All that glitters is not gold, and consequently even the urban vegetable garden has its downsides. These include pollution, a serious problem in many metropolitan areas of our planet.

Vegetable gardens on our balconies help our urban bees and offer them a small natural area where they can carry out their precious work.

Our goal is to make tending a balcony vegetable garden easy, productive and (as we never tire of repeating) sustainable, starting from the materials that are  used to create it.

Building a vegetable garden in a city is no simple task, especially in the case of very small spaces. Those who do not have a terrace or garden will find the space available is often too limited for it to be practical. Most city balconies in northern Italy measure 80 cm in width and 200 cm in length. With such conditions it is fundamental we organise the space well if we want  the vegetable plot garden we build to give us the desired results.

Earth day, greenhouse gas reduction, the use of electric or even hydrogen cars too often are only good intentions which remain unfulfilled;

Even if we decide to grow just a small pot garden, we absolutely must experience growing tomatoes, at least in some seasons. Tomatoes are annual herbaceous plants belonging to the Solanaceae family.

One summer, a tomato plant appeared in Grandma's garden that I had never seen before.

Over the past fifty years, global consumption of raw materials has almost quadrupled, surpassing the growth of population. In fact, in 1972, we consumed 28.6 billion tons of natural resources; this rose to 54.9 billion in 2000 and to over 100 billion in 2019. Added to the acceleration of the primary resource consumption is the growth of waste, as 90% of these resources are not part of the production cycle: the circularity index today stands at 8.6%, even lower than that recorded in 2018 (9.1%).

When I was little, I used to spend a lot of time hiding among the tomato trees. But at that time I never thought about planting tomatoes in pots.

The bottles stood in rows, on the lowest shelf of the sideboard, to keep them out of the light during the hot southern summers. Sometimes in the afternoon, I would open the window and the sun's low rays would hit them, creating pinkish-purple spots on the stone floor.