On earlier posts I’ve covered some of the basic areas you should think about before deciding what vegetables to grow on your balcony, deck or patio. If you’ve gardened for years then you already know how to accommodate the length of your growing season and you probably already have a good idea how to estimate how big your plants will get. But if you’re new to growing – especially to growing vegetables – these are important areas to consider.

I was going to talk about growing vegetables that will allow you to get the greatest possible yield from a small amount of space, but maybe if you’re already going with something that is fairly compact we can deal with concepts like multiple crops from the same small planter later.

I’ve seen articles and blog posts that talk about the money that you can save growing vegetables on your balcony. Go fish! In my experience if you’re only growing vegetables in containers on your balcony because you think you’re going to make a noticeable dent in your grocery bill- I’m sorry- you’re going to be dissappointed. Yes, you might harvest a few quarts of tomatoes at the end of the summer, but you’re going to do it at the same time that every store is flooded with cheap local produce and you could have bought your entire crop for $10.00.

But what you can do is

grow something different

– not outlandish- just a variety that you can’t already buy. If you like cucumber, why not try a beautiful little white Dragons Egg Cucumber, or a Chinese Beauty Heart Radish or how about a Green Zebra Tomato?

By taking a vegetable that you already love and growing a unique version of it, you’ll not only have the pleasure of picking your own food right from your planter, you’ll be able to treat yourself to something that you wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to enjoy. Just for the record, your local grocery store will not be filled with produce that was grown because it’s unique or unusually healthy or tasty. In fact, most produce grown commercially is selected because of it’s uniformity of size or shape, its ability to ripen in the box or survive the rigours of being trucked across the continent. You can do so much better than that. Go for something special!

Just imagine for a second what a hoot it would be to invite your friends or family over to dinner and stun them with these awesome cool green striped tomatoes or green radishes with a bright red center. Now that’s something that you can’t find in every grocery store and they taste delicious. Check out some of the wonderful heirloom vegetables at http://www.rareseeds.com

Yes, it means you will start your vegetables from seed, but trust me – it’s not difficult to do and its a ton of fun.

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!

Attention frustrated gardeners. Do you work out of your home for too many hours every day? Do you live in an urban condo, apartment or townhouse with no place to dig a garden? Are you waiting for the chance to grow a garden? Well, you don’t need to wait any longer.

If you have a balcony or a patio or deck or even a postage stamp sized backyard there is only one non-negotiable requirement to grow your own vegetables. What you need is light. You need a spot with at least 5 hours of direct sunlight every day – unless you want to bring it all indoors and grow them under lights – and come to think of it – if you want – I can show you how to do that.

There is nothing you can do that is more in keeping with a long list of “it’s about time” trends than sweep off your deck or balcony take out some containers and use them to grow organic produce for your own table. Not only is it tastier than what you’ll buy in the store, it’s waiting for you, literally on your doorstep. Besides, when you release your hidden gardener, you might also find out why gardening is such a hugely popular hobby. It’s a calming, infinitely rewarding pastime that you might fall in love with. I did.

I started my first garden when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Everything died, from a combination of ignorance, neglect and the simple fact that my dad, anticipating my possible shortfalls as a beginner gardener allotted me a corner of the yard that were missing both rain and sun. I didn’t really care and over the years kept trying.

Right now I’m living in rental accommodations and don’t have any ground to call my own. I stopped putting gardens into my landlord’s yard because every time I moved I got to watch the next tenant kill my labor of love and I swore I’d never do it again. But, recently my interest in vegetable gardening was rekindled when I discovered an awesome technique for growing vegetables in containers. Using a gravity-fed, hydroponic system that is almost criminally easy to maintain, I harvested a wealth of peppers, tomatoes and simply the best salad greens that I’ve ever enjoyed and it was 100% organic.

If you’re still reading, I’m gathering that the idea interests you. So stay with me and I’ll tell you exactly how to do it…..although it’s going to take a few articles.

Step 1

How to Choose What to Grow

While there are a lot of things that can easily be grown in containers, some plants don’t do nearly so well. Luckily, the most popular vegetables including tomatoes, peppers and salad greens are excellent choices. I’m devoted to indeterminate tomatoes – that’s the kind that grow as a vine, as opposed to a bush. Yes you need to tie them up but having grown the special patio tomatoes in the past; I will personally never waste my time or my very precious space on them again.

I’ve also had decent luck with cucumbers although not such great results with squash. I don’t think they cared much for getting their roots cramped and any plant that needs a root run the size of Oklahoma will not be a great choice for containers.

Peas will do well, although they are a fairly short season crop and even more so given the extra warmth they’re experience in a container. If you’re going to grow beans – I’d suggest going with the pole beans even though I’m not sure they’re quite as tender as the bush variety, but the simple truth is that the bush beans just don’t give you the return on your space and seeding progressive crops is not as practical in a container garden as when you have lots of room in the ground.

Corn is a non starter and similarly I would also stay away from broccoli, cauliflower, and sprouts – something for which my son is eternally grateful. You also don’t want to try anything that has serious rambling issues like watermelon and I don’t recommend root crops either – meaning carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, turnips, radishes or parsnips. You can’t grow asparagus in containers either.

If you don’t know anything about growing vegetables and you’ve never done it before, advice like “vines are good” isn’t going to be much help. So maybe I should step back for a minute and approach this question from a different perspective. Try this on for size, “grow what you can’t easily buy”.

Yes, you can buy tomatoes – but the tomatoes you can buy in the stores have been selected for qualities which appeal to agri-business. For example – tomatoes that are going to be trucked across half a continent – or more- need to have fairly tough skins so they don’t get mashed to a pulp – yummmmmmy. They need to be picked when they’re green and ripen in a truck. They need to stand up well to refrigeration. They need to be uniformly sized so that they pack well and display easily in a grocery store. If you’re growing your own tomatoes – none of these things matter!

You can have plum tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, beefsteak sized tomatoes, grape tomatoes in a range of colors and sweetness levels that will simply amaze you. If you’re not a gardener already, then you’re probably not familiar with the craze that is heirloom vegetables. Oh what a wonderful surprise you have in store. I grow lots of tomatoes – surprisingly I’m not a huge fan of big chunks of tomato. But I love little grape tomatoes in Greek salads and I’ve found that oven dried cherry tomatoes packed in olive oil with basil are like eating candy.

Peppers are terrific – because there are so many different kinds of them – especially if you like hot peppers.

Salad greens – Mesclun mix – Baby salad greens – you know the ones I mean. They cost about 16 bucks a kilo and 9 times out of 10 the ones in the grocery store have already started to wilt. I don’t know about man – but woman cannot live on iceberg alone!

Other great small space crops include Chinese greens, eggplant, kale, spinach and Swiss chard. And then of course a simply wonderful idea is to also grow herbs – some of which – like parsley and cilantro also make great salad greens.  Basil is another example of a crop available in a mind numbing variety. I love Thai basil.

Oregano, thyme, chives, tarragon, marjoram and sage are all perennial herbs, which mean that they will live from year to year. Sadly, that makes them a not too good choice for a container garden since plants which can survive the (Toronto) winters in the ground will not necessarily do so in a container on a balcony. Ironically, rosemary, which is also perennial but one too tender to survive the Toronto winters in the ground can easily spend those winters on a windowsill and go back out next spring.

But what I’ll say right now is, “if you really want a perennial herb, and it’s easy for you to find the plants, give them a try and we’ll touch back on the subject before the fall of 2010 and talk about how you can get them through the winter. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

To help you begin to make your decision about what you might want to grow, here is a list of websites that offer herb and vegetable seeds. Take a look at what they have to offer and make some choices – you’ll probably choose too many, but that’s ok. You haven’t ordered them yet.

http://www.heirloomtomatoes.bizland.com/

http://eternalseed.ca/index.php?ID=1&Lang=En Canada only

http://victoryseeds.com/

http://www.seedsavers.org/

http://www.sandhillpreservation.com/catalog/seed_menu.html

http://www.heritageharvestseed.com/

http://www.uharvest.ca/zenstore/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=21

http://www.richters.com/

http://www.stokeseeds.com/cgi-bin/StokesSeeds.storefront

http://www.dominion-seed-house.com/en-CA

Now, if you’re thinking that come spring, almost every grocery store in the city will be offering trays of little vegetable plants that you can grow, you’re absolutely right. Some of them will have a simply excellent range of choices too and if you want to go that route, you certainly can. But at some point you’ll probably want to grow something that you can’t find unless you start it yourself. So for now, you don’t need to make an absolute decision, check out the seeds and if you’re just not ready to make this leap yet, you can always start with pre-started plants.