Container Gardening: Fresh Balcony Veggies!

How would you like to make a salad, plucking the tomatoes and perhaps a cucumber from just outside your window? Even if you live in a little apartment with nothing more than a square foot of balcony (or even just a decent window, for that matter), you can grow your own vegetables through container gardening.

What container gardening is

Container gardening is growing plants in a container of any sort. This could be your average plant pot or something more exotic like a truck tire or half a rum barrel! The sort of container you use will depend on the type of plant you intend to grow as well as how much space you have.

You can also recycle household trash and use the bottoms of plastic milk jugs, ice cream buckets, or yogurt containers to plant your herbs and vegetables.

How to get started

First, you will need to decide what you want to grow. If you plan to have a pumpkin in time for Thanksgiving, you will need an awful lot of space and a pretty big container, so for small apartments, this wouldn't be a very practical plant.

Ideal for container gardening are small or climbing plants like green beans, carrots, tomatoes and the like. Vegetable seeds can be bought in many supermarkets or your local garden store or nursery, or if you prefer, buy seedlings, baby vegetable plants.

You will need containers to plant in and soil. If you live near someone who will let you dig up their backyard, the soil is free, but otherwise you will need to buy potting soil, again, available at the local nursery.

For tomatoes, cucumbers and other climbing veggies, it's a good idea to have something for them to climb up. Two or three straightened coat hangers stuck into the pot at an angle to form a tripod, with the tops tied together (twist ties work well) are perfect if you don't want to buy a special tomato cage.

For tight spaces, plants can be combined. This usually works best with a climbing plant and a root vegetable in the same container. For example, you can put green beans in with radishes and neither will suffer.

Herbs grow well together as well. Use a larger container and plant sections of each herb. This makes it nice and easy to pick up and carry into the kitchen for snipping while you cook, too!

Caring for your container garden

Container gardening has its perks and its downsides. One of the downsides is that smaller containers dry out faster than say, a garden. That means you have to be diligent with watering or your veggies will shrivel up and die before you even get a chance to taste them!

For the more forgetful gardener, there are watering devices available that are basically a funnel stuck into the dirt and filled with water. The liquid is slowly released into the soil to maintain the humidity level.

Apart from water, your plants will only require sunlight and that you pick the ripe fruit they produce. Container gardening is one of the cheapest ways for city-dwellers to get fresh vegetables.