Young China Practicing Self Care Through DIY Balcony Farms

What do you do when your store-bought potatoes begin to sprout? Plant them and grow new ones!

That’s what Wang Qinghuan, a 32-year-old writer based in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, learned from the internet in early 2018. She managed to get a basket of potatoes out of just one potato that had sprouted and she was able to make salt and pepper-garnished potatoes multiple times that spring.

Since then, Wang’s been planting foods such as blueberries, wheat, lettuce, ginger, watermelon, green figs, bok choy, spinach, and cherry radish. She started on her balcony and later moved her mini-garden to the rooftop.

“To me, growing vegetables at home is like a condiment for my busy urban life. It’s an effective and practical psychological healing process.”

Many young Chinese people are choosing to live in the city because there are more job opportunities and better living conditions. According to a report in 2020, 20% of recent college graduates choose to work in first-tier cities, like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, with 68% of them migrating from other parts of the country. China’s urban population has increased about 35% in the past decade from nearly 670 million to 902 million.

Image courtesy of Gillian Hu

But deep down, many young Chinese people still dream of a life in the countryside. As such, they build a vegetable garden in their apartment to balance out the stress of work and their personal lives. The presence of vegetables and plants also works to spark inspiration as many young gardeners share visuals of their gardening process on social media, where small communities of growers have sprouted.

The hashtag “I’m growing vegetables on the balcony” has gotten over 8.6 million views on Chinese social media platform Douban where many are sharing tips on how to take care of their vegetables. Comments on the site include the observation that, “a day of making slides and spreadsheets at work is less productive than growing vegetables at home.”

We interviewed three urban gardeners about what they're growing, how they're growing it, and why they've become so obsessed with their own little balcony Gardens of Eden.

Click “read more” to dive deeper into this DIY green philosophy.

Cover photo via Unsplash