana peel in a standard rubbish bin earlier that morning:

There were also chard and beetroot:

…and some tomato and basil plants. I don’t know how realistic is is to have these growing outside in Ireland but the point was to demonstrate companion planting. If memory serves I think they also suggested that the tomatoes would taste better grown in the vicinity of basil. I remain sceptical!

And lastly, here is a bed of mixed herbs:

All in all, a great demonstration accompanied by clear and useful information on placards. Hopefully it has people thinking about how easy it is to grow food themselves and the variety of options available to them. Did anyone else stumble upon this display?

As part of a series of talks on sustainability in the Green Room in the Body and Soul area I’ll be talking about my experiences growing my own food over the past year at 12 o’clock on Saturday and Sunday.  For those of you who haven’t been there before, the Body and Soul area is really cool, with lots of interesting cultural activities, great food, diverse music and art installations.

I’m really looking forward to it, if a tad nervous.  I can’t wait to see the reaction we get.  If anyone is heading to the Picnic do drop by the Green Room at 12 o’clock on Saturday and say hi.  Everyone at the talk will get some free seeds and if they’re lucky get a carrot grown on my balcony too!

If for whatever reason you can’t catch me at the Green Room, I can be found rocking out at Flock of Seagulls.  See you there!

I followed up our conversation with a google to verify the claims. It seems there are two things required for the tomatoes to ripen:

1. The tomato fruit need access to light and so can’t be in shade.
2.  The tomato plant needs to divert as much energy as possible to fruit production.

Luckily these two things can be accomodated easily by pruning branches, leaves and any fruits or flowers which are too dead or small to make it at this stage. Removing leaves reduce the amount of shade the fruit are in and also reduces the amount of effort the plants puts into leaf production and maintenance.

Admittedly, I should have been on this way earlier. As my grandmother would have said – I should have kept the amount of main stalks to 1 per plant (the Internet seems to think 2 is ok too) and remove any “suckers“. I haven’t been doing this. This is due to one part oversight on my part (read: laziness) and one part the difficulty in navigating around a microgreenhouse which is jam-packed with growth.

I removed as much of the plant as I could without disturbing the growth. Hopefully we will see some more ripe fruit beyond the 6 red tomatoes we have had so far. The plants outside are doing great – it certainly looks like bringing them out of the greenhouse was a good move!

The overgrown greenhouse, which as I’m sure you can imagine is difficult to get at to prune:

Below are our cherry tomato plants, post-pruning. Admittedly, you can’t see much difference to how they looked before. Rest assured that much was removed and it took a good while!

1. Should I put the tomato plants outside in the unpredictable Irish weather?

At the time I took the results, the winning option was to put the cherry tomato plants out, which I did. It does seem that the option to leave them both in the greenhouse had a late resurgence though. Luckily enough we have had a mild couple of months (In Ireland, mild=good in the summer) and the tomato plants have flourished outside, arguably moreso than the two left in the greenhouse. There are plenty of green tomatoes appearing so it’s just a matter of getting them to ripen. More on that in the next post!

2. What should be done about our greenfly infestation?

As it turns out,  this question probably should have read – ” What should be done about our greenfly, spider mite, fly, flea beetle, caterpillar, etc. infestation?” I actually ended up trying three of these options in the end!

First up was soapy water. I tried spraying, showering and bathing, with mixed success. Well it failed really – even dunking the whole plants in a bath of soapy water. It’s also a significant inconvenience as you can imagine and makes you feel like a bit of a twit!

Next I introduced a ladybird but it went AWOL with no significant improvement. I might have needed more than one though in fairness.

Lastly I tried an all-in-one, spray today / eat tomorrow bug spray containing pyrethrins. I’m not sure if this is organic per se but from googling and reading the back of the spray it definitely doesn’t seem evil. There’s planty of room between organic and evil right?

This has worked wonders and there is a noticeable improvement in all the plants concerned. I’m looking forward to chilis being back on the menu.

3. …how should I deal with these uber-tall potato plants?

I tied up the potato plants to stop them breaking as suggested. It turns out I didn’t really need to as they all just died down anyway. The leaves seemed to be attacked by flea beetles along the way for good measure. I was expecting them to go on to flower before harvesting so this was a tad disappointing:

I started rooting around down one end of the trough for potatoes and found some (400 grams) which we duly ate. They were nice too!

A potato-eating action shot:

Thanks again to all that voted. Next up I am going to look at how to cut back tomato plants to maximize yield and ensure ripening. Anyone with any ideas or experience in the area, please send ‘em on!

The YouTube solution is basically to place a dish of one part water, one part light coloured vinegar and a dash of detergent out to catch flies. I’m unclear on the science behind it, though I read somewhere that it is something to do with breaking the surface tension of the liquid. Another site suggested that the flies are attracted by the scent of the vinegar. In my case, I used tap water, some white wine vinegar (posh I know, but all we had) and some generic washing up liquid.

For fly paper I have some “fly stickers”, about the same surface area as the dishes, which are cleverly designed to look like a flower.

I put one sticker beside a vinegar dish outside and did the same at the same spot inside. Catching flies outside is a bit futile but I thought it would make for a good comparison. After two weeks here are the results (for insects greater in length than about 1 mm):

As you can see, inside (where the real problem is ) there is no difference between the two methods, with the sticker performing marginally better.

What was surprising to me was that in the dish outside with only 12 flies, there were also hundreds (literally) of insects about 1mm or smaller. These were largely absent from the inside dish. There was also a much more diverse selection of insects in the outside dish: (outside top, inside bottom)

I guess this is a tribute to the insect biodiversity out on the balcony! I was once under the impression that container gardening leaves you less likely to experience insects but this summer we have noticed bees, wasps, flea beetles, earwigs, centipedes, caterpillars, mites and many types of fly on the balcony to name a few.

As regards the experiment, I don’t think that there is any real difference between the two methods, but they both seem to do a reasonable job. I would say whichever is most convenient or cheapest is probably the best. I would also like to add that our fly problem is not as bad as it was last year so it might be worth investigating again when we have a really bad infestation. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

There are three other common methods I didn’t consider that are worth a mention:

Honey: A lot of people on the Internet use honey to catch flies. I guess this would have a similar effect to the sticker, although perhaps the flies would be attracted by the sugary substance.

Venus Fly Trap: While entertaining, fly traps don’t have a very high insect turnover. I had one for a number of years, which is now sadly in carnivorous plant heaven, and even in its heyday it would struggle to consume more than about one insect a month.

A Dish of Water: This probably won’t catch any insects, but I just wanted to preempt anyone who came on and commented that I should have used a proper control!

After careful humming and hawing over insecticides, we decided to take the nobler course of action and bathe the insects off our plants. Here they are queueing for the bathroom:

A few days ago I noticed that some of the indoor plants (chili, basil and oregano) had discolouration on the leaves:

After putting this out to the crowds on Twitter, I got a number of helpful replies. In particular, allotments.ie pointed me towards an article on their site about the red spider mite. These sub-millimetre creatures seemed similar to ones on the underside of the leaves of my plants when I checked, though admittedly between mediocre eyesight and shaky hands it’s hard to see anything on that scale.

There seemed to be three options:

1. Unleash a predator, namely phytoseiulus persimilis.
2. Do a regular plant wash using an oil, fatty acid or simply water.
3. Use an insecticide. Things containing bifenthrin seem to be popular.

Option 1, while exciting and fun, seemed sadly logistically troublesome. I really felt like option 3 when I found out about the infestation, but since I have calmed down, maybe I’ll keep it as a last resort. This leaves option 2:

The Shibazguyz also backed up option 2, recommending that I could wash off the guests using “a strong tap or shower”. How permanent a solution this is remains to be seen. Early checks suggest that I may not have got them all, though it’s hard to tell when they are still wet. The basil plants seemed to be the worst infested so we decided to bin them altogether.

And so that’s how I ended up spending the evening giving my plants a shower in the bath. Ridiculous carry on altogether, but sure at least I can say I tried.

At the start of the season I set out to do some investigation into how efficient various plants can be grown in tight spaces, often with limited light and heat. We have seen good growth and pollinated the plants successfully, but if it were a plant competition, I would have to admit that it’s not looking good for team pea.

I can confirm that, just over three months since we built our pea trellis, we have amassed a grand total of 64 peas. hat’s right, not 64 pea pods, 64 actual peas. Technically that’s 50 grams, 20 grams of which is the inedible pod/shell.  There looks to be  some new growth at the moment so I’m not ruling out the possibility of plundering the pea fields a second time, hopefully to make triple digits and a nice omelette.

Not to be set back we used some of our chilis and cabbage to make a semi-locavore stir fry as you can see in the pictures below.

Peas plus shells – no matter how pretty you make it look, it doesn’t quite make up for quantity:

A close-up so you can see each of the 64 individuals peas:

Our cabbage which has actually grown quite well. It’s a shame we only have one plant:

.. and the final product. It was very nice. Good to see a nice bit of heat from the new chilies too!

They were good fun to grow though, quantity aside. Even then, I think I’ll have a hard time justifying their square metre in my plans for next season!

About 20 caterpillars had taken up residence on one of the kale plants and pretty much destroyed it overnight.  The pictures show the caterpillar-infested kale as I found it and after.  They really know how to do a thorough job!

I put a picture up on twitpic and tweeted looking for advice. After a few tweets from fellow gardeners it was clear that this incident was probably not entirely unrelated to the pretty white cabbage butterfly on the balcony not so long ago.  As the twitterers advised me, I removed the caterpillars by hand and checked for any eggs.

I can confirm the yellow glove is entirely a product of my own squeamishness. Gotta work on that. The plant is now caterpillar-free and the other plants seem unaffected since so looks like we got them all. Still, I’m very impressed they managed to find my minor kale patch in this concrete jungle. Anyone know if that’s normal? If this happens again I guess I will have to cover it with netting or similar.