Katie Kaboom

It’s a sad fact that I’m not one of those people who have the lucky fortune of having a yard. Instead of gardening space, life has given me an upper level two bedroom apartment complete with carpet, cement, and linoleum flooring.

So what are apartment dwellers with an itch to grow to do? Of course, space in a community garden is always a possibility, but for me, the gardens that actually had space (and not a long waiting list), were too far for me to reasonably trek to on a regular basis. And so I turned to my dear balcony.

After being inspired by two excellent gardening books; this one by John Jeavens, and this one by Robert Smaus (the former garden editor of the LA Times), I set out to find some containers, and grow a plethora of food in the space I had.

My mission was to make a real garden with vegetables that I could cook, share, and enjoy (small though it may be). None of this “tiny herb garden” stuff or single tomato plant in the corner. After reading the above mentioned books, I was amazed by the biointensive gardening method, and set out to do just that.

A few ground-rules first. Your garden well need the following, air, water, space, and sunlight. My balcony gets full afternoon sun- about four to five hours, which is the minimum amount of sunlight vegetables need to have. My space was limited, but usable. I found my space to be about 2 and 1/2 feet by 4 feet.

Knowing that I needed to create a nice bed shaped bin, my first thought was to create a wood one. While wood, in my mind, is preferable to other materials, I was concerned with a)the weight b)the expense. I may not have needed to be so worried about the weight, I knew that the wood I would need would be expensive. Pine being too prorous, and other wood being to easily susceptible to weather and the elements, cedar and redwood were my only options. Tres chere as they were, I also considered the drainage factor, the cleanliness factor, and the overall ease-ability that I demanded to keep my patio a tidy place to still sit with friends.

And so, walking through Home Depot, I found a plastic, sturdy, cement mixing bin (it looks identical to this) . Size = 2.5×4 and about 12′ deep. Perfect! Holes were drilled in bottom and voila, instant garden bed for under $15.00.

The bed still needed to be raised. And so, a wonderful man built me some sawhorses which did the trick. A table was placed just below with a pan to hold drained water, and large pot was wedged in between the bin and the table to support the bed from the center. BAM! Garden installed!! The entire project probably cost under $30. That price is not including the soil amendments, seeds, and other matter that actually went inside the bin.

Beets, lettuce, scallions, mescaline mix, endive, spinach … all growing marvelously. Plans are in the works to do a climbing bean plant, perhaps some sunflowers, and maybe a few strawberry plants!

The hardest part has been biding my time, waiting for the day that I can harvest and cook!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 and is filed under Apartments, Container Gardening, Food, Gardening, Sustainable Ag, sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.