A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion Landscape trials and triumphs Gardening with limited space?

Hello there!

I hope I put this in the right forum. If not, I'm really sorry!

Pretty much, I will be transfering to a college in the city soon and I will mostlikely get a fair sized apartment with 2 roommates. We all agreed that we would like to grow our own vegetables, fruit, and have the place filled with plants. We are looking at getting a balcony for sure. However, space and and an actual yard will be an issue.

I was thinking about setting up a garden box on the balcony. I am also interested in those tomato and strawberry plants that hang upside-down. Are there any opinions on these?

Have any of you had a similar experience? I would greatly appreciate to hear your stories and methods.

There is some information on this site about container gardening. There are also some other great sites on the subject. You can easily do an internet search and find lots of helpful information. I am not sure if I can post a link to my favorite here.
~Good luck
Beth

Ah! I will look through the site, then. Maybe if someone hasn't already done so, I can ask people to post up photos or describtions of their tiny-space set-up. I love looking at how people organize their gardens, especially with trail, such as little space. ^^"

Try a search for Urban Organic Gardener. He is in Southern CA, I believe, and has some great pictures of balcony/container gardening. Also try searching Container Gardening. There are some really nice sites there. I have never heard anything positive about the upside down plants. Maybe others have had good luck with them, but they are fairly expensive for what you get, I think. As long as your area gets enough sun, the regular planting method would be fine, I think.

I've grown upside down tomatoes in buckets. So the special containers should work just as well. Radish, leaf lettuce, small onions, baby carrots and such can all be grown in containers.

You can also buy special strawberry pots for your berries, that way you can keep the plants more than one year.

We have lots of info here on our own site..just check out our 'search' button and ask any questions and we'll be glad to help.

We aren't really limited on garden space, but I want to use the least amount of space as possible for our garden this year. I'm trying not to take the yard space away from my kids and dogs, so we are doing alot of vertical gardening this year. You can do a Google for vertical gardening to get alot of ideas...also, do the same search on Pinterest.

I'm also doing the tomatoes growing up-side-down thing this year, but I'm using a 5 gallon bucket with a hole cut out of the bottom for the plant to grow from and then will also have a plant growing from the top....2 plants in the space of one! :)

There are dwarf blueberry bushes you can get...Gurney's has some nice ones...I'd get it asap so it starts growing tho. I don't know that those produce fruit the first year. You'll have to do some research on them. We have wild bushes that grow near us, so we just drive up to them and pick. :)