Creating an Urban Micro Garden.

In the city where I live, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, it is very crowded. Like most major cities really. People live in apartments where only the person in the bottom apartment may have a garden and sometimes the people all the way at the top have a roof terrace. However, even the garden that some people have are usually very small. Mine is 10 square metres for example but it gets zero sun. So it's good for storage but nothing else. The front of my house gets sun from the early morning till late afternoon. So that's where I want my garden! But since it's a bit anti-social to use up all of the sidewalk (and a bit illegal, too ;-) it has to be small, very small... Other people had the same problem and the idea of urban micro gardens (or sometimes urban micro "farms" if they actually grow food!) was born.

This blog post shows how I made mine.

Last weekend I went to a garden centre and bought the borders and proper dirt. It's actually all quite inexpensive. Check your local garden centre for prices. I needed 6x50cm and 10x8cm pieces and 160 litres of dirt. I also bought some plants.

This is the "before" picture. Pretty ordinary. But that's about to change :-)

Clean the place up a bit. It will make working nicer.

I placed the border around the windows to see where it needed to go exactly and which tiles needed to be taken out.

One tile in the middle was easily removed so that's where I started.

All the tiles have been removed.

The next step is to dig a big hole. I made mine about 20cm deep. In the middle  I made it about 35-40 deep though because I'm going to plant a big rose there which needs more dirt than the smaller plants.

Make sure the "bottom" is as flat and straight as possible and then start by putting in the side and continue all the way round. I used a piece of brick that came out of the ground as a measure to make sure all the parts stuck out evenly.

Create the whole border this way. Be accurate, it saves you from having to do things again.

Fill it up with dirt.

It's a bit tricky putting the tiles back because there may not be enough that fit. I barely made it. A few holes had to be filled up with sand here and there.

The next day I put up this grid for the rose to grow on.

Now it is finally time for the fun part! The planting :-)

(Click to enlarge)
And here it is, an Urban Micro Garden!