Balanced Bites

Food is the one thing everybody needs every single day. It is also the first thing that runs short.

Around us, most people can find something to eat. Finding a balanced meal is the harder part. When money is tight the plate fills with whatever is cheapest, and vegetables and fruit are the first things to disappear from it.

Schools and children's homes feel this most. Many depend on produce that is bought in or donated, which means the vegetables arrive when somebody else can afford them. When a donation stops, so does the kale.

So we asked a smaller, more stubborn question: what if a place could grow part of its own food, in the space it already has — a wall, a corridor, a strip of concrete by the gate?

Balanced Bites is what came out of that question. It is run by students, and it puts three things in the same basket: urban farming, nutrition education, and support for the communities near us.

We had two problems facing each other: plastic with nowhere to go, and gardens with nothing to grow in.

We asked classmates, families and neighbours to stop binning their plastic bottles and start saving them for us. Sacks went up at the school gate and outside the staff room. People brought bottles from home in shopping bags, in backpacks, once in a wheelbarrow.

A bottle that would have spent decades in a dump site costs us nothing and holds soil perfectly well. That is the whole trick. Every planter on this page was rubbish a week earlier.

Bottles were free. Seedlings were not — so we asked.

We partnered with a local nursery and a few supporters who donated seedling trays and gave us advice we did not have. They also told us, politely, which of our first choices would never survive in a bottle.

We did not pick crops by what we like eating. We picked by what tolerates a shallow container, part shade, and a school holiday with nobody around to water it.

Planting day was loud, muddy, and the best day of the project so far.

Each seedling went into its bottle roots first, soil pressed in gently around the stem, then watered straight away so the soil settles against the roots instead of leaving air pockets.

We hung the rows on the east-facing wall, where they get direct morning sun and shade through the hottest part of the afternoon. Bottles sit a hand's width apart, and the rows are staggered so an upper bottle does not stand in the light of the one below it.

The part that mattered most was not agricultural. Every student planted their own bottle and wrote their own name on it. A garden that belongs to everybody gets watered by nobody.

The name is Balanced Bites for a reason. Growing kale is only half of it — knowing why the kale belongs on the plate is the other half.

Alongside the garden we run short talks, ten minutes at a time, on what a balanced plate actually looks like. Six things, none of them expensive.

One thing we learned the hard way: growing a vegetable does nothing if it is then boiled to death. Half of our nutrition talk is now about cooking greens briefly, in a little water, with the lid on.

The wall is full. The plan from here is simply more walls, in more places, run by people who are not us.