I frequently receive comments that someone would like to have a garden but they do not have the space.  It doesn’t take a lot of space to grow a few vegetables.  In square foot gardening, Mel Bartholomew developed an easy-to-use method of intensive cultivation so people can grow a lot of vegetables in a small space.  His method is easily adapted to containers for those who have only a porch or balcony.

Don’t Overload Your Balcony

First, if you will be putting containers on a balcony, make sure you do not overload it.  A pot full of wet dirt is heavy and you do not want to cause the balcony to come crashing down.  That tends to annoy the people under you.

Size Of The Container

If you can manage it, a pot that is about a foot in diameter and a foot deep works well for crops with shallow root systems.  One two feet deep works for root crops such as beets, carrots, and potatoes.  Shallow window boxes are best kept for herbs.

Soil And Compost

In this pot, you need to put a mixture of half potting soil and half compost.  Vegetables are heavy feeders, so they need compost to produce the food we eat.  They also need regular water — enough to keep the soil moist but not soggy.  Do not let the soil dry out between waterings.

What To Plant

Now that you have your pots set up, you are ready to plant.  Plants are planted at the following spacing:

• Extra-large plants, such as tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, one per pot
• Large plants, such as leaf lettuce, four per pot
• Medium plants, such as bush beans, nine per pot
• Small plants, such as carrots, sixteen per pot

Trellis Up For Vines

You can plant cucumbers and other vining plants such as squash by trellising them up instead of letting them grow out.  You can grow quite a lot of food with just a few pots if you plant each of them with successive crops during the season.  For example, plant a pot in radishes, then harvest them when the radishes are ready and plant something else.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.