For many people in small spaces, container gardening is the only gardening type available to them. When you don’t have access to a permanent area of soil in the ground, your choices for what to grow are limited somewhat, but probably not as much as you think. You can grow many flowers, herbs, fruits, and vegetables in pots on your balcony though you might need to provide them a bit more attention and car then if you had planted them in the earth. Your two biggest concerns need to be whether you’ll be able to water them often enough (daily, in most cases) and what kind of sunlight your balcony gets.
In general, the more sun, the more options you have for what to plant. You can always make shade if it’s too sunny; you can’t create more sunshine on your balcony. Root vegetables such as carrots and onions, and fruiting vegetables including eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes, are ideal vegetables to grow on your balcony. Root crops will need medium amounts of sun to thrive; fruiting vegetables will need full sun as much as possible. Tomatoes are one of the most useful and most popular of the container-grown vegetables, and you will find plenty of help and tips online, such as this compilation of tomato container gardening tips from Thrifty Fun.
Fruits, in general will be a little more difficult to grow in containers. Many fruits grow on trees, and would take up too much space on a balcony to be practical, and many others take years, or even decades, to produce edible fruit. These two restrictions eliminate most fruits from our list, as well as some smaller fruit trees that are often grown in containers and would be good options for readers who have some sort of backyard area (figs, oranges, lemons, grapes). As far as balcony gardening goes, however, we are left with berries as a good container gardening, small space fruit crop. Strawberries are far and away the most popular container-grown fruit, with raspberries and gooseberries also popular options. Strawberries need soil with a lot of organic material in it, lots of fertilizer, and continual watering through a well-drained container. To read more about growing strawberries in pots, check out this “How I Did It” article.
If you want more information about growing herbs in containers, check out this post about the best types to grow in containers. And to read more about container gardening in general, as well as good flowers and vegetables to grow, check out this Gardening Guides article.
