Garden Planning for a Balcony

By this time last year I had already written at length about my garden plan, broke down how I store my seeds, had given you a spring garden tour, and even had some harvest totals to share. I think it’s safe to say that I’m taking a more relaxed approach to gardening this season. A major part of this is the fact that I’m only working with a balcony for garden space, so I thought you might be interested in what I’m doing this year to plan that out.

Haskap bushes in our new (large) planter beginning to leaf out.

I’m actually excited about the garden this year. A lot of people have asked me why I haven’t joined a community garden, or found somewhere to grow some things on a friend’s property or something. I might look into it in the future, but honestly with the arrival of Baby Forager I think the balcony is about all I can handle this time around! It’s also a really different climate than I’m used to. It’s almost the exact opposite of my old garden - south facing, sunny, and hot instead of north facing, shaded, and cool. Lots of things I had little succiess with before might do well here. Maybe I’ll finally have that amazing tomato crop I’ve been hoping for!

I like to do my initial plans on graph paper. I don’t worry too much about drawing everything perfectly to scale, but this way you do get the ability to be a bit more precise. I find it helpful to at least have the exact measurements of the space you’re working in.

We built some really big planters for the garden out of cedar planks, and I’ll share how that worked at a later date when they are all finished. I am keeping a couple shrubs alive in the first one, and so hope to add some small fruit trees, and a grape vine. I’m hoping to use the grape vine to shade our large window a bit since it’s going to be a really hot summer and I don’t want to spend a ton on air conditioning!

This will be a lot different for me, but I’m still going to focus the garden on mainly growing food, but obviously I won’t be able to grow a large amount of anything anymore. I’m very grateful for the awesome farmers markets and farmstands that are nearby to buy our produce.

Do you have any tips for growing in containers? I’d love to hear them all in the comments because I’m going to need all the help I can get!

Spring 2018 Garden Tour

Those of you who have been following along with my Instagram stories voted that you wanted my next post to be a garden tour, so here it is!  I don't think I've ever shown the whole thing completely like this, so I'm happy that a garden tour was something you all said you wanted to see.  Things are a little bit haphazard, and not completely tidy and manicured, but I wanted to give you a sense of what it looks like in real life on a regular day.  There is a lot I still want to do - and a lot more I would do if we weren't merely renting the space, but for now this is what it looks like.

The area I have for my garden is all north facing, so I am having to be creative with how I arrange it, and what I grow.  I am starting a lot of things inside that my neighbours would normally succeed with by direct seeding.  We've been adding on a few raised beds each season, so the layout evolved organically.  In the photo above you can see the four newest additions.  I think we have room for one more (beside the furthest bin in the left photo below).  Since we are tenants, we wanted everything to be affordable, and easy to dismantle in the event that we needed to move out.  We chose to make all of our raised beds without bottoms or lining of any kind so we can simply unscrew them, spread out the beautiful soil, and reseed with grass.  If you follow me on Instagram you can see the process of how I put them together in my saved stories.  We buy 10"x2"x12' boards from the hardware store and each bin is one board.  It's not the most elegant solution, but it's very affordable, and keeps things in small, manageable sections.  It's also easy to walk across, or stand on their walls if I need to reach something, or don't want to walk all the way around a path.

You'll notice that a few of the beds have PVC pipe hoops over them.  We were planning on doing some poly tunnels over a few of them to extend the growing season last winter but ran out of time.  I'll be using them as trellises for the vining plants this summer, and then we'll do them as low tunnels this coming winter and see what we can overwinter.

So far there isn't all that much planted this year.  I have some perennials - raspberries, bunching onions, strawberries, haskaps, blueberries, rhubarb, mint, chives, hyssop, lemon balm, and yarrow - and a few other things like brassicas that were just put in the ground very recently.  I am excited to see how my haskaps and rhubarb do now that they are well established and in their third or fourth years.  Bunching onions are a recent favourite I got last year from a neighbour who was dividing their plant.  I haven't had very good success with growing regular onions, so having them in the ground, basically ready to eat all the time has been a revelation!  They don't have much of a bulb, so I still buy regular onions, but you can use these any way you would use a spring onion, or a shallot.

In the above photo you can see a few of our bins that don't match our other basic square ones.  The three small ones near the wall were made for me by a friend from Church who had some spare wood and wanted to make some for me.  The really long raised bed is one we did before we realized that it is really hard for me to reach all the way to the back of it - especially now that we have the potato bin and other beds blocking the access from a few directions.  I also filled in the space behind the three small bins with dirt for some perennial berry bushes.  You can see this better in the photo below.

As far as what is growing right now, below are a few snapshots of the perennials (and some overwintered brassicas) coming back to life for the spring.  The one I am most excited for is the rhubarb, but I am also watching the progress of the Bianca hops (top left photo) closely as it is my first time growing them, and I think hops bines are really beautiful. 

As always, I am so grateful for the gorgeous view of the valley I have from my garden.  The best mornings are when I have a mug of coffee, and I get to wander around the garden and check on everything.  We have quite a few birds and other animals that come to visit, so I enjoy watching them and marking the seasons when they come and go.  Right now the warm weather is bringing back the tree swallows, and I love watching their swooping flights.  We have deer, and bears (mixed blessings there as they can also be quite the nuisances), and last year a whole bunch of garter snakes were born right in the garden.  Little forager enjoyed watching them, and I enjoyed that they helped take care of some of the pests.  I love that I have a garden that encourages biodiversity.   

I'd love to hear about your gardens in the comments below.  Or if you don't have a garden talk to me about what you wish you could do if you had a garden!

How to Plan a Garden

This post might be more accurately titled "How to Plan a Garden if you are Me and You Have Cabin Fever and You Are Dreaming of Spring and Can't Wait to Get Planting So You Do Whatever You Can To Feel Like You Are Doing Some Gardening", but the title I used is catchier, so I went with that instead.  You might remember that one of my garden goals for this year was to plan more, and if my followthrough for this goal is any indicator for the rest of them, I think this is going to be a very good year!

There are so many different ways to plan a garden, and if what I have done doesn't get you excited for the spring season, then don't worry about copying my method!  I think that making a plan in general is important, but what is most helpful to each of you is going to be different, and each season might be different as well.  I'd love to see what you come up with - let me know in the comments or link to any blog posts you might have done on the topic.  I'm always looking for new ideas to try. 

This type of garden plan (above) is what I have been doing the past few years.  It's not an exact version of my garden layout because I wanted it all to fit on one page, and my space is rather long and narrow, so I shortened some of the walkways and in-between spaces to make it fit.  The gardening areas are somewhat to scale, though.  I find this type of plan overall most helpful since it gives you a birds eye view of your space and hopefully will clue you in to any problems.  For example, I am probably going to have some issues with the amount of tomatoes I want to start vs. the amount of space I have to put them.  We have some plans this year to add a few more raised beds to hopefully alleviate that issue.  Last year they were too cramped and didn't produce well.

Keep in mind the areas of your garden that get the most light, and where any hot spots are.  My first year in this space I planted my broccoli in completely the wrong spot, and it got totally baked.  I figured any spot would be ok for them to go since in my north facing garden there is only the bare minimum of what would be considered "full sun", but I didn't realize how intense the heat and light were concentrated in some specific areas.  Now I put peppers and other heat loving things in those spots.  Also be aware of the shade areas you have, and think of creative ways to use them.  I have mostly "part shade" and even some "full shade" spots, so I have planted a lot of herbs, and plan to add some other understory plants.  The area you see above that is all herbs is actually covered by a deck above, but it still works for things like mint, chives, and parsley.  I've been thinking of adding some fiddlehead producing ferns there this year, and I have wondered if Oregon grape might work there too since I usually see it in the forest as an understory type plant.  It's native to the area as well, so I have a feeling it might do well there.  

As part of my planning this year, I was inspired by Lavender and Leeks to draw out what my garden will look like visually.  This isn't quite as practical as doing the birds eye view layout, but I really enjoyed the process, and it helped me think about what the space would look like aesthetically.  I also realized that in my drawing I forgot a few things that I planned to do like tuck in nasturtiums between all the brassicas.  These are also not to scale, and in some cases I shortened the space between the raised beds so things would fit on one page together.  I also realized I draw almost all my vines the same as each other, and that some of these plants are really hard to draw from memory.  I thought I knew what they all looked like (and for sure I can recognize most garden plants from sight), but there is something different about knowing them when you have to try and draw them.  I want to try that a bit more this year and really get to know the plants I am growing.  Mr. Forager had an amazing idea that I should make garden colouring pages for Little Forager, and I think I will!  I also think I might offer them as some sort of printable here on the blog!  

Hopefully you found this inspiring, or at least interesting.  I really enjoyed the whole process, and it helped to work out some of my garden dreams on paper while I still can't get outside and make them happen in the dirt.

I'd love to see what you all come up with for your garden plans.  Make sure you let me know in the comments!  I'd love to hear your ideas and get some new ones to try as well!  

Using a Potato Tower in the Garden

As you can see our garden is a bit challenged when it comes to space.  We are renters right now and we consider ourselves lucky to have the space that we have.  I could just go at gardening as more of a hobby, but I consider it a personal challenge to try to feed my family as much as possible from our tiny little plot.  One important step to this is encouraging vertical growth whenever possible.  This makes peas and beans no-brainers, but there are some other veggies in this category that might not be initially thought of. One of these is potatoes.

This is our potato bin.  I wish I took a photo of it right at the beginning, but I wasn't thinking of writing a blog post about the project at that point so that got neglected.  Basically we used a couple pallets and Mr. Foraged and I worked together on an idea that might work.  

I've grown potatoes in grow bags before, and grown them in a raised bed with the more traditional method of 'hilling up'.  This potato tower method was sort of a combination of the two.  I was also influenced by some reading I did on other traditional ways people grew tomatoes - one of which was to grow them in straw.  This was the real key to keeping our idea cost effective!

What we ended up doing was screwing together a four by four square with four posts going up from each corner.  We then covered the ground inside it with newspaper to discourage weeds, and then covered that with a few inches of good manure and compost.  We planted our potatoes in that and then covered it with a good six inches of straw.  

Then as the potatoes grew we kept adding slats and filling it up with more straw.  I made sure to keep a few inches of the potato leaves visible from under the straw to make sure the plants still had access to sunlight.

A major benefit to this method - aside from saving cost and space - that I can see is that the job of harvesting should be much easier!  I'm thinking we'll spread out a tarp and then unscrew the slats on one side and then just pull everything out.  The potatoes should be pretty clean from just growing in straw, and we won't accidentally poke any with a potato fork.  It will also make it really easy to get in to grab a few early baby potatoes!  Of course it remains to be seen if this even works for growing potatoes.  So far we have beautiful looking plants, but I don't know what is going on underneath right now.  We'll have to wait and see!  I will definitely update when it comes time to really put this method to the test!