Welcome to our small balcony food garden! We’ve been growing and harvesting a surprising amount of food from our small container garden and we’ve been able to eat from it all summer long. Probably partly because we have so many containers now, but also because we’ve been doing succession planting, where we plant new crops once the previous one is not producing much anymore. So we’ve always got some seedlings on the go, and we’ve always got something fresh to eat.
We are growing some of our favourite vegetables, including three types of cherry tomatoes, two types of sugar snap peas, as well as kale, beets, and cucumbers, and we are also growing jalapeño peppers and purple beans for the first time!
Three of the herbs we use all summer long are parsley, basil and mint, so we’ve got lots of those growing. We also had cilantro and dill but they went to seed once the weather got hot so we’re going to plant more when the weather cools down.
The balcony is a good size for us, but we’ve got some seating and a storage box for cushions on one side, so the garden as it is right now is about 45 square feet or 4 square meters. But we love having plants to take care of and fresh food to eat right outside our door so it seems inevitable that the garden will take over a bit more space on the balcony next year…
We mainly plant in 3 different types of containers, rectangular planter boxes, shallow window boxes, and round pots. One of the reasons we try to stick to just a few types of containers is because we don’t have much space to store them over the winter, so buying the same shape and size is going to make it easy to stack them together at the end of the season so they take up less space. We also like using plastic containers instead of clay pots or wood boxes because they are super lightweight and durable.
We are constantly moving the containers around when we water, weed, and harvest, and we also move them around to protect the plants if it’s too hot, too windy, or if there’s a big storm. So it helps our backs when they are easy to pick up.
Setting up this balcony garden has been quite a lot of work and it’s definitely been a learning curve trying to figure out how to keep our plants alive and thriving up here. We’ve been trying out different fertilizers to keep the plants healthy, we’ve been managing different insect pests like aphids and cabbage moths, and we’ve figured out how to keep the garden watered if we’re away. But by far the biggest challenge has been the elements, and protecting the garden from heat waves, downpours, and high winds.
We absolutely love growing food and having plants to take care of, and we've already started ordering seeds for next year's urban balcony garden :)
If you want to see more gardening and homesteading videos, check out our Growing Food playlist here: • Growing Food
We’ve featured some really inspiring folks who are growing food on balconies, rooftops, backyards, and homesteads.
