Successful, vertical, high yield urban gardening for terraces, balconies and lawns
Hi, my name is Antje Cobbett and I've been gardening all my life. For the last 14 years my husband and I ran a 7000 square meter homestead in some remote mountain valley near the Costa Blanca in Spain. Almost total self-sufficiency. We had animals, trees, fruits, veggies.
Our circle garden in the mountains:
We made our money selling home made items or holding spinning courses on medieval markets along the coast. Life was great until the crisis hit. Almost from one day to the next people who even had money got frightened and didn't spend any money at all anymore. They were just "sitting" on their money.
Spinning on medieval markets - dog hair on this occasion:
So my husband went to Germany for a few years to work and I continued on our homestead alone. Obviously I couldn't do it all by myself, so I downsized to the extent that I only grew my own food, made my own firewood, the usual and I was also lucky enough to make a bit of money on the internet writing for various platforms where they actually paid money for articles.
The economy in Spain really never picked up completely, but we were lucky enough to be able to buy a small, modernized cave house, because we realized that running a homestead is simply too hard work as one gets older. Yes, we are fit and healthy, but we don't know how long we will live, so we have to make things super simple and super efficient when growing our own food.
Without realizing it, we are probably a couple of friendly, peaceful anarchists. We have taken responsibility for our own lives, learned to become herbalists and studied NLP. Therefore we have no need for governments, doctors, dentists, psychologists, vets, hospitals or pharmacies. Neither do we need health insurance or any other insurance, they are all a scam anyway. We rather spend that money on proper food. Yes. Food. We love healthy food. And that makes us independent from the supermarkets, Monsanto and the rest ...
Now, living in a cave in the south of Spain is rather special. We don't have a garden, only a small terrace, so we plant in containers.
Our modernized cave house. You can only see the terrace and the front of the cave, the rest is underground:
The temperature in such a cave is always 18 degrees Celsius, a bit more in summer and a bit less in winter. Yes, you guessed it, this is the ideal temperature to grow mushrooms all year round. In fact, it's so ideal that we only have to buy a grow box every few months, they are so prolific.
Another thing that we set up quickly was 3 earthworm hotels. Get 3 big plastic paint boxes, fill them with soil, earthworms, a bit of water and food scraps. Ours are spoilt, they get the lettuce from the garden and some left-over soft sweet fruit because earthworms love sweet stuff. Again the cave temperature is ideal for them, so they multiply fast. More about earthworms in a later chapter about animals for small spaces, i.e. quails, chickens, geese, rabbits.
Setting up our vertical garden took a bit longer. We moved into our cave last year (2016) end of November. December is still a good month in the south of Spain for growing, so we started putting out seeds right away and every week we bought trees, bushes, flower and vegetable plants ready made on the local market that takes place every Wednesday. The owner of the stall is Miguel and he is such a sweet and knowledgeable person, we couldn't be happier buying plants from him.
We also definitely needed the internet to buy all the things we needed for the garden especially soil amendments like Azomite and seabird guano as well as a foliar spray called "Sonic Bloom". Occasionally we also use Kelp, horse manure, hemp chips, spent coffee grounds and other good soil amendments. More about these things later as they are most necessary when planting a lot of plants in a small space.
We also do companion planting and sensible gardening by the moon, so look out for this future chapter.
Just to mention it - another income stream of mine is crocheting amigurumi gifts on demand. Here is a small example:
Amigurumi gifts made with love:
And finally: I know I shouldn't do this, but I will. I want to invite you to write to me personally with questions and suggestions or experiences of your own. I always welcome those emails and I'm certainly not afraid of spam, scam, trolls and other internet toe-rags. I've learned to deal with them. Because ...
... fact is that in the early days of the internet we always wrote emails to people we liked and even invited them to come and visit us, especially Americans who travelled to Europe and we miss all that.
So here I'll stick my neck out and invite you to please write to me: antjecobbett@gmail.com which is my primary email account. I will reply. I also found that Steemit.com is a very secure platform with mostly sensible folks who can spot a troll in a split second. I can, too! ;)
Looking forward to hearing from you soon!
Love,
Antje