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 .

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!

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.

First of all, big thanks to Susan Gallagher for all the hard work she’s done on the new website. I think you’ll agree it’s a smashing job! Between that and working on the minor matter of the PhD it’s been a while since the last post so it’s time to get things rolling again.

There are many more experienced farmers and gardeners than me who contact me through this website and I am very grateful for all the advice I have received over the past year. For this post I wanted to try draw on the collective experience of the readers to decide what to do next,  wisdom of crowds style.

To that end, I have below a few polls covering gardening issues I have been grappling with. I encourage you to answer to the best of your knowledge. Don’t worry if you’re not an expert; the thinking behind the wisdom of crowds is that the collective intelligence transcends that of any individual!

Once I get a big enough sample size enough answers (gotta watch nerdy terms after being called “highly geeky” during the week!), I will implement whichever solution is favoured in each case, and of course document the results here.

In my microgreenhouse, I have two large tomato plants in big containers and at the top I have two cherry tomato plants in hanging baskets. Both sets of plants are getting a bit big for the available space in the greenhouse.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

We have been getting greenflies on and off on a couple of the plants for the last month or so.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Answers on a postcard please! I look forward to putting to work whatever it is you decide I should do.

Specifically, the plants I was interested in were the pea plants, the tomato plants and the chili plants, each of which has a number of flowers now. I was surprised to see that a different approach was recommended for each plant, so I thought I would sum up my findings here. The specific botany, biology and zoology for the reproductive process is outside  the scope of this blog but the pollination article in Wikipedia should make for a good starting point. As I understand it from Mrs. McCahill’s second year biology class c.1995, it has something to with the stigma, stamen and pollen and cameos in certain cases from insects.

Poke: Chili
You need to distribute the pollen from chili plant flowers to other flowers on the same plant. If a flower is not fertilised it will simply fall off after blooming. If you don’t like getting your hands dirty you can use a q-tip / cotton swab / cotton bud to carefully transfer the pollen from flower to flower:

However, if you are a young male risk-taker like myself you maybe just want to poke the flowers with your finger in succession to spread the pollen:

I have tried both techniques and can vouch for them both working equally well.

Shake: Tomatoes
Tomatoes are a little more  accomodating when it comes to pollination. In the breeze outside, the plant moves enough to allow the pollen to do it’s job. If however like me you live in Ireland and trying to grow tomatoes outside seems silly, just give the plants a gentle shake every now and then. I read in a few places that noon is the best time for pollination in terms of temperature and humidity this is a little too pedantic for my liking.

In order to illustrate the technique I have cleverly added cartoon shake lines to the picture below. As you can see our mini-greenhouse is filling up quickly.

Leave: Peas
Pea plants seem to have done very well when the plant kingdom were handing out reproductive systems. They don’t need any mechanical assistance so will pollinate fine left to their own devices. Good stuff.

It was difficult to illustrate not touching something but I did my best with a jazz-hands style pose:

I was initially wondering whether we would get many insects up on our 3rd floor balcony as other than our plants it’s a bit of a concrete jungles. I was therefore glad to see some bees hovering around the flowers on the sage plant last week:

And I think we can all agree that the real plus is that I made it through the whole post on mechanical assisted reproduction wihout any double entendres. Phew.

I took 3 chili seedlings that would have otherwise been binned and put them at three places in the apartment window, in two different rooms.

Position 1
Advantages: Longest light in the afternoon.
Disadvantages: In same room as kitchen so big fluctuation in temperature, maybe humidity.

Position 2
Advantages: Consistent temperature
Disadvantages: Limited light, balanced between afternoon and morning.

Position 3
Advantages: Longest light in the morning, consistent temperature.
Disadvantages: Very little light in the afternoon.

As you can see in position 1, the plant grew quite a lot but there is very obvious discolouration on the leaves. In position 2 we see slightly better growth and no noticeable discolouration. In fact the leaves are a dark green. In position 3 it’s clear that the plants has been struggling to reach for light as it cranes over (’photo-tropism‘ if my Junior Cert. biology doesn’t escape me!). The plant leaves are also thinner and smaller. This is also the only position where flowers haven’t started to form.

This confirms what I thought: (i) that getting the light in the afternoon is very important, perhaps more-so than morning light and (ii) the plants are somewhat disturbed in the living room / kitchen. The plants were put in very small pots for the experiment so it is possible that the discolouration was due to lack of nutrients. However, I have seen this dicolouration  before in our plants in that position so I am inclined to think there is something else at play. I’d be interested if anyone else had any thoughts on this.

The upshot is that we are going to try keep as much as possible in position 2 above – a mixture of constant temperature, and as much afternoon light as possible. 

The next challenge is to figure out what to do with the greenfly on a couple of the plants on the balcony. Does anyone have any tips? At the moment, we are washing them off with soapy water but this seems to only temporarily resolve the problem. Are ladybirds the answer?!

As you can see above the potatoes are looking good (at least the above soil portion is!). At the near end of the trough are the pentland javelins, coming in at about 50 cm and at the far end are the charlottes towering at 70cm. I have been filling in the trough with compost as they grew so the charlottes are now about a metre above where the original seed potatoes were planted. They have been down now for just under two months.

The french climbing beans have been less than enthusiastic in their climbing pursuits:

On the contrary, the berlotti beans are doing well. This comes as a bit of a surprise as I was worried that the berlottis would prefer something a little sunnier than Ireland’s East coast:

At the other end of the balcony we have our second crop of potatoes. I used the same varieties are before. Perhaps I should have used something later cropping – any spud experts out there? In the background are the peas which have climbed on the trellis to 60cm:

Clockwise below from left we have carrots, lettuce, lavender and sage. The sage is flowering at the moment which we are going to let go even though I suspect culling this might give better leaf growth. Note the lettuces are ones we bought as seedlings in the Farmleigh market in Phoenix Park after multiple failed attempts to produce homegrown seedlings. (Note the random cabbage top right we got as a surprise in the lettuce seedling batch!)

I am a bit concerned over the lack of light that the tomato plants are getting and I think this is reflected in their less than inspirational growth. The first picture below is the cherry tomatoes and the second the harbinger tomatoes:

The parsley plants are doing well as always – both flat leaf (left) and curled (top). Unfortunately our chives (right) got aphids. We washed them out with mildly soapy water on the advice of Google which seems to have done the trick for the moment.

Lastly there is the corn salad (front) and more lettuce (back). The corn salad seems to be growing quite slowly but perhaps this is normal. Despite the window boxes being quite small for the lettuces they seem to be doing well. We are trying to just take leaves from our lettuces rather than harvesting whole heads of lettuce in an effort to maximize the yield.

As usual send on any comments, advice, criticisms, observations etc. If you are growing any of the same plants I’d be very interested to see how you are getting on.