What My Balcony Is Trying to Tell Me About This Summer

Italy is currently in the middle of its fifth heatwave. For more than two weeks straight we’ve had 34–39°C during the day. No breaks. No rain. Overnight lows aren’t dropping below 23–24°C either. It’s the kind of stretch that’s basically impossible to get through without air conditioning. And of course there’s always someone clever enough to tell me, “well, it’s summer.” Sure, it’s summer now. But on May 28th it wasn’t summer yet, and we already hit 35°C that day. Add it all up since then, and we’ve had fewer than ten days where the temperature dipped below a merely tolerable 30°C. Thanks to El Niño, the first expert warnings are already out that next summer could be worse. Worse? How is that even possible?

The Balcony Report

Anyone who’s been following this blog for a while knows I started an experiment: how much food, and what kind, can I actually grow in a few flower boxes. I’ve learned more about farming from this than I ever wanted to. At this point, more of my plants have died than have actually produced anything, and heat is behind most of it, straw mulch and regular watering notwithstanding.

Here’s what made it through, and what didn’t.

Tomatoes survived, though the variety matters a lot. I got plenty of small tomatoes, but the hotter it got, the smaller they stayed before turning red. Even with a straw layer on the soil, I had to water them almost daily or the leaves would just droop.

Sweet potatoes are still an open question harvest-wise. Three out of four plants made it, and they’re green and putting out new growth. But they’re thirsty in a way that’s hard to overstate.

Peppers had one survivor out of several. The rest got eaten by some kind of caterpillar. The one that made it produced exactly two sad little peppers, one of which was already shriveled from the heat, despite regular watering.

Lettuce looked fine right up until the heatwave hit, then the plants dropped one after another, like dominoes.

Onions gave me an absurd amount of green onion tops, right up until the heatwave forced me to pull them. Actual bulbs? Almost none.

Celery seems to be handling the heat fine, as long as it stays in partial shade.

Chili peppers had their main branch snapped off in a storm, and the rest of the plant is now flowering again. We’ll see. Though honestly, who’s living off chili peppers anyway. Also needs a ton of water.

Bottom line: the heat killed a large share of my plants. Not because they dried out. Because their roots simply got too hot.

Now Scale That Up

That’s my balcony we’re talking about. Now picture the same thing happening across actual fields and greenhouses, and that’s where this starts to genuinely scare me. Our food supply is nowhere near as secure as we tend to assume. The rivers are running close to empty, barely any water left in them, water that’s desperately needed to irrigate crops. Which means it’s now being pumped out of groundwater instead. The same groundwater we also desperately need as drinking water.

And on top of that, we’re wasting water anyway, through leaky pipes, through industrial use, through irrigation methods that lose more to evaporation than actually reaches the plants. People are still out there watering their lawns, which might be the single most pointless way to waste water since, I don’t know, whatever the last most pointless thing was.

I genuinely don’t know if we need Europe’s first famine since 1816 before we finally get serious about adapting to climate change. Before we stop treating water, food, and our overall standard of living as things we’re simply entitled to. And that’s before we even get to electricity. Solar is great in summer. During the day. But our fridges and air conditioners need power at night too, and this heatwave happens to be arriving with almost no wind, which isn’t helping the other side of the grid either.

What the Balcony Actually Taught Me

My balcony experiment has shown me exactly one thing clearly: I can grow only a tiny fraction of my own food in a limited amount of space, and even that only works for as long as water keeps coming out of the tap. On the bright side, I did find a genuinely productive tomato variety this year that’s held up well on my balcony. Same with a sturdy celery. If anyone has other heat-tolerant plants that can survive an Italian summer on a balcony, I’m genuinely all ears.

I’ve never been able to stand Greta Thunberg. When she screamed into a microphone that she wanted all of us to panic, I remember hoping someone would just take the mic away from her. I still can’t stand her, for what it’s worth. But this summer has actually managed to put me into something like a state of panic. That much, at least, I can say for certain.

Saskia Karges is a corporate strategist for Fortune 500 companies and a solarpunk author. She specializes in bridging the gap between rigid business operations and radical creative visions for a sustainable future. Her work explores neurodiversity in leadership and the systemic shifts needed to build resilient, circular societies.

Her novel, AMATEA — Memoirs of the Last City (2026), dives deeper into these themes, exploring the thin line between a sustainable utopia and an eco-fascist dystopia. You can find her insights on strategy and creative rebellion on Medium and follow her mission to amplify unique voices and planetary health.

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Previously Published on substack

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