Anyone have a balcony or patio garden?
Now that Spring is upon us, I was hoping to grow some veggies on my balcony. I have a friend giving me a tomato plant. Anything else I can pick up that can grow well potted? I'm looking for more veggies than herbs, but I wouldn't mind some herbs too.
Also, do I need to do anything to keep bugs off them?
Those pots are way, way too small for tomatoes, FYI. 5 gallon bucket, minimum.
You can do potatoes in a five gallon bucket. Cabbage and lettuce in a good sized pot. You can also do strawberries in a strawberry jar or even a hanging basket. Herbs you can do pretty much anything.
Bugs won't be too much of a problem, especially if they are on a balcony above ground. Just keep an eye on them.
Also, don't cheap out on the soil. Get good (not Miracle Gro), light weight potting soil from a real garden center, not Home Depot or another big box.
Try asking /an/
>>7455582
Arugula is really easy to grow and will save you a lot if you like it and buy it a lot. I usually do some kind of peppers but last year I did a sugar baby watermelon on my porch and it was great.
>>7455615
Seriously? That's rad. What size pot?
I wanna grow teas and maybe some spices, how feasible is this?
I win...
>>7455582
Pretty much any herb and vegetable can be grown in a container. Tomatoes do very well in containers, so do peppers, broccoli and cauliflower. Anything that grows on a vine like summer squash, cucumbers, pole beans, small varieties of melons work well too, just grow them in good sized pots and train them up a trellis. You can also grow root vegetables provided you have deep enough pots, stuff like carrots, turnips, onions and radishes.
As for bugs, you can use some kind of pesticide, natural/organic if you like.
The biggest concern is how much direct sunlight your balcony gets throughout the day. If it doesn't get enough, you won't get particularly good yields unless it's a more shade tolerant variety of plant. Most fruiting plants (tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, etc) want 8+ hours of sun during the day to be the most productive. Most root vegetables and herbs and some greens are good with closer to 6 hours.
The only other thing I would worry about would be birds. I lived in an apartment for a while a few years ago and the fucking birds would always peck holes in my fucking tomatoes and eat flowers off the plants.
>>7455582
ask /out/
they do lots of gardening and have a lot of useful info dumps in their gardening thread
>>7456000
You think a fake owl would scare off birds?
>>7456026
Worth a try but I've never had much luck with them.
I ended up just draping some bird netting over my plants propped up with some pieces of wood to keep them out of my shit, but then the apartment managers gave me a warning for having a bunch of "unsightly" stuff on my balcony so I had to take it down.
>>7456026
Perhaps
>>7455618
I think like a 20 gallon pot? Nothing too terribly huge. They're sugar babies so they are tiny, slightly bigger than cantaloupe, but good watermelon. My fiancee did sugar snap peas and threaded them up the rails of the balcony.
>>7455624
I've done jalapenos, poblanos, hungarian wax, bell and fish pepers and they all went well. I find just about any of the nightshades except for tomatoes are relatively easy to grow on the balcony. Cherry tomatoes make excellent balcony plants by the way, they're much less finicky than regular tomatoes and I have had nothing but low maintenance success with them.
>>7456026
Snake oil.
>>7455582
Peppers do well in pots, as do bush beans, peas if you can trellis, carrots do great, you can do potatoes but it takes a lot of work, lettuces and greens like spinach and arugula do well, you can do cutting celery (this isn't regular celery and is considered an herb), scallions, broccoli and cauliflower do okay but don't expect to get a big harvest, sometimes you can do summer squash, zucchini, and cukes, smaller melons (like musk melons honeydew cantaloupe small watermelons). There are also lots of berry bushes that do well in pots, like strawberries and blueberries. Some types of dwarf variety fruit trees (lemon, lime, orange, banana, coffee, olive, apple though with apple you need a type with two different cultivars of apple grafted on or it won't grow fruit since apples are finicky fucks and won't produce if not pollinated by a different type of apple tree) do well.
As long as the area gets 6-8 hours a day of direct sun, most things will grow. If it doesn't, look for more shade tolerant varieties (lettuce and spinach like not getting too much sun cuz they wilt or bolt easily).
Tfw my apartment doesn't even have a patio
