How to Set Up a Roof Top Balcony Garden with Integrated Worm Composting

I was recently looking for tips on how to set up a roof top vegetable garden and a worm farm for my in-laws living in Chennai, India. I had a few concerns to set up the garden and worm farm:

• It is bloody hot in Chennai – like a daily 40°C during summer. My worms in Australia would die at this temperature stuck in their little plastic farm!
• How to enable an easy watering system for the garden, cheap and low maintenance
• What are the (preferably recycled) materials needed to make it happen

Turns out after searching and I found this awesome roof top garden set up done by a certain Rishi Gangoly on Youtube.  It’s so great I thought I should try it, and share it!

It involves a second hand tank, a couple of big pipes with lids, some wire and 4kg block coconut fiber for the garden bed base (good for nutrition) and I believe around 50kg of soil (depends on how big our tank is). And a little bit of sweat and handy work !

The best thing is that this set up is allowing to have a compost “bin” embedded in the garden bed where worms will most likely come and eat the food craps. And it also has a smart and easy watering system involving a big tube running through the garden bed that you can fill up twice a month and keep the garden hydrated.

Check out the video for step by step instructions given by Rishi as he was setting this up for himself:

As a side note, I found that the Tamil Nadu state is offering cheap DIY Terrace gardening kit, which could be useful to anyone wanting to start a garden on a roof top in this state.

If you do have roof top garden set up tips for a very hot weather please share in the comments!