I thought a thread could be useful, and seems many posters here are growing stuff and could chime in with their experiences.
I think probbaly the underlying idea is if something happens that makes food either outrageously expensive or in very short supply we can supply some or all, of what we eat. If that happens i think its safe p assume energy costs will be high too, so large indoor lighting setups might not be feasible. So lets stick with roof tops, balconies, tiny gardens and even windows as the challenge.
For me the goal would be high space:product ratio. Growing space wasters like most fruit trees, corn, chili peppers etc wont help in tough times.
Here are some quick thoughts we can keep adding to.
Sunny
Okra ~ sturdy stem to allow vines to climb, nearly daily yields. Hot weather.
Moringa ~ Tree but can be trimmed for big windowsill. Very fast and easy. Year round.
Pole Peans/Peas ~ Ones that can climb up strdy plants like okra. I like kidney beans can eat them with skin.
Malabar Spinach ~ vine that can be trimmed compact.
Malabar Spinach (Basella alba)
Water Spinach (Ipomoea aquatica) ~ Easy sprawling plant
Egg Plants ~ Bit of aspace hog, but te long skinny varieties can be exceptionally heavy yielders that might justify them in a garden or roof top.
Partial Shade
Sweet potatoes (easy nutritious leaf crop, tubers not reliable in pots). Year round.
Pole Beans/Peas ~ will search out light. More light = shorter internodes and better fruit sets.
Malabar Spinach
Water Spinach (Ipomoea aquatica) ~ Easy sprawling plant.
Heavy shade
Ferns ~ Pretty poor space to food efficiency! But if you hvae no light they are something that can grow, and thy can be suspended on walls hung on string etc to save more space with ones like birds nest ferns.
Indoor/Dark
Crickets ~ Probably the best bet for no light and can eat everything wasted from the garden.
Mushrooms ~ Hard to grow due to sterilization requirements of substrate, but requires vey little light.
Personally i find big plants with little food a space waste. Things such as:
Tomato
Corn
Most grains (many also inneficient to consume requiring water and heat)
IMO, individual survival gardens are impossible, in the sense of growing food on a balcony to feed yourself. Apart from the fact that you donât have enough light or space, humans donât do well on a diet of only vegetables. Bringing rooftops into service would help, but itâs still not really possible for an apartment building to be self-sufficient in food.
I donât think agriculture is going to collapse overnight: there will be food, but itâll be hard to get, and expensive, until things sort themselves out. It seems to me the aim should be to get the maximum economic value out of the available space, and that wouldnât necessarily mean getting the maximum calorific value per unit area. Sure you can survive on sweet potatoes, but if you set that as your goal, you lose sight of the reason for living.
So Iâm not going to discount e.g., chilis and herbs. Theyâre very productive and therefore take up almost no space given the amount of them that you need. Also, you can eat chili leaves, and Iâve found that theyâre very shade-tolerant.
+1 to moringa, pole beans climbing up other plants, basella, sweet potatoes, and water spinach. These are undemanding, productive, and easy to grow. Tomatoes (particularly determinate types) are an obvious choice.
Alliums are great and require little space (theyâre also stupid expensive at the moment). At minimum, Iâd want to see walking onions, chinese chives, garlic, and those little red local shallots. Carrots can be shoved anywhere (theyâre fairly shade tolerant). Beets grow quite well in Taiwan and you can eat the leaves. Dystaenia takesimana is a good celery substitute. A small clump of ginger, turmeric, lemongrass, and galangal would provide enough for several families.
I donât think leaf veg (lettuce, mustard, rocket, coriander etc) are a waste of space because theyâre unbelievably productive if harvested in a cut-and-come-again manner. Iâve grown vast amounts of these in tiny areas. Sissoo spinach is similarly useful.
Mexican gherkins (Melothria scabra) are easier to grow than cucumbers; they produce a lot of fruit on vines that donât shade out everything underneath them.
On a rooftop, Iâd want to see three hens. Yes, theyâd take up 5-10m2, but theyâd consume unwanted scraps and recycle them into manure and eggs (and more chickens, if you can find someone with a cockerel). Or you could do something similar with a fish tank. Youâd also want some kind of composting or fermenting system.
EDIT: someone mentioned palm oil in the other thread. If a rooftop is available, Iâd definitely want to start a couple of oil palms if weâre in for the long haul.
Tomato plants can yield 20+ lbs each, and donât take have to take up much space - you can train them up a string (takes ~1ft2 or less of space), or grow them from a hanging pot (they look cool growing upside down).
To add to the list: passion vine (for passion fruit) can be trained up a post and will grow along a âroofâ, leaving space underneath for plants that canât have so much sunlight. This is more for the practical purpose of providing shade to plants that otherwise would not have them, as passion fruit is hardly going to sustain youâŚ
Has anyone looked into pre-designed vertical gardens? I know there are some âgrow your own vegetables in x# of tiny square feetâ set ups online but they seem to be hundreds of USD for not much growing space. I feel like a few pipes with holes drilled in would work better.
In my experience, most things seem to be âtake over everythingâ or did. Zucchini, for example. Either youâre paying people to take them from you because you have run out of all possible space, or the whole thing just dies.
Awesome suggestions. Never grown gherkins, any seasonal issues in taiwan? Many curcurbits get serious fungal infections in certain weather. I love pickles though, nice way to grow food and preserve without a fridge or heat source.
@finley. Yes for are, economic value as well. I think we can be fairly safe the main food security taiwan has is in dried grain storage. I dont like it for te cost ofcooking, but t stores for decades and is currently cheap. A person can fairly easily store a 20 year rice supply in a small apartment. Those things will probbaly depend more on gas prices and electricity prices more than food costs.
Practically i do see an apartment possible for food sustainability but it would have to include insects. I dont see many people willing but i bet you beer its not hard to accomplish. Assumin one has a sunny balcony. I love chickens, but crickets blowthem away on efficiency and yeild. Stackable low to no light, eat more varied diet, their poop is far more useable without aging as a fertilizer, and safer. Certainly eggs and chicken taste better though.
@Poundsand the main reason i dislike tomatoes is you get low quanity of food for space used. Sure 20 pounds with ferilizer in the sun. But the real issue is we get about 9% dry matter with bigger varieties and slightly better (9~14) with cherry types. More skin ratio. The 20 pounds is more like 2 pounds food and 18 pounds water. Everything has fairly high water content, but tomatoes and similardruts are exceptionally high.That with its size and growing requirements i put it more into luxury than necessity personally. Luxury would be correlated with space available. But your hanging basket idea totally changes that. I can very much see that if we arent blocking too much ground light! Indeterminate varieties can be tucked around stuff easy. So i guess its not all bad. Maybe we can think of good varietes of tomatoes that are well suited fortaiwans climate and produce well. I would think certain cherry tomato varieties would be the most efficient.
@nz i am presuming most small houses especially condos, are wanting more light because they are normally quite dark. Passion fruit has quite low yields per square meter. For me, i would grow vines that can eat the foliage (malabar spinach) or that fruit with far more nutrition (beans) if trying to shade an area.
Shelving units are cheap and customizable. Well suited for taiwans balcony style. The premade stuff honestly is often ultra specific, not flexible in use and often quite weak, if not also very expensive. I think between a few store types people can rig up pretty wicked systems for way less and would last through humidity ,UV and typhoons
Palm oil is a great one. Though people also need to take into account weight limits and taiwan constuction. Dirt, water soaked durt ten heavytrees might become dangerous. Would grow them on top of load bearing posts probably.
On ginger, one will to ha e their nutrients well sorted if in a tight space. Ginger is anutrition PIG. Farms always rotate to trees, pineapple etc after ginger because the soil is so depleted. A great use of cricket frass in the system also has mnay ungal pathogens, so soil type should be c hosen carefully. Wouldnt use pea based store bought stuff much. Trmeric seems more forgiving. Certain galangals get massive. Great gets 3 meters and the root mass a couple hundred kg in the couple years in the field. Tey may be a bit too aggressive for a tiny plot consideing what they give back. I loke the idea of alliums forflavor. Nice and small and fast, and leaf/bulb all edible.
I dont personally find them worth it in a tiny balcony, be alright on arooftop. There are some high yeilding ones. I prefer bean species where tefir skin is also consumed if i am aimin for more food per square meter with limited space. Im not super up on my soy bean varieties, perhapsthe ther posters know some good yielding shade tolerant types?
Been fodder is generally pretty good as feed stocks for animals bacteria, fungi etc and makes good compost too.
I tried on a rooftop, various types of tomatoes, shallots, beans, strawberries various western types of herbs with little success.
My timing was not good? March- April-May became to hot and still not enough daylight. I think compost I bought was poor quality.
Beans French, runners, borlotti, kidney and fresh peas I would very much like to grow.
I will to try again.
Having a thread for rooftop, balcony gardens would be great.
Airflow is going to be a major problem on a balcony, which is why I suggested getting a power source set up - lights and fans are going to improve your results dramatically.
Melothria isnât a standard gherkin, it looks like a tiny, tiny watermelon. Tastes basically like a cucumber though. I reckon you could pickle it, but I prefer eating them raw. The foliage is more open and net-like than cucumber - itâs very easy to train up a piece of hardware cloth or something similar. You get absolutely loads of fruit in the right conditions.
Agree. I wouldnât bother growing grains for any reason except amusement value. In an open area theyâd probably be destroyed by birds anyway.
Humans need a certain minimum area for sustenance. Itâs just physics - a human consumes roughly 8MJ/day, and ultimately that has to come from sunlight. With a typical insolation of 15MJ/day/m2 in the subtropics and a photosynthetic efficiency of 2%, youâre looking at an absolute minimum area of 25m2 per person (50m2 seems to be the practical lower limit). Even if the insects are eating waste vegetation, an apartment just doesnât offer that surface area exposed to sunlight. At least not without some modifications to the wall design.
I guess it boils down to an issue of philosophy and necessity. My main priority would be growing food thatâs enjoyable - Iâve never bothered to grow anything that I canât use to make a nice meal (directly or indirectly). I have little personal interest in things that are âefficientâ but donât taste good. If we were literally in a crisis scenario then I suppose Iâd be happy enough to eat bugs. But I donât see any pressing need to do so at the moment - Iâd rather raise (say) black soldier fly larvae on garbage, feed them to the chickens, eat the eggs/chickens ⌠and you still end up with useful compost from the BSF frass. The system as a whole, if it remains closed, is no less efficient than consuming the bugs directly.
Iâd use the same logic with tomatoes. Yes, tomatoes are watery. But so what? They donât need to be transported anywhere, so the water isnât âdead weightâ in the usual sense. They taste good, and you can make a lot of interesting meals with them.
Iâve found that cherry tomatoes are definitely the most reliable.
IMO nutrition isnât an issue at all in tiny areas - if youâve got a lot of biological activity happening in your growing medium and some sort of waste fermenting system, youâll have all the fertility you need. The key is to let the microlivestock and the bacteria/fungi sort it out for you. A âhumanureâ recycling system would be optimum, but I imagine most people would be more squeamish about that than eating insects.
Regarding ginger specifically (or other demanding crops) ⌠I think the point here is that youâre not going to use much of these things, but theyâre very useful and have quite high economic value. How much ginger can you consume in a month? 100g maybe? A clump of ginger in a couple of square meters would feed an entire apartment block.
Personally Iâd rather grow tastier varieties, and Iâve found soy to be really finicky. But beans in general are great. They donât yield much, but the leftover plant waste is a useful mulch or compost substrate.
What went wrong? Shallots and tomatoes are pretty foolproof. âWesternâ herbs like rosemary and sage donât do well in hot weather, though. Strawberries likewise.
When I first tried growing stuff in Taiwan I wasnât using enough soil. A big planting bed works much, much better than individual pots - I suspect because it has a larger thermal mass and more potential for a self-contained microbiome.
Donât know all started well, tomatoes, onions and green beans, then just stopped growing eventually dying off.
Do have suspicions of other Taiwanese tenants doing something they didnât like me in their space? Even though I was in designated space for top floor apartment.
My ex grew a tree from avocado, I left before it came to fruition, but I was really impressed you can in Taiwan. Such a cool tree and I love dragon fruit plants.
Excellent points. I should mention my work experience and style is working from efficiency first, then adding luxury as logisics allows while maintaining safety and quality. Apologies for this, just how my head works, and this will probbably keep showing through in my posts I should also note, i can eat leaves for a meal if the situation requires it, so I am not a picky foodie!
Airflow is going to be a major problem on a balcony, which is why I suggested getting a power source set up - lights and fans are going to improve your results dramatically.
Melothria isnât a standard gherkin, it looks like a tiny, tiny watermelon. Tastes basically like a cucumber though. I reckon you could pickle it, but I prefer eating them raw. The foliage is more open and net-like than cucumber - itâs very easy to train up a piece of hardware cloth or something similar. You get absolutely loads of fruit in the right conditions[/quote]
Absolutely airflow is huge. Thats a big concern with many curcurbits. Sorry, I thought you were talking about the commercially grown ones for âdill picklesâ. I certainly havent grown the ones you mentioned (or the mini cucumbers for pickles). Any chance you could describe the right conditions in respect to taiwans climate?
This looks like an awesome avenue for more back and forth. Please dont take it as argumentative, as i am very interested in chatting with you on this ,especially because we disagree with the logistics. Its a fun one!
One reason i am a huge propenant of (certain species of) insects a food is due to their efficiency. But there are draw backs with each species. For example soldier fly. There is a food safety issue with their environment, food stuffs and gut load. So for them, i wouldnt eat them drectly simply because (unlike chickens) we would eat the entire body which includes ther gut loadâŚwhich is often nasty. i know you werent recomending that. So, we feed chickens, fish, pigs etc. The only reason that works is because we dont eat whole chickens and pigs. If feeding fish that we eat whole, i wouldnt use BSF either⌠We dice chickens up or eat their eggs. This avoids lots of pathogens and parasites. Thats great, land permiting. te lef overs can be fed back to BSF, but thise BSF fe back to hickens enter disease territory that can be dangerous. Although they are absolutely quicker than crickets, its not by that much (quick guess without checkin is 30% by fresh weight) . Species dependant, but a 6 week cycle for crickets is ample for a much safer product that can be directly consumed by humans while their feed inputs are drastically easier to obtain. unlike fly larvae, crickets will consume cellulose/lignin (not digest, but chew, swallow, poopâŚaka great for composing aerobically) rather than leave it (certain peals like onion) and will even consume bone and other hard ingredients as well. Ideally i think whole animal foods (be it insect, crustacean or fish) are best fed a diet that has gone through a plant filter to avoid most pathogens. Its just way easier with less steps with say crickets than some other insects. Also a fan of various beetle larvae if they feed on plant or certain fungal material. Thats my main thing on bugs. Plus as a powder no one cares. We all eat bugs if we eat noodles anyway its well known and not cared about. We eat meat balls, hot dogs and numerous other ground waste material without a problem, and thats while ruh with options. Hunger will relieve us of our princess like tendencies. I dont think its an issue especially now that the US FDA has changed its stance on insects as being a food contamination in order to allow them as human feed.
I am with you 100% on human waste like feces needing to be used. Its happening in taiwan now actually, especially with the ban of west to east fecal transport causing higher ferilizer costs in the east, but there are protests. but this is a disease vector that makes apartment use more risky. Possible, but not likely. I think soldier fly are great in that design of eating shit and being important in the nutient cycle , but i think this still must be run through a non underground harvested plant filter and/or a fungal fruit harvest filter to be considered safe. Or fully composted.
With your photo radiation points noted, these topics go back to economic in a way as well. Weeds, tree scraps etc can be used to feed crickets, that BSF will avoid, extremely easily while giving an incredibly fast, high quality and low energy/space demand. turning outside non food inputs into high quality food inputs directly and with relatively little effort. If we add fermentation and fungal activity (eg. allow a fungus to eat leaves, the available nutotion for insect feed is extrapolated). I have done this before with grass. Let the crickets eat as much a thye can quickly. The remainin hard stuff removed and innoculeted with wild fungi ten fed back to them. Vet little waste on 3 week cycle. And amazing soil amendments to boot! A 2mx2mx2m room can grow many kilograms of animal protein weekly on the lowball this way, from essentially raw palnt material collected outside (careful not to collect poisonous species as you will be eating it durectly inside the guts of the insects same as we do with shrimp and clams). They can even be flavored via food for ease haha.
[quote=âfinley, post:10, topic:217898, full:trueâ]
IMO nutrition isnât an issue at all in tiny areas - if youâve got a lot of biological activity happening in your growing medium and some sort of waste fermenting system, youâll have all the fertility you need. The key is to let the microlivestock and the bacteria/fungi sort it out for you. A âhumanureâ recycling system would be optimum, but I imagine most people would be more squeamish about that than eating insects.
Regarding ginger specifically (or other demanding crops) ⌠I think the point here is that youâre not going to use much of these things, but theyâre very useful and have quite high economic value. How much ginger can you consume in a month? 100g maybe? A clump of ginger in a couple of square meters would feed an entire apartment block.[/quote]
Totally right. I agree, but only if a person has their soil nutrtion inputs ready to go. A ginger plant is going to seriously fuck up a tomato plant in the same tiny plot without decent inputs. 20 pounds quickly becomes 3 if not planned well. Root crops i avoid raw manures, especially humanâŚbut insect manure is quite a lot safer on the small scale space saver. Good composting will always be necessary. I call ginger a luxury too (i love it, we go through a couple kg a month easilyâŚ3 people), but on a balcony it wouldnt be wortht the nutrient draw to payback, personally. Your suggestion of Allium species is much more attractive to me in a small space for my taste preferrences. This is pretty subjective of course But its worth noting the nutrient stealing ginger does haha.
They are yummy. But both avacado and dragon fruit are space hogs for fruit given as well. Certainly they are a luxury of space crop. At least cactus doesnt need much water. But they only have 2 seasons in taiwan unless you use light (electricity input). Nopale on the other hand we eat the vegetation and can yeild far more food.
Sure, thatâs what I meant by differences in personal philosophy. And thatâs OK. Itâs not necessary for everyone to do exactly the same thing. I can envisage a scenario where apartment block A is growing a bunch of, I dunno, taro or something on their rooftop, and someone else in block B is growing herbs and salad veg, simply because thatâs what they like doing or because thatâs what they have experience with. As long as each is aware of the existence of the other they can trade stuff between themselves.
They seem to be completely unfussy. Give them some reasonable soil and enough water, and theyâll produce fruit. The only problem Iâve found is that, although theyâre supposed to be perennials, they usually die on me after theyâve fruited. Not really a big deal since the seeds are easily saved (theyâre open-pollinated and there are no named varieties AFAIK).
Yeah, this makes sense. One of the main problems with intensive small-area âfarmsâ is the possibility of catastrophic disease, or disease cycles being perpetuated.
Yes, it has to be done properly. As you mentioned, my preference is to route composted humanure through a plant that isnât intended for direct consumption (on the farm, it feeds a L. leucocephala tree that gets heavily pruned for compost).
Itâs one of those things that would be best handled by professionals on a moderately large scale. Apart from anything else, you need a certain rate of, um, material flow to keep the process âhotâ.
If they didnât get that sorted as a priority, itâd all just collapse in on itself. The problem with this kind of system is that they have to be professionally managed. The average resident trying to cobble this stuff together from scratch would face a very steep learning curve.
If I had a 60m2 enclosed balcony, approximately how much would it cost for solar panels, lights, shelving and other materials to turn it into a huge garden? Vegetables and fruit are pretty cheap here now. Two of us use about $600nt a week for plenty of fresh produce from the market. Seems like it might take a while to get the investment back
also has mnay ungal pathogens, so soil type should be c hosen carefully. Wouldnt use pea based store bought stuff much. Trmeric seems more forgiving. Certain galangals get massive. Great gets 3 meters and the root mass a couple hundred kg in the couple years in the field. Tey may be a bit too aggressive for a tiny plot consideing what they give back. I loke the idea of alliums forflavor. Nice and small and fast, and leaf/bulb all edible.