At a glance
- The first question is not which appliance to buy, but where you are allowed to put it. In your own garden you mostly decide yourself and only hit limits once you start building, on a balcony the tenancy agreement and house rules have a say, and in an allotment it is your association's garden rules.
- Portable beats built-in for as long as you are not the owner. Anything you can put away usually needs no permission and no removal when you hand the plot back.
- Smoke decides the location, not the view. Get that the wrong way round and you will be arguing with your neighbours two summers later.
- You can do more without a water connection and without electricity than you think. A canister with a tap and a bowl cover everyday use.
- Cast iron is not maintenance free. It is simply honest: it tells you immediately whether you look after it.
- The real gain is not the equipment. It is that there are no longer ten metres of kitchen corridor between the bed and the pan.
There is that moment in July, usually around seven, when the courgette has grown so large that you have to pick it today, and the sun still stands an hour above the hedge. You could carry it inside, cut it in the kitchen, fry it in the pan and look out at the garden through the window. Or you cut it two steps from the bed and lay it on the embers.
That is what an outdoor kitchen is about. Not a fitted kitchen under the open sky with a sink, a fridge and a power strip. It is about the short distance between what grows and what ends up on the plate.
The technique for it is the same everywhere, whether you have your own garden, lease a plot or work with three square metres of balcony. What differs is the framework, and outside your own garden it is fairly tight.
What you actually need before you buy anything
Three questions, and they come in this order because the first one can settle the other two.
Where am I allowed to? On your own land you have a lot of freedom and neighbours all the same. On a balcony the tenancy agreement and the house rules decide. In an allotment the garden rules apply, and in some associations they forbid exactly what you have in mind. There is a separate section below for all three.
What will I really cook there? Be honest. If you barbecue twice a year, you do not need a worktop with storage. If you cook outside every other weekend from May to October, you will quickly notice that stooping over the fire bowl gets old after the third time.
What happens to it in winter? This is the question that gets skipped most often and costs the most. Anything that stays outside has to survive a German winter or be put away. Both cost space or money.
One summer as a trial
Before you build, cook improvised for a season. A folding table, the barbecue you already own, a crate with accessories. After three months you will know where you actually stand, where the smoke drifts and what you are missing. That insight is worth more than any plan on paper.
Starting small is not a compromise
Most outdoor kitchens that appear in spring are half abandoned by their third year. What remains is almost always the simple part: a heat source, a surface to put things down on, a pot that can take some punishment.
Start there. What you really miss becomes clear while cooking, not while planning.
Location: wind, smoke and the neighbours
In Germany the summer wind mostly comes from a westerly to south westerly direction. That is no guarantee, but it is a usable starting point: stand once on the spot you have in mind and think about where the smoke will drift on an evening with the usual breeze.
What decides your relationship with the neighbours is the smoke. It creeps along the ground as the evening cools, and it reliably finds the open patio door opposite.
Smoke decides the location, not the view.
A rule of thumb from practice
Check the distance to hedges and to anything made of timber as well: garden shed, carport, decking, house wall. A fire pit right against a thuja hedge is a poor idea, because conifers catch fire surprisingly fast in summer. There should be air between embers and anything that can burn.
Your own property: you may build, which changes the questions
For most people this is the normal case: a house, a garden, no garden rules and nobody who can withhold permission. That is exactly why the question shifts here. It is no longer whether you may, but at what point a barbecue spot becomes a building project and how close to the boundary you move.
The building law threshold. A masonry barbecue in the garden is exempt from approval under most German state building codes as long as it stands free and stays low. As soon as a roof, an extension attached to the house or a masonry chimney comes into play, the assessment changes, and then size, height and the distance to the property boundary matter. Building law is a matter for the federal states, the thresholds differ, and a phone call to your local building authority costs nothing.
The distance to the boundary. The neighbour law acts of the individual states govern how close structures may come to a boundary. A fire pit directly at the fence is badly planned even where it is formally allowed: the smoke then sits permanently with your neighbour, and a good relationship turns into a file.
Smoke as a legal question. Section 906 of the German Civil Code sets out what a neighbour has to tolerate: insubstantial interference always, substantial interference where it is customary for the locality and cannot reasonably be avoided. Where neither applies, section 1004 gives them a claim to have it stopped. Occasional barbecuing normally falls under what has to be tolerated. Daily, dense smoke into someone else's bedroom window does not.
The advantage only a house garden has
Water and electricity are already there. That makes a real worktop with a sink possible, and it is the one point where a fixed outdoor kitchen is clearly better than the portable solution. Two things go with it. Waste water belongs in the sewer and not in the bed once detergent and grease are involved. And the line running outside needs a frost proof shut off valve inside the house, otherwise it bursts in the first hard winter.
Planning on your own land also gives you the luxury of taking your time. The spot is not going anywhere. Cooking improvised for a season and building afterwards costs you nothing but one summer, and it is the only reliable way to find out where the kitchen really belongs.
What applies in an allotment, and why it is the hardest constraint
If you garden on your own land, you can skim this section. If you lease a plot, read this part twice: in an allotment a fixed outdoor kitchen is simply not permitted in many places.
The framework comes from the Federal Allotment Gardens Act. Section 3 paragraph 2 states that the summerhouse must not be suitable for permanent living. What exactly follows from that for fireplaces and kitchens is a matter of interpretation and is handled with varying strictness by the associations. What is solid is the text of the act, not the inference.
It becomes concrete in your association's garden rules, and those can be very clear. The garden rules for the city district of Karlsruhe, for example, expressly prohibit outdoor kitchens in any form in section 7 no. 22 and only permit barbecue installations up to a certain height. In the same document, section 3 letter n prohibits open fires, including fire baskets and fire bowls, on fire safety grounds.
Read those two rules together: in the same set of garden rules, the charcoal barbecue is permitted and the fire bowl is banned. If you buy a fire bowl because it looks cosier, you may have picked exactly the variant that is not allowed.
Read first, buy second
Your garden rules are a document of two to eight pages and you get them from the committee. Search it for the words fire, barbecue, structure and installation. That takes ten minutes and may save you a purchase you have to dismantle again. More on the legal framework is in our article on the Federal Allotment Gardens Act.
There are plenty of court decisions quoted about barbecuing, but most of them come from tenancy and condominium law and concern balconies and flat terraces. They do not transfer to allotments without further ado. For smoke drifting into neighbouring flats there is also state law: in North Rhine-Westphalia it is set out expressly in the state immission control act, other states regulate it differently or not at all, and Baden-Württemberg has no state immission control act of its own.
And one more point that gets passed on wrongly again and again: simply burning garden waste is not an alternative to composting. Waste is in principle to be disposed of in approved facilities, and whether and when garden waste may be burned in the open is something the states and municipalities each regulate themselves. The fire in your fire bowl is a working fire for cooking, not a disposal route.
Balcony and roof terrace: small, with rules of their own
On a balcony an outdoor kitchen is above all a question of space. And this is precisely where those court decisions are relevant that do not help in an allotment: they come mostly from tenancy and condominium law and were handed down for exactly this situation.
What decides on a balcony is not the appliance but the frame around it:
The tenancy agreement and the house rules. Many agreements regulate barbecuing expressly, some prohibit open flames entirely. If nothing is written down, the neighbourly standard applies, and on a balcony that is reached quickly, because your smoke goes straight into the windows above.
The type of appliance. Electric grills are permitted almost everywhere because they produce neither sparks nor smoke. Gas bottles, by contrast, are often ruled out on balconies, and they have no business in underground car parks or cellars in any case. Charcoal is the most common point of dispute.
The surface. Timber decking and plastic coverings do not tolerate radiant heat from below. On a balcony, a stone slab or a protective plate belongs under anything that holds embers.
What still works on a balcony
A table top grill, a folding table and a crate of accessories are entirely enough for courgette slices, peppers and herbs. If you garden in containers, you have the shortest route of anyone: the bed is two steps away, and you harvest at the moment the pan is hot.
The same applies to a roof terrace, with one addition: wind. At roof height it blows noticeably harder and shifts direction more often than in a garden, and flying sparks quickly become an issue. Up there you need an appliance with a lid.
Surface and fire safety
Under embers belongs something that does not burn and does not pass heat on. Slabs, gravel or a stone surface. Bark mulch and dry lawn are both poor ideas, and so is timber decking without a protective plate.
Flying sparks are underestimated
A gust carries sparks several metres. Keep your distance from timber walls, hedges, parasols and the garden shed, and put a full bucket of water or an extinguisher within reach. Put it where you can grab it in two seconds if it matters, not in the shed. Embers can still be hot the next morning, by the way.
In an allotment a second consideration comes on top, and it is more concrete than most people expect: every sealed surface is taken away from the area you use for growing, and how much is allowed is written as a number in your garden rules. Karlsruhe requires in section 2 paragraph 1 that at least a third of your plot remains productive garden with vegetables and fruit, and caps sealed and partly sealed areas, meaning summerhouse, terrace, paths and water basins together, at no more than 20 per cent. Other sets of rules calculate differently, but almost all of them calculate. In 2004 the Federal Court of Justice set a similar one third standard, though for the site as a whole (judgment of 17 June 2004, III ZR 281/03). What counts for you is the number in your own garden rules, because that one applies to your plot. Work out your standing area in square metres before you order any slabs.
Water and electricity, honestly calculated
The normal case in an allotment is sobering and very helpful for planning: water comes seasonally from the shared supply and is turned off in autumn. Often there is no electricity at all.
What works well without a connection:
Without a connection you get surprisingly far
- A canister with a tapTwenty litres on the worktop cover hand washing, rinsing and topping up for a whole evening.
- Two bowlsOne for the coarse soil off the vegetables, one for rinsing. The soil water goes onto the beds, not down a drain.
- A water butt nearbyRainwater is fine for the first wash of carrots and potatoes. Only the last rinse needs drinking water quality.
- No fixed drainA sink with a waste connection is a legal topic of its own and almost always a problem in an allotment. A bowl is not.
If you water regularly, you have already solved half of the water question. How to collect rainwater sensibly is covered in detail in the article on collecting rainwater.
Fire, charcoal or gas
Wood, charcoal or gas. Each of the three has a real drawback, and none of them is right for everybody.
A wood fire is the most beautiful and the slowest. You need a good half hour before the embers carry, and you make smoke. In return you use up brushwood that accumulates anyway. In some garden rules open fire is prohibited, see above.
Charcoal and briquettes are the compromise, and in many allotment rules expressly the only permitted variant. Charcoal is glowing through after about 20 to 30 minutes, briquettes need closer to 30 to 45, but they then hold the temperature much longer. Briquettes hold their temperature longer than charcoal, which makes the difference when braising in a cast iron pot.
Gas is instant, adjustable and smoke free. The price is the bottle. It is heavy, and it wants to stand upright, secured against tipping and well ventilated, preferably outdoors. It never belongs below ground level, so not in a cellar, a pit or an underground garage. There is no nationwide inspection regulation for gas installations in allotment summerhouses, which is why many associations have passed their own resolutions on it. What applies to you is in your garden rules, and Karlsruhe permits only ordinary charcoal or barbecue briquettes in its barbecue installations.
Fix the location
Watch for a week where the smoke drifts and where the evening sun stands. Only then mark out the area.Prepare the surface
Lay a non combustible covering, large enough that the area in front of the fire is covered too. That is where the sparks land.Sort out the working height
Anything you do for longer than ten minutes should sit at around 85 to 90 cm. Stooping over embers is the most common reason an outdoor kitchen quietly falls out of use.Keep the accessories in one place
Tongs, oven cloths, firelighters, gloves. A crate that stays dry and that you can carry in one go.Build only after a season
If everything still fits after the summer, you can make permanent what has proved itself.
Portable or built in
This is the central fork, and in an allotment it is all but decided.
Portable is the route with the fewest hurdles. But be careful with the shortcut that portable automatically means it is not a structure: some garden rules already count a fixed barbecue spot, a paved seating area or a larger gravel surface as structures. In that case even your movable appliance on a paved spot is a matter for permission.
Built in means the landlord's consent, a valuation when the plot changes hands, and in quite a few sets of rules simply a prohibition. Build anyway and you risk having to remove it when the tenancy ends, at your own expense.
On your own land the sums look different
If you own your plot, you can plan something built in and get one thing portable solutions never manage: a worktop that stays put in the wind, and an ember zone that works even in drizzle.
Even then the order above holds. One season improvised, then build. A masonry barbecue in the wrong place stays in the wrong place for forty years.
Materials and what a German winter does to them
No material is maintenance free. The question is which care you will actually carry out.
Stainless steel does not rust by itself, but it picks up flash rust when iron particles from the air or from tools settle on it. Wiping it down once a year is usually enough.
Powder coated steel holds up well as long as the coating is intact. A scratch down to the metal keeps rusting underneath the coating, and you only see it once it blooms.
Cast iron needs a patina, and that patina is also the non stick layer. Store it dry, oil it thinly, heat it briefly after cleaning. Forget that twice and you have flash rust, forget it three times and you start seasoning from scratch.
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Concrete and natural stone as a worktop are indifferent to heat and to frost, as long as no water sits in joints and freezes there.
Timber looks best and creates the most work. If you know you will not oil it every year, do not plan it as a worktop.
Storage and the walk to it
The working height mentioned above needs a piece of furniture that carries the pots and can be put away again afterwards. Anyone who has had one does not go back to stooping.
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In a house garden the walk is short, and yet everything still ends up back in the kitchen every time, because there is no dry place for it outside. That is exactly what makes an outdoor kitchen fall asleep: if you fetch pot, tongs and charcoal every time and put them all away again, sooner or later you cook indoors again. A lockable cupboard beside the standing area, or a crate in the garden shed, solves more than the equipment itself.
In an allotment one more criterion comes on top, one that guides almost never mention: weight. If your car parks sixty metres from the association path, you carry every cast iron pot those sixty metres, once there and once back, on every visit.
Whatever overwinters in a summerhouse or garden shed sits there damp and gets visited by mice. Charcoal draws moisture, firelighters go soft, textiles grow mould. A tightly closing box solves that for little money.
Putting it away for winter
Autumn decides what condition you start in next spring.
- Wipe cast iron dry, oil it thinly, store it with paper between pot and lid so residual moisture can escape.
- A breathable cover rather than a tarpaulin. Under a sealed tarpaulin the material sweats and rusts more reliably than in the rain.
- Store gas bottles upright and secured against tipping, ideally outdoors under a cover, and never below ground level.
- Empty the water line and canisters before the first frost.
- Let ash cool and put it in the residual waste. It has no place as a fertiliser in a vegetable bed: burning concentrates heavy metals, cadmium above all, and briquettes add binding agents on top.
A neutral cooking oil is enough for the oiling. If you want to make it easier on yourself, use a ready made seasoning paste that does not turn rancid.
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What else belongs on the list before winter is in our checklist for getting the garden winter ready and, for the tools, in the article on putting garden tools away for winter.
What goes straight from the bed into the pan
And now the part that makes the whole effort worthwhile.
Courgette is the obvious candidate, because in July more of it arrives than you can process anyway. Sliced across the grate, a little oil, done. How to see it through from variety to harvest is in the courgette article.
Peppers and aubergines take longer and cope better with the indirect zone at the edge of the embers than with the middle. The skin may go black, underneath the flesh turns soft and sweet.
Halve onions, lay them cut side down and leave them alone. They turn sweeter than you know them from the kitchen.
Put sweetcorn on the embers still in its husks, then it steams in its own moisture. Squash in wedges. On thin skinned varieties such as Hokkaido the skin stays on and turns soft, on musk and butternut you are better off cutting it away.
And the herbs at the end, not at the beginning: thyme, rosemary and sage burn over direct heat within seconds. A bunch of them goes in during the last minute, or under the lid. Whatever you do not need straight away you can dry and preserve.
Leftovers from the evening go into jars the next day. The basics for that are in the article on preserving and bottling.
Note down what worked
Which variety convinced you on the embers and which one fell apart is something you will not remember next July. A short entry in the garden journal, two sentences, is enough. After three years you have a list that fits your garden and not somebody else's.
Four stages
Meant as an order, not as price brackets. Most people stop at stage two, and that is perfectly fine.
Stage 0, balcony and terrace. A table top grill, a folding table, one crate. Nothing more fits, nothing more is needed, and the walk to the container bed is the shortest of all.
Stage 1, what you probably already own. A folding table, the kettle barbecue you have, a water canister, a chopping board. Costs nothing and answers the location question.
Stage 2, one appliance that does several things. A folding fire or barbecue unit, a cast iron pot, a pan. All of it can be put away, all of it also works on a balcony or on holiday.
Stage 3, a fixed spot with portable technology. A prepared standing area, a worktop at working height, a box for accessories. The spot is fixed, the appliances stay movable.
Stage 4, built in. Only on your own land or with express consent. Knowing that removal and valuation at handover are part of the deal.
One last thought
The finest outdoor kitchens I know are not kitchens. One of them stands on three square metres of balcony, another on a plot at the edge of town, and both consist of a spot, some embers and a pot that has been around for a few years. Everything else arrives over time when it is needed, and stays away when it is not.
The garden is a project spanning many years anyway. Your kitchen underneath it is allowed to be one too.
Common questions
Can I build an outdoor kitchen in an allotment?
That is decided by your association's garden rules, and they vary a great deal. Some sets of rules prohibit outdoor kitchens in any form, others allow barbecue installations up to a certain size. Fixed installations additionally need the landlord's consent, because they are valued when the plot changes hands and may have to be removed. Get the garden rules from the committee and read them before you buy.
Do I need planning permission for a masonry outdoor kitchen in my own garden?
Call the building authority, use the term exempt from approval, and have three numbers ready: planned height, footprint and distance to the boundary. With those you get a usable answer on the phone instead of a follow up question. Also be ready to say whether anything is to be roofed over or to adjoin the house wall, because that is exactly what the classification hangs on.
Is a fire bowl allowed in an allotment?
Often not, and that surprises people because the same set of garden rules permits a charcoal barbecue. The difference is flying sparks: a closed barbecue with briquettes throws fewer than an open bowl. If you are unsure, ask the committee in writing and keep the answer. When the plot changes hands, that is the only version you can later rely on.
Am I allowed to barbecue on a balcony?
That is usually set out in the tenancy agreement or the house rules, and both may restrict it or prohibit it entirely. Where there is no provision, the neighbourly standard applies, and the courts have ruled on this mostly for balconies and flat terraces. Electric grills are almost always unproblematic because they produce neither sparks nor smoke. Gas bottles, by contrast, are frequently ruled out on balconies. In every case a non combustible surface belongs under the appliance, because timber decking does not tolerate the radiant heat.
How often am I allowed to barbecue in the garden?
There is no nationwide number, and the much quoted rulings with fixed upper limits come mostly from tenancy and condominium law and concern balconies. For a garden what counts are the garden rules, the law of your federal state and the neighbourly standard. In practice the deciding factor is usually not how often, but whether the smoke drifts into someone else's living or sleeping rooms.
Where does the washing up water go if there is no drain?
Plain soil and rinsing water without any detergent may go onto the beds. As soon as detergent or grease is involved it belongs in the sewer and not in the garden, and in an allotment this is a point associations take seriously. In practice that means rinsing the coarsest soil off in a bowl and pouring that onto a bed, and doing the actual washing up at home. That removes the drain, which is where most outdoor kitchen plans come unstuck.
Is a cast iron pot worth it, or will an ordinary pan do?
To begin with, whatever you already own will do. Cast iron pays off once you cook for longer than twenty minutes: it holds the heat evenly, forgives fluctuating embers and goes straight into the coals. The price for that is weight and care. Oil it dry after every use and it will last you a lifetime.
Legal information without warranty
This article gives an overview and is no substitute for legal advice. Depending on where you garden, a different body of law applies: in your own garden the state building code, your state's neighbour law act and the neighbour law provisions of the Civil Code, on a balcony your tenancy agreement and the house rules, in an allotment the Federal Allotment Gardens Act together with your lease and the garden rules. All three are additionally overlaid by state law and municipal provisions, and the differences between two places can be considerable. What matters is always what applies specifically to your property, your flat or your plot.
Sources and further reading
- Federal Allotment Gardens Act, in particular section 3 paragraph 2 on the summerhouse: gesetze-im-internet.de
- German Civil Code, section 906 on the introduction of imponderable substances such as smoke: gesetze-im-internet.de
- Closed Substance Cycle Waste Management Act, sections 17 and 28 on waste disposal: gesetze-im-internet.de
- State Immission Control Act of North Rhine-Westphalia, section 7 on smoke and odours: recht.nrw.de
- Garden rules for the city district of Karlsruhe, section 2 paragraph 1 (productive garden share and sealing), section 3 letter n (open fires) and section 7 no. 22 (outdoor kitchens and barbecue installations): karlsruhe.de
- Federal Court of Justice, judgment of 17 June 2004, III ZR 281/03, on the allotment character of a site
- The Federal Allotment Gardens Act: what applies in an allotment
- Getting the garden winter ready: the checklist
- Harvesting, drying and preserving herbs
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