It’s been a long cold winter here (relative to our usual expectations) but hopefully now we are near the end. I was out on the balcony last weekend and there are even signs of growth in places – raspberries and garlic come to mind. There were some carrots and kale that survived the freeze (fair play!) so I brought them in to cook:

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 .

Throughout the growing and harvest season I kept tabs on what we have harvested. In this post I’ve constructed some pretty graphs in an attempt to illustrate how well (or not!) I have done this year and how we might change things next year.

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 .

First of all, thanks to all those who showed up on Saturday in the Green Room in the Body and Soul area at Electric Picnic! I thought the talk went well with plenty of interaction and discussion and the reaction was very positive. The tent was packed and I had a some very interesting follow on conversations afterwards. I think even some of those that had been dragged semi-willingly (!) out of their cosy tents seemed to get involved and have a good time.

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?