Out of the windowsill, onto the balcony!
In the two months since we first planted the seeds, they have germinated very quickly and forced us to take the garden from windowsills of our office onto the balcony.
Like many garden-starved urbanites, we are not blessed with fertile soil here on the Cafédirect balcony so have had to construct flower beds out all kinds of items – it’s a great challenge; we’ve created growbags using compost and old coffee sacks, old wellies, coffee packs, kitchen items, old cafetieres and even footballs!
As you can see, we’ve really embraced the idea of ‘mini allotments’ and with the help of celebrities such as Stella McCartney and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall created a Green Print to upcycle the most unlikely items into flourishing miniature vegetable patches!
Transforming our barren balcony to a flourishing urban oasis hasn’t all been plain sailing though, and there have been a few ‘learnings’ along the way; we planted many of seeds far too close together and they are fighting each other for space – this was particularly the problem with our carrots in a football – they are no longer with us! The runner beans which were the early stars of the show, growing super-fast in their early weeks have not been so happy outside, perhaps due to the blustery conditions and don’t look likely to come up with the goods at harvest time – so any expert advice you can share with us is welcome…
But our great success has been growing herbs in our old coffee packs. We are currently giving away free parsley, coriander and basil seeds with packs of our coffee, so before they hit the shelves we wanted to test them for ourselves – so as they say in Blue Peter, these are some we made earlier!
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