Before I ever considered moving into an apartment I read about apartment permaculture. Basically the smaller size of the balcony means that people need to be creative in order to grow decent crops of fruit and veggies. But because the balcony is so small, an automatic system can be created and then refined until the garden is operating maximally. The design can be kept simple because there are no weeds to pull out, no lawn to mow, no pests to worry about (well if you’re high enough anyway) and the balcony can act as a trellis for vertical growing. A well designed permaculture balcony garden can produce more than a larger regular garden and with a lot less effort.
Permaculture balcony gardens do require a labour-saving water source, and that can be tricky on a balcony where there is no tap.
This is where wetpots come in. I have not purchased a kit yet, but I plan to buy one from Mirror Paints in West Melbourne asap.
Wetpots are porous ceramic pots that have been designed to affix to poly pipe in a gravity feed watering system. A holding tank which sits above the height of the pots is filled with water and the poly tubing is attached to the water outlet. Water then flows down the poly tubing into each of the wetpots. The wetpots act as a unidirectional osmosis system where water flows from the inside of the pots through to the soil. The water only escapes the ceramic pots when the surrounding soil is dry, and so the plant roots cannot become waterlogged. This is great from an ecological perspective as well as from a practical one, because the holding tank only needs to be filled with water once per week in sunny weather.
On a high balcony like mine (I’m on the 21st floor) the water holding tank needs to be well secured. The bottom of the tank needs to be positioned taller than the height of the plant pots for the gravity feed to work and this raises the tank’s centre of gravity. I have not yet investigated the tanks to see how they can be secured to the wall, but I’m sure there is a way that this can be done safely. The tank is then filled by bucket.
Another thing I like about this system is that there is no need to apply a separate fertiliser or growth formula by hand. Simply add a liquid fertiliser to the holding tank and this will be dispersed along with the water in the ceramic wetpot. In my case I have two bokashi buckets that I fill with food scraps in order to make fermented compost full of beneficial microorganisms. I can also add the bokashi liquid to the holding tank, increasing the health of my plants without making their soil too acidic. Previously without a holding tank I would have to distribute a fertiliser such as liquid seaweed and bokashi liquid by hand and so I got lazy and often forgot, or other times made it too concentrated.
This system of watering requires good potting mix so that the water is wicked away from the centre of the pot. Using a very sandy soil would cause the water to fall straight down and the extremities of the pot would remain dry. Use plenty of organic matter mixed with the soil. In my case I plan to mix bokashi scraps into the soil to add large quantities of organic matter.
Depending on what you are growing in your pots you may also be able to save water by using greywater from the shower, bath, handbasin or washing machine. This is not normally recommended for watering edible plants, but you can make the call as the wetpots system directs the water only to the roots, not to the fruit or leaves.
Once I have the system setup I will describe the results!
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