Time to jump into the joy of gardening — even if you don’t have a backyard to grow plants and vegetables.
Container gardening is all the rage. With the right tips, living in an apartment or condo is no deterrent to nurturing beautiful blooms and verdant veggies on your balcony throughout the spring and summer months.
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Creating a balcony garden requires some planning and taking into consideration how much sun or shade your outdoor space gets throughout the day. Use potting soil, not garden soil. Potting soil is aerated, giving roots room to grow.
Buy larger containers
While you may be tempted to dot your balcony with small pots, don’t. Larger containers allow plants’ roots space to grow and make plants healthier.
Start with fragrant herbs
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Growing herbs is an easy, delicious way to get started on your balcony garden. Garden centres, even grocery stores, sell potted herbs or even pre-potted herb gardens, usually in some combination of basil, rosemary, parsley and sage.
Buy pots with drainage. Water often. Plant in direct sunlight.
Vegetables great for containers
Tomatoes are among the easiest vegetables to grow in containers, provided your balcony gets five to six hours of sunlight a day. If your space is limited, look for dwarf varieties, such as cherry tomatoes.
Beans are well-suited to container gardens. Find a spot that gets lots of sun, a pot at least one foot deep and a trellislike structure for the beans’ vines to grow.
Peppers, particularly smaller varieties such as chili or jalapeno, grow well in containers, but it must be a large, deep pot. Give it full sun and fertilize from when the plant flowers until it’s done producing peppers.
Mix in some pretty blooms
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Spectacular spring and summer sun-loving bloomers include hydrangea, petunia, fuchsia, pansy, chrysanthemum hibiscus and impatiens. Begonias and ferns do best in lightly shaded environments.
Lush greens
Low-maintenance plants that bring the green to your balcony garden include aloe vera, spider plant, devil’s ivy, jade plant, succulents. Or try a Boston fern with its frilly fronds hanging from your balcony ceiling.
is a journalist in Etobicoke reporting hard news, politics and health and human-interest stories. Tamara loves to travel and is a fan of foreign and independent films.
