My permaculture balcony

How do you bring nature into your home when you live in the city? Is it possible to create small, productive systems that respect nature in an urban environment?

This is Hervé Chabert's challenge, as he demonstrates that you can set up a veritable mini-forest on your balcony! It's the perfect way to satisfy your desire to garden and produce a small part of your own food.

The activity is fun and easy to do, and brings many satisfactions: adopting a more ecological lifestyle, eating healthy produce, embellishing your daily life...

In this book, Hervé Chabert shares his unique experience and teaches us how to transform an environment that is a priori hostile to crops (lack of soil, presence of wind...) by taking inspiration from nature to make it productive and full of life. He organized his balcony by taking into account all the elements involved in the ecosystem he was trying to recreate: water, light and heat management... All the major principles of permaculture are present, concentrated in 10 m2, demonstrating that it's the organization of the environment and taking into account the various interactions that take place there that count.

Get started, enjoy yourself, trust yourself and dare to follow your intuition: these are his main tips, accompanied of course by all the lessons he's learned from his own experience about choosing the right substrates and containers, sowing or repotting correctly, choosing the best locations and exposure, creating micro-climates, optimizing volumes, maintaining plantations, managing absences...

Tomorrow's city will be greener...

Hervé Chabert - Éditions Terre Vivante - 120 pages