My London Balcony

How much food can you grow without a garden?

A 9 foot x 6  foot north-west facing foot balcony, 5 south facing window sills, 3 north facing window sills, and a small patch of concrete outside the front door. Is this enough growing space to keep a family in vegetables most of the year? That’s what I set out to discover!

Every day, I recorded the weight and value of harvests. In these pages you can see the results, along with pics, for each month of the year – from May 2010 until October 2011 – until we moved to Newcastle.

The 2010 Challenge – is £500 of food possible?

Can you grow £500 of food without a garden? On 1 May 2010 I started weighing my harvests to try and find out! By September 10th (7 months early) I reached £500, you can see a short breakdown of how it was reached here.

I then increased my target for the year to try and grow as much as a London allotment. According to the National Society of Leisure and Allotment Gardeners, a 300 square yard allotment produces £1564 a year. As most London allotments are half this size, I set the target at half this: £782.

You can see images and details of the harvests, month by month, here.

By 1 May 2011, the total value grown was £899.99 ($1,480), weighing 83.66 Kg

The 2011 Challenge – is £1,000 of food possible?

In 2011 I doubled the target – and further increased the challenge by basing the value of food on one of the UK’s lowest price supermarkets. (In 2010 I’d chosen a premium supermarket to reflect the quality of home grown food). I also aimed to grow more food both earlier in the year (May and June) and later (November and December).

This experiment was cut short by our decision to move to Newcastle. However, after 6 months, I’d grown £452 weighing 69kg – below where I needed to be to reach £1,000 by May 2012.

You can see images and details of the harvests, month by month, here.