How to Grow a Balcony Garden

A balcony is never too small to add a garden.

Even a standard-sized apartment balcony has room to grow a garden. Your task is to optimize this space to enjoy a nice garden, giving you a hint of nature in a dense living space. You can place your containers on dollies so you can move them around on the balcony.

Things You'll Need

• Containers
• 1-, 2- and 3-gallon buckets
• Potting soil
• Large watering can or hose
• Seeds and plant starts

Instructions

1. Plan your garden to take advantage of the balcony exposure. An east-facing balcony can grow flowers, herbs, and smaller vegetables such as radishes. Cool-weather crops such as lettuce also do well with an eastern exposure that gets most of its direct sun in the morning, since leafy vegetables tend to go to seed rather than maturing if they're grown in a desert climate or with hot afternoon sun on them. A southern exposure permits almost anything, but stay away from bushy or tall crops such as corn if you have limited space. Root vegetables, such as long carrots and most potatoes, require soil depths that you really can't get in a container-based garden.

2. Line up your containers according to size. List a crop for each container, writing the container size in a notebook with the vegetable or herb. For example, radishes or herbs grow nicely in a long flower box only a few inches deep. Bell peppers need more depth and plenty of horizontal space to spread out, so you place them in 5-gallon containers.

3. Take your notebook to the nursery. Read planting instructions on the labels or ask the nursery worker to determine how many plants you should start with in each container for each type of vegetable.

4. Let the starter plants sit for 24 hours in their nursery containers to allow them to recover from handling. During that time, fill your growing containers half to two-thirds full of potting soil.

5. Make holes in the potting soil with a trowel and transplant your starter plants according to package or nursery guidelines.

6. Cut a hole in the bottom of the buckets lightly larger than the root ball of your tomato or cucumber plant. Push the root ball through the opening so the plant emerges from the bottom of the bucket, then line the bottom of the bucket with part of a feed sack or landscape fabric to form a loose shield between the top of the root ball and the hole in the bucket. Fill the bucket with potting soil as you normally would. Hang the bucket by its hanger from the upper rail or near the edge of the balcony ceiling, using a hanger rated for 50 pounds or more. A 2- or 3-pound bucket full of moist soil is heavy and the growing plant will add a lot of weight as it grows.

Tips & Warnings

• Thin out your plants as they mature. Overcrowding limits plant yield.

• Place vines such as peas and beans where they can grow up trellises and around railings.

• Make sure you hang plants securely! A 2- or 3-lb bucket full of moist soil is heavy and the growing plant will add a lot of weight as it grows.

References

• University of Florida IFAS Extension: Balcony Gardens
• The University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: Vegetable Garden: Container Garden