Why I Started Growing Vertically
When you live in a 52-square-metre apartment on the seventh floor in Budapest's District XIII, horizontal space is a luxury. My balcony measures roughly 4 metres by 1 metre. After filling it with pots along the railing, I realised I was only using a fraction of the available growing area. The walls were completely empty.
Professional living wall systems cost anywhere from 80,000 to 200,000 HUF even for a small section. That was out of my budget. Instead, I spent a weekend researching DIY approaches and came up with a system that cost me under 15,000 HUF in total.
Materials You Will Need
Everything on this list is available at OBI, Praktiker, or local garden centres around Budapest. I also found some items cheaper at the Feny utca market.
- A wooden pallet or pine slats (around 2,000-3,000 HUF)
- Landscape fabric or thick felt (1,500 HUF per metre)
- Cable ties or galvanised wire
- Small pots or fabric grow bags (300-500 HUF each)
- Lightweight potting mix with perlite
- Hooks or brackets rated for your wall type
- A drip irrigation kit or plastic bottles for DIY watering
I went with pine slats because they are lighter than a full pallet and easier to cut to the exact dimensions I needed. Weight matters when your vertical garden hangs on a balcony wall.
The Build Process
I started by measuring my available wall space, keeping in mind that the structure should not block natural light coming into the apartment. I settled on a frame 120 centimetres tall and 80 centimetres wide.
The pine slats were screwed together to form a grid with pockets roughly every 20 centimetres. I lined the back with landscape fabric to hold the soil in place and prevent water from dripping down the wall. Each pocket got a small drainage hole at the bottom.
Mounting was the trickiest part. My balcony wall is concrete, which meant drilling with a masonry bit and using heavy-duty wall plugs. The whole structure weighs about 12 kilograms when fully planted and watered, so I used four mounting points for safety.
Plant Selection for Vertical Growing
Not every plant works in a vertical setup. The pockets are shallow, so deep-rooted plants struggle. After testing many options over two growing seasons, here is what performed best on my south-west facing balcony in Budapest:
- Strawberries (Fragaria) - excellent trailing habit, produced fruit all summer
- Lettuce varieties - fast growing, light root system, harvest in 4-6 weeks
- Sedums and Sempervivum - virtually indestructible, great for the top rows
- Trailing herbs like oregano and creeping thyme
- Small ferns (Nephrolepis) for shaded lower sections
Avoid tomatoes, cucumbers, and other heavy-fruiting plants. Their weight and root requirements make them unsuitable for shallow vertical pockets.
Watering Challenges
The biggest ongoing challenge is watering. Vertical gardens dry out fast, especially in Hungarian summers when temperatures regularly hit 35 degrees Celsius. My first summer, I lost several plants because I underestimated how quickly the small pockets would lose moisture.
My solution was a simple gravity-fed drip system. I placed a 5-litre plastic container at the top of the frame with thin tubes running to each pocket. It cost about 2,500 HUF from a garden centre and reduced my daily watering time from 15 minutes to essentially zero.
During winter, I remove the frame from the wall, replant it with cold-hardy sedums, and water only once a week. The structure has survived two winters outdoors without any damage to the wood, though I did treat it with linseed oil before the first frost.
Two Years Later
My vertical garden is now in its third growing season. The frame has held up well, the plants cycle through seasons, and the whole setup draws compliments from neighbours. More importantly, it has added roughly one square metre of growing space to a balcony that previously felt cramped.
If you have a bare wall on your balcony or even inside your apartment near a bright window, I genuinely recommend trying this. The initial effort is modest, the cost is low, and the result transforms an empty surface into something alive.