Living in an apartment or condo can discourage even the most avid gardeners. If you’re lucky enough to have a sunny balcony, Andrea Bellamy shows how you can grow a wide range of edibles that taste and look great. She suggests combining a mixture of small fruiting trees and shrubs, vegetables, strawberries, herbs, and edible flowers in large pots for maximum yield and visual effect.
An avid gardener living in an urban environment, Andrea Bellamy has been growing food on a small balcony for the past 12 years. Gardening above ground level certainly offers its share of challenges (among them, gusty winds, lack of light, and the inconvenience of lugging soil, plants, and containers up elevators — or worse, several flights of stairs). For Andrea, a lush balcony filled with ripening fruits and tender salad greens is worth the small hassles. And there are other advantages to a balcony garden: there are no weeds and, aside from an occasional outbreak of aphids, pests are rarely a problem.
Wide-ranging possibilities. “Provided your containers are large enough, you can grow pretty much everything on a balcony,” Andrea says. “I choose edibles based on what I want to eat and then I look at which are going to do well in containers, and in the conditions on my balcony.” Once she has a list of possibilities, Andrea narrows it down further, selecting for productivity, flavor, decorative properties, and sometimes unique characteristics like color or shape (globe-shaped or purple carrots, for example).
Tomatoes and peas are among Andrea’s top picks for container crops. “Homegrown tomatoes can’t be beat,” she says. “Peas help out the other things growing in the same container and will create a leafy screen.” She uses tall climbing peas for screening and short-stemmed varieties on the edge of a container to spill over and create interest.
Edibles that make a splash. Andrea also loves combining blue-green dinosaur (‘Lacinato’) kale with orange nasturtiums or golden marjoram. She says she likes to pick edibles as she would ornamentals, considering color and form and using the “thriller, filler, and spiller” rule pioneered by Steve Silk.
While many balcony gardeners shy away from perennial crops or fruits, worried that they’ll take up too much space or not overwinter when planted in containers, Andrea enjoys growing them on her balcony. She suggests growing a ‘Brown Turkey’ fig, strawberries, and two dwarf blueberry shrubs. Blueberries need to be cross-pollinated to yield a good supply of fruit, so Andrea says to make sure to select two different cultivars. Strawberries are self-fruitful, but still she suggests growing two types to ensure the longest season of harvest. The June-bearing plants will bear a heavy crop of sweet berries for three weeks in early summer, while the everbearing strawberries fruit intermittently through the spring, summer, and autumn. For winter, the figs can be brought indoors to a cool storage room or basement, and the blueberries and strawberries can be mulched with straw and wrapped in burlap.
A living screen. In the limited space of a balcony, there are many reasons to choose vertical crops like pole beans. Not only do vining vegetables produce more food in less space, but the ‘Purple Peacock’ pole beans, clambering up a teepee, help fill out that corner of the balcony and provide privacy from neighboring apartments or, if placed near the railing, the street.
Another technique that Andrea employs is underplanting, a method often used in traditional vegetable gardens to get more out of the available growing space. Underplanting involves choosing a tall plant for the center or back of a container and then filling up the lower space with compact or cascading vegetables, herbs, or edible flowers. Beneath the large ‘Brown Turkey’ fig, Andrea has planted common (English) thyme and trailing nasturtiums, whose edible flowers can be enjoyed for their bright colors or harvested and tossed into salads. The nasturtiums’ rounded waterlily leaves and plump seeds add a radishlike heat to many dishes. Beneath the ‘Fairy Tale’ eggplant, she has tucked a clump of sweet alyssum. The tiny alyssum flowers add both fragrance and color to the balcony, and they attract beneficial and pollinating insects to the fruiting edibles.