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Shirley Eppler on container gardening and how you can grow a variety of beans and vegetables in your balcony garden.
Grow beans on your balcony
You have a small city lot and don’t have the room for a vegetable garden? A condo with only a balcony? No excuses! Plenty of vegetables and small fruits are perfectly happy being grown in tight quarters in containers. The containers don’t need to be expensive or fancy. Use black nursery pots, plastic containers, ceramic, clay, whisky barrels—even an old basket will grow a head or two of lettuce, or herbs quite nicely.
The main requirement for most vegetables is sun. Six to eight hours is ideal. Container gardening can actually be an advantage because you can move pots around to follow the sun if necessary. But containers dry out quickly, so be sure to keep them watered.
Good soil is also at the top of the list. Don’t be tempted to dig up dirt from an empty lot. It will probably be too heavy and smother your seeds. Use a good quality potting mix and amend it with some of the following:
Chard
All the usual suspects like lettuce, radishes, chard, kale, tomatoes, peppers and strawberries will happily grow in containers, too. Not only are home-grown vegetables fun and easy to produce but they also taste so much better and are generally more nutritious than produce that has been trucked halfway across the country. No more excuses. Treat yourself to some fresh, nutritious and oh-so-tasty container-grown veggies.
Shirley Eppler is the manager of Cannor Nursery in Parksville, B.C., and contributes regularly to Parksville’s Oceanside Star newspaper.