Create a beautiful city garden

PHOTOS: Dook | PRODUCTION: Klara van Wyngaarden | CONSULTANT: Annemarie Meintjes

City dwellers are leading the green revolution – you don’t even have to be a landowner or farmer to help free humankind from hunger.

Here’s how to grow your own greens on a balcony or in a small city garden.

• Give the tiniest balcony a designer edge with unusual planters.

• Beer boxes have a wax layer, making them great as planters. Create a trendy vertical garden by attaching a sheet of chicken wire to a wall. Then use cable ties to fix the box planters to the wire panel – a clever way to beautify the suburb while producing chillies to add flavour to your table.

• Bird feeders are not only the latest universal decor trend, they’re also a sure way to lure birds into your outdoor living space. Prepare breakfast for the birds in your garden by looping a piece of thin wire through a seed block. Cover one side of the block in peanut butter and press it into wild-bird seed mix, making sure the peanut butter is fully covered with seeds. Bake the roll seed side up in an oven at 100 degrees Celsius, let it cool and hang it from a tree.

• Go green with the cabbage family, which can be grown all year round in most climates. Cabbage is an excellent source of vitamin C and contains glutamine, which has anti-inflammatory properties. Chinese cabbages thrive in pots – pick the outer leaves when needed and let the rest continue to grow.

• Most technological consumer products are fitted securely into polystyrene moulds and then boxed, but paper traders only run off with the boxes and leave the non-biodegradable moulds behind. Use the “everlasting” promise of polystyrene packaging by lowering it into prepared earth – it forms the perfect divisions for a salad garden.