Growing a garden from your balcony for under 100$

Do you happen to live in an apartment or a townhouse and have a desire to grow your own fresh vegetables? Growing a garden without a yard may seem impossible but if you have a decent sized balcony with good exposure to natural sunlight you can still grow. All you need is the right supplies, plants, water, and eagerness to see your sprouts turn into flourishing plants full of blossoms and ripe vegetables. In this article I’ll cover what supplies we use, plants we’ve had success with, and what we’ve learned over the past several years from being balcony green thumbs in our town house garden.

My Vegetable Growing Backstory

When I was a young boy growing up in the lush greenery of Michigan, my step-dad and I always grew peppers and tomato plants throughout the yard. I used to love the comfort of going and picking some fresh tomatoes to snack on with a touch of salt and the warmth of the mid-summer sun. There was one time the tomato plants were so plentiful my step dad and I had an impromptu tomato war with each other. The great tomato battle of 1998 was great fun until he accidentally picked an unripe tomato and it hit me in the eye exploding in my face and bringing shameless tears which surrendered my defeat. That may have ended further of those endeavors but we still grew the plants on friendly terms throughout the years until I moved out and ventured to a much bigger city and my own apartment. Gone were the days of 1 acre yards and plentiful home grown vegetables; replaced by the 6 foot by 4 foot balconies of the one bedroom apartment and plastic plants over shadowed by the building next door.

A New Townhouse With A Better Opportunity For Homegrown Vegetables

Eventually in the big city I met Chen and we ended up serious enough to get a townhouse together . With this came a slightly larger balcony that had an eastern exposure clear to see the morning sun and an unobstructed view above so our plants could absorb all of the strongest noon rays. This balcony as well as the light switch triggered gas fireplace and one car garage made this a must have and I could envision the peppers, tomatoes, and herbs before we even put in our offer.

In mid June of the first summer after moving in we went to Home Depot eager to start our home growing adventure and here was our overzealous shopping list:

• Starter “Big Red Beefsteak” Tomato plant with several blossoms already started in a small pot $5
• One wire tomato plant support frame $2
• Pepper seeds $4
• One herb garden kit with Mint, Cilantro, Basil, and Rosemary starter plants $12
• Two medium rectangular planters $8 x 2
• One large round planter $10
• Two 25 pound bags of potting soil $7 x 2
• One container of miracle grow fertilizer. We didn’t notice if this actually did anything or not $5
• One medium watering can. We should have got a bigger watering can $7
• Two medium sized hanging flower planters $10 x 2
• Grand total – $95

With these items we were sure we could be suburban gardeners and would have fresh herbs, tomatoes, and peppers all summer long. We couldn’t have been more wrong. But before I go over why this was a stupendous failure and excellent learning experience let me tell you what we did do since not all of it failed!

1. Come back from home depot with high spirits, full of hopes and dreams, with a victory Starbucks latte in hand and supplies in the trunk
2. Drill holes in the bottom of the planters to allow for water drainage to prevent the plants from becoming flooded
3. Fill the planters with the potting soil
4. Transplant the tomato plant into the large planter container
5. Transplant the herbs into one of the medium rectangular containers
6. Plant a row of pepper seeds into the other medium rectangular container as well as the small pot the tomato originally came in
7. Add fertilizer to each of these
8. Water the plants when the soil appeared dry
9. Get excited when the pepper plants started to sprout
10. Harvest herbs occasionally for cooking and use the mint for fresh Mojitos on the warm summer nights with friends
11. Realize we didn’t harvest the cilantro properly when it started growing really tall, lost leaves, and turned into seeds
12. One of the tomato plants branches turned bright yellow and we pruned it off. Still not sure what happened here
13. Keep watering and get more excited when the tomato blossoms turned into real tomatoes!
14. Harvest 12 tomatoes! Somewhat of a victory
15. Some of the tomatoes had weird holes in the bottom. This apparently occurs from under watering
16. Harvest 3 peppers. One looked weird and may have been a home to spiders. I threw that one away.
17. Forget to bring in the peppers one day in early September when it unexpectedly dipped below freezing.
18. Brought in peppers inside, the other plants at this point were done for

Growing fresh herbs was our biggest success the first year we tried growing plants on our balcony. They tasted extremely vibrant and fresh and we could pick off what we needed. Not only was this considerably cheaper than buying them at the store it eliminated waste since the store often gives you more than you need for a few recipes

Stefan

While we did get a few tomatoes and the herbs worked out really well; all together we may have been better off just buying our harvest from the grocery store. However we still have all the supplies for this summers attempt at it. Even more valuable is the experience of growing something from scratch and the learning we have so that we can be better gardeners the next time around.

The last fun thing to share from our first year of balcony suburban gardening is the conclusion of what happened to the peppers that froze and I brought inside. After a few days the leaves fell of most of them. I was in dismay over this since peppers can be brought in and grown for three to five years and growing them in this fashion yields higher pepper returns the next year since they will blossom and bear vegetables sooner in the growing season. After continuing to water the peppers for the next week a little over half of the plants actually started growing back new leaves and getting more green! This was an amazing sign to me at the vitality of life and plants. Two months into the winter and the surviving pepper plants were looking amazing. They were even blossoming which I was able to pollinate them using q tips and have them start growing peppers. We harvested one pepper this way but started noticing a ton of gnats in our house which we traced back to the potting soil we used for the pepper plants. We used tons of products to catch the gnats and to try to kill them in the soil but they kept returning. Ultimately a few plants wasn’t worth the constant effort of killing the gnats.

To resolve this we may have been able to get new soil, uproot the pepper plants and fully rinse off the roots, discard the old soil, and replant the plants. If we had a dedicated space to keep growing them instead of the middle of the living room which is the only place with good access to light, I may have tried this.

When growing peppers inside during the winter ensure your soil doesn’t have a gnat problem. Also find a dedicated space that doesn’t disrupt the normal function of your house. Such as a shelf or a basement area if you have proper grow lights.

Stefan B

A New Season For Planting Redemption With Our Freshly Acquired Knowledge

One of the biggest mistakes we made the first year of our balcony garden was we started too late. This year we wanted to start growing seeds in the middle of April but with the corona virus shutting down everything and being very heavy in our city we were unable to do this and to get starting pots. Instead we waited until the Home Depot gardening center reopened in early May.

This is our year 2 shopping list:

1. 2 Pepper starters, not seeds $5 x 2
2. Smaller tomato plant that will be safer to transplant $5
3. Rosemary, Basil, and Cilantro. Remarkably the mint grew back from last year and looks amazing! $3 x 3
4. Flowers for our front planter, $4 x 2
5. That’s all we needed. Much cheaper than last year. Total $32

At the end of the season I’ll add on to this article to share the outcomes and learnings but so far everything has been going much better!