Balcony Garden Yields Full Harvest of Pleasure

As I drive through Los Angeles, the tenacity and imagination of the small-space gardener amazes me.

From the New Zealand spinach thriving in the semi-shade of a front porch in a 1-gallon container to the balcony so full of plants there is barely enough room for the gardener, their efforts are undaunted by the amount of room available.

When I first walked out onto the 18-by-14-foot second-story balcony of what was then my husband’s bachelor apartment, it was clearly a small-space gardener’s dream. Planter hooks hung in the places of maximum light exposure and flower pot rings were part of the wrought-iron railings.

I watched the sunlight move over the area for a couple of weeks and although slightly discouraged by the mere eight hours of light ( just enough), I bought my first 2-inch and 5-inch pots of herbs, vegetables and flowers.

Lavender, lemon and peppermint-scented geraniums, thyme, rosemary, dill, curled parsley, costmary and basil filled small, hanging clay pots, while my rectangular redwood planter held a strawberry plant, a Japanese eggplant and a tomato plant.

Our Little Eden

Using 1-gallon plastic containers, my husband and I carried hundreds of gallons of water from our upstairs bathroom through three rooms to the balcony.

We delighted in our little Eden, and were soon treated to a harvest of three strawberries, one dozen Japanese eggplants and 14 tomatoes. It was a meager harvest, but one we were proud of nonetheless. The herbs, however, thrived, and I dried lavender to scent our dresser drawers and the costmary for some hoped-to-be-discovered use, and we cooked with the fresh parsley, thyme, dill and rosemary quite frequently.

I soon became a victim of my flourishing herbs: they got bigger and bigger and required a succession of transplantings into larger and larger containers. I reluctantly gave up my beloved clay pots in favor of plastic to reduce weight and conserve water. My original 2-inch thyme and rosemary plants are now overflowing their 5-gallon containers and measure about 1 foot by 2 feet each.

The second season, I grew more audacious. I planted eight “baby” corn plants and discovered, three months later, that although the harvest was miniature, the mother plant was within normal corn size--about 5 to 6 feet.

Cramped Roots

My interest in gardening grew, The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and Taylor’s Guide to Vegetables and Herbs became my horticultural Bibles, yet the garden remained imprisoned in inadequate pots and containers with low yields because of cramped root systems.

When I would pull out the annual plants at season’s end, the entire soil content was one solid churning root system in search of nourishment, sometimes growing out of the drainage holes.

The garden was pretty, quaint and a joy to tend, but I wanted it to perform, wanted vegetable crops I would really see making a difference in our cooking.

Finally one day I put two facts together and began to create a solution to my space problems. I had learned the average root depth for vegetables was 2 feet, whereas my deepest planter box was 8 inches and my tallest clay pot was 12 inches.

I realized that if my plants were higher up, in very deep planters, I could take advantage of greater sunlight access while providing adequate room for greater root spread, increasing my yield. Yet I had little horizontal space, so this planter would have to be much taller than wide, something I had not seen in any nursery and which would have been exorbitantly expensive, judging from the smaller sizes.

Redwood Planters

Also, the wooden planters I had seen were held together with nails and stainless steel ribbons that would pull apart after several season’s weight and expansion.

I had seen something similar to what I needed in a gardening magazine but it had handles for carrying and wheels for moving around, was square and required nails for its construction. I didn’t need mobility, so I figured I would take the basic design and enlarge it, strengthen it and make it a rectangle.

Thus one Saturday my husband and I sat over brunch with paper and pencil between us. Several muted arguments later, and after drawings, calculations and refinements, we ended with a design that is adaptable to any space, is sturdy and beautiful.

The redwood we used gives off an intriguing spicy smell when watered as well as lending a woodsy feeling to the cityscape it adorns.

Having finished the planters (four in all) by early March (two weekends of work), I began the task of choosing vegetables and herbs that would yield the most per square inch of space.

Tomatoes Are Healthy

I set seeds into 2-inch pots so I could bring them indoors in case of a freak frost (at least three of which have happened in the last three years) and transplanted them into the planters in early April. A hose attached to the bathtub tap helps with the now-gargantuan task of watering.

As with any garden, especially with the complications of limited light and the dangers of over-watering with container gardening, I have had some successes and some failures.

My Roma tomatoes are healthy, bountiful and just ripening now and the Japanese eggplants are another high-yield crop. I have seen at least a 50% or more increase in plant size and crop yield working with the planters. Arugula and chiso (a Japanese herb) are shorter-term crops that grow well in the lower light areas of the balcony and several summer lettuces are surviving the heat so far (Little Gem, Little Red Riding Hood and Red Leprechaun).

The Italian parsley, coriander, red, green, orange and yellow sweet peppers, baby watermelon, honeyloupe and basil plants are all thriving to date, though the jury is still out on the melons, which are just setting fruit now.

All in all I have reached my sought-after goal: almost every night there is an element of our dinner that has been home grown in our own organic garden on the balcony off our bedroom.