Lots of Pots

Story by Jay Smith

Jealous of your home-owning friends and their backyard gardens? Feeling ecologically cooped in your condominium? You need not spill a tear over someone else’s immaculate tomato harvest any longer! Food for Thought brings you the scoop on how to grow in the most urban of environments: the apartment or condo balcony.

Bringing to fruition a lush vegetable garden on your balcony isn’t any harder than doing so in your backyard, it just requires a sort of preparation you might not associate with vegetable gardening. To create a little Eden amidst the concrete jungle basically just means you need containers, soil, and a more thoughtful seed selection.

Before anything else, however, you need to consider your space. Because your veggies will be growing in containers, you need to have an idea of how much space you have for them. (Remember that you’ll probably want to use your balcony for other purposes, too—save space for your lawn chairs!) Ideally, your containers will be close to a faucet, too, because you will be watering your garden at least once a day.

Like conventional gardens, it is also important to consider how much light your balcony plot receives. Generally speaking, you need at least five hours a day of sunlight. How much light beyond that you receive will determine what plants will thrive: leafy vegetables like lettuce and cabbage need the least light, whereas root vegetables like beets and baby carrots need the most. (Yes! You can grow root vegetables!)

Select your containers. Pat Nielsen of Prairie Gardens and Greenhouses says they do their container gardening in pots 19”-22” in diameter. This allows space for a variety of vegetables, while the pots remain manageably moveable.

Jim Hole, gardening expert at Hole’s Gardens, recommends that you be discerning when you’re picking out pots at the gardening centre. “Old plastic pots just don’t look good—you should think of your balcony garden as an extension of your living room.”

Once you have your containers, the next step is to fill them. Unlike “real” gardens, container gardening requires potting soil, which is usually a mixture of peat moss, sand, vermiculite, and compost. (You can also find recipes on-line and in gardening books to make your own.) Real dirt cannot be used because it compacts with repeated watering and smothers seedlings. Remember, too, that potting soil, because it is so spongy, dries out more rapidly and must be watered frequently. In fact, it is hard to over water container gardens.

Hole emphasizes the significance of buying good potting soil. “A lot of places have really bad stuff” he says, “like at hardware stores. It’s important to get high-quality stuff from independent gardening stores.”

Finally, you need to select your seeds. Although the temptation to plant one or two of everything is strong—and container gardens can grow just about everything conventional gardens can—you need to be selective. Plants that use space efficiently, such as leafy greens, are rewarding crops, especially since you can use the lettuce or spinach for fresh salads. So are tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and cucumbers.

One of Prairie Gardens’ bestselling products is the “salsa pot”: Roma tomatoes, cilantro, hot peppers, basil and oregano. Tam Anderson, also of Prairie Gardens, says that, with a few heads of lettuce tossed in, this is a combination ideal for novice gardeners. Whereas you can easily purchase vegetables from the farmer’s market, plants like fresh herbs, tomatoes, and lettuces are best fresh and, thus, perfectly suited for container gardening.

Once you’ve planted your seeds, the hard part is over. Because potting soil is without foreign seeds, you probably won’t even need to weed! Just remember to water, water, water, and you’ll be harvesting some great veggies.