How to Grow an Apartment Garden:

Apartments are a helpful (and affordable!) convenience in the modern world, but apartment dwellers often lose out on an extraordinarily rewarding part of life: gardening. Especially if you're moving from a house with a yard to an apartment, thinking about gardening can be frustrating. However, you can have a garden in your apartment and here's how to do it:

Outdoor Apartment Gardening
If you have a small outdoor space like a patio, you can easily build a relatively large garden there. Consider using the entire outdoor area as your garden to create more space. Since you can't grow plants on concrete, though, you'll need to use some sort of container. Baby pools are excellent options for small apartment gardens and will accommodate several plants. You can also try large tupperware containers or even build a wood box garden. Make sure you plant plants that are suitable for the amount of light the outdoor area of your apartment receives. Plants like lilies that require a lot of light will typically not do well, for example, on a shady porch. Read up on the plants you want to plant and find the best match.

Indoor Apartment Gardening
If there is not an outdoor area available to you at your apartment, there are still many options for growing a garden. Herbs are especially hardy indoor plants. Consider buying a window box and planting herbs like arugula, thyme, and basil on your windowsill. If flowers are your thing, there are many species of flowers that will thrive inside, including orchids. Visit your local gardening store and ask what flowers do well inside in your area. If there is a particularly sunny area in your house, you can set up hanging flower baskets as well. You can also buy a fluorescent bulb to provide your plants with artificial light. Simply mount the bulb above your plants, and you'll substantially broaden the variety of plants you're able to grow. Using this method, you can grow many plants that require a lot of sunlight right in your apartment!

Other Things to Keep In Mind
The key to success with apartment gardening is to plant intelligently. Most apartment gardens cannot accommodate large plants, so avoid tomatoes, blueberry bushes, and other plants that will take up all of your space. Lettuces, squash, many herbs, and countless flowers, however, will remain small enough to fit in your garden. If you're new to gardening and are interested in learning about easy plants to grow, this article may help.