If you’ve never had a garden and if you’ve never grown vegetables it not fair to take anything for granted. There are a lot of things you’ll need to learn and one of them is how much room some plants demand. Now, when you’re growing in containers and certainly if you use my hydroponic planter system, you can reduce the space that any plant will take up but some choices – frankly are beyond hope.

When you’re considering what to grow, a good place to learn about their needs is from seed catalogues and another – even better source – is from other gardeners, but there just never seems to be a master gardener handy when you want one!
Some plants like cucumbers, and tomatoes can be trained to a trellis and indeed so can some melons and squashes – but not all of them.

Pumpkins and watermelons for example, turned loose on your balcony would not only take it over completely- they could probably take possession of your neighbor’s balcony and your living room too. Corn is another example of a plant that’s entirely unsuitable for a balcony. For one thing it’s tall but you don’t grow it to a trellis which means that on your balcony the wind would easily break it but more to the point, you need to have a fairly large patch of corn growing to be assured that it will pollinate properly and therefore actually produce any corn.
As you’re making your list, keep the really large plants off.

Actually, for what it’s worth – here are the plants that I think are best suited to balcony vegetable gardens:
Beans, peas, some cucumbers, some sweet peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, some eggplants, salad greens but not many cabbages and most annual herbs.

Asparagus and rhubarb are not suitable since they’re perennials.

Living in Toronto, it’s easy to be jealous of someone in the south with a growing season that seems to me to last all year. But you live where you live and if you want to enjoy the fruits of success it’s necessary to respect the limitations of your growing season.

Although I successfully grew hot peppers last year, some of them came in just under the wire and I tend to favour short season tomatoes. Crops (although “crops” seems like a bit of an exageration when describing the amount to be grown in containers) that I will probably never try include such long season goodies like cantalopes and honeydew melons.

Respecting your growing season and what you would like to grow also means that some vegetables like spinach will grow early and late in the season, but not during the “dog days”of summer – although last summer in Toronto we didn’t have anything like that.

Look, if I talk too long here, all that will happen is that I’ll make a very simple idea much too complex and instead of helping you grow something great to eat on your balconies or decks or patios, I’ll just scare you off.

That is NOT my plan. So I’ll wrap up with this. Do just a little bit of research on the length of your growing season and get a feeling forthe things that just need more time to grow than your summer will allow.

Balcony gardens are special. Because space is at such a premium, the vegetables or herbs you grow on your balcony garden really should be chosen with a lot of care. After all, when you only have a little bit of room, it’s best to get the most possible bang for your buck!.
Over a series of 5 posts I’ll review what I think are the five most important considerations when selecting the vegetables or herbs that you grow on your balcony. They won’t be presented in any particular order – because frankly I think they’re all pretty much indespensible.

The first principle I’d like to present you with is the idea that you need to grow something your already know and already like. This might sound very simplistic, but seed catalogues and nurseries can make even a vegetable you don’t care for sound irresistable! (Heaven only knows I’ve fallen for it more than once.)

If you have a 20×20 foot plot in the ground you can afford to take a chance, but when you only have a small amount of room, go with a proven winner that you know you’re going to enjoy.

Also, you need to adopt a very Stephen Covey idea and begin with the end in mind. By that I mean only grow vegetables or herbs that you not only like but you actually know exactly what you’re going to do with. to make my point, just think of zucchini. Every year at the end of the gardening season when abundant harvests are generously distributed to friends, family and neighbors – what gets handed out more than anything else? Zucchini! Why? Well, because almost everyone plants too much of it and almost no one knows what to do with it! Do you?

Vegetable gardening on your balcony deserves a bigger reward than harvesting your crop and then watching it go bad when you realize you really don’t know exactly how to cook or preserve it or what to eat it with. I did that the first time I grew Thai Basil – which I love and NOW know what to do with.

Think it through!

Today, once I get my son out of bed to work the camera, I’ll be making the first video on how to assemble an outdoor hydroponic garden. I’ll also start work on a PDF version you can download that will have more detailed instructions.

But I know that anyone who is interested in growing vegetables – hydroponically – will have a ton of questions and I don’t really know what they will be.

So, if you have questions about how you can use the system that I use to grow container gardens – vegetables, herbs or flowers. Please send me comments and questions.

There are so many things I can say and so much I can write about, it would be incredibly helpful to me to know what you would like to know.

Thanks,
Lorraine

By Anna Ruth

Are you familiar with the Free Radical Theory of Aging? It has nothing to do with politics and is one of the most widely accepted theories around right now to explain the process of cellular and system degeneration. It’s about how your body acquires and produces unstable molecules called free radicals. Because nature seems to abhor instability, a molecule that is missing an electron will steal it from a nearby molecule, or atom.  This creates a new free radical or oxy-radical which in turn steals from another neighbor. If left unchecked, this process can create damage that begins at a cellular level and as these damaged cells accumulate, the systems that they are a part of start to break down.

Antioxidants are nature’s answer to free radicals. Antioxidants are molecules that can donate an electron to a free radical without becoming unstable themselves. They halt the chain reaction and prevent the damage.

You only need to look at the face of a 60 year old sun-worshipper to see how cellular damage ages us. We can see the skin, but we don’t see the accumulated damage to the liver or the heart or the brain. Meanwhile, arteries get clogged with cellular debris and joints become swollen with chronic inflammation- of damaged cells, all directly caused by free radicals.

So where do they come from? There are two main sources of free radicals – one source is the outside environment – think of pollution and cigarette smoke and the host of toxic substances that we inflict on our bodies. And then on the other hand there are the free radicals that are made by our own bodies.

We produce free radicals through four different mechanisms.

To create energy we use oxygen as fuel and generally convert it to water. But, like many other processes in nature the fuel doesn’t always burn as cleanly as we would like, resulting in damaged versions of the oxygen molecule.

Our body uses some oxidants to fight chronic infections, bacteria and parasites. Unfortunately, in the process other cells in our body are exposed and vulnerable to the free radicals. We fight fire with fire and sometimes manage to burn ourselves in the process. We also produce hydrogen peroxide- another free radical version of oxygen – when we metabolize some fatty acids.

Our bodies produce free radicals in millions of and millions of cells and do it almost constantly. Luckily we also have the ability to produce the remedy in the form of powerful free radical scavengers like CoEnzymeQ10 and Glutathione.

In an effort to combat the external sources of oxidants – like drugs, pesticides, cigarette smoke and other foreign and toxic chemicals our bodies creates an enzyme called Cytochrome P450. However, in calling up this necessary enzyme, we create a by-product, free radicals. The toxins damage us on their own, and we damage ourselves to fight them. It ages us.

If you’re interested in helping your body combat the damaging effects of free radicals, you need to support your supply of antioxidants. Some antioxidants, like Vitamins C and E can be supplemented and you simply cannot – in my opinion overestimate the importance of a good diet. Other antioxidants like Glutathione cannot be supplied as a supplement although you can nourish your body with the precursors -raw materials- to produce it yourself.

Anna Ruth writes about why MAXGXL is different from a glutathione supplement and a better alternative to helping boost your levels Glutathione the Master antioxidant