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I have a small garden on the roof of an appartment Building, and I have an area of 3 square meters to plant crops. Last year I planted carrots and got around 100 distributed over the year.

This year i'm planing on planting common beans, but I still have space left and don't know what to plant there. Do you have any recomendations?

For information, I live in Switzerland, it's mostly about 20-30°C and there is a lot of sunshine.

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  • What depth of soil do you have? Is it well watered? Is the soil fertile? Do you mulch it?
    – Highly Irregular
    Commented Apr 4, 2016 at 19:45
  • What's wrong with plain old tomatoes? Sheesh.
    – Ricky
    Commented Apr 4, 2016 at 21:24
  • I already have some tomatoes, but they're in a greenhouse to survive the winter. The depth of the soil is around 0.5 meters and I collect rain water, so it is always well waterd. The soil is fertile and I have my own compost, to fertilize it.
    – Jerry
    Commented Apr 5, 2016 at 5:41

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I'd go for a quick green leafy crop, silverbeet, kale or spinach in the winter, lettuce or rocket in the summer. Those are all shallow rooted and will recover from being too hot and dry for a day if you water them well. They do all require watering, preferably daily when it's hot. They will all go to seed if you let them, and easily produce fertile seeds. I did that deliberately with ours to save buying seed next year. You can trim kale at almost ground level once it's established and it will grow back, or just keep pulling leaves off and you can end up with quite a stump. The others are normally annuals.

Our kale and silverbeet both grew quite well through a Sydney summer with regular days over 35°C and a few over 40°C, while the lettuce and rocket went completely wild. We went on holiday for a few weeks and came back to a wall of metre-high rocket all gone to seed and now it's growing wild. Which is good, since we have stupid lawn and enough space that having edible rocket as our broad-leafed "weed" makes me happy :)

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  • How do I get seeds from silverbeet or lettuce when I plant them?
    – Jerry
    Commented Apr 6, 2016 at 8:50
  • I let them got to seed, they will shoot up a tall stalk that doesn't really look like flowers, but you will eventually get seed heads on it. If you just leave them the seeds go everywhere, which works fine in a larger garden, but once you're confident you have seeds set you can either tie a paper bag around them, or cut them off and dry them before shaking the seeds out. Lettuce seeds have dandelion-style fluffy bits so can be annoying to have in the garden.
    – Ⴖuі
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 7:04

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