Apartment Gardening: The 3 Most Important Rules to Obey (pt 1)

“Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years.”

In this course, we’ll cover the 3 most important rules you must follow before you plant your first seed when growing food in a small space, namely an apartment balcony.  We recently asked the community for feedback on growing in a small space and we received over a 1000 emails with extremely useful information.  This course series takes all that information and distills down into actionable steps that you can follow, making it easy for you.  This video series will take you step-by-step, guiding you through everything you need to know to successfully produce nutrient-dense food to supplement your diet.  

This first course is a very high-level overview of the considerations you have to make before you start planting.  Please note most of what we’ll explain in this video are concepts you need to be aware of which we’ll explain in greater detail in break out courses.  So don’t feel overwhelmed by this course, instead consider these items we’re about to outline. 

Over the next several courses, we will set up 3 different growing areas on my patio to show you ways of gardening in each area that have been proven to work on apartment balconies.  With this information, you will be able to choose what methods and plants will work best with your specific area.  I would encourage you to start here as these factors will determine what you grow on an apartment balcony or small space.  Let’s jump into the first factors.

CAUTIONS & CONSIDERATIONS

WEIGHT:  One cubic foot of dirt can weigh between 70 and 110 pounds.  Potting soil tends to be lighter, but a 5-gallon bucket can hold .70 cubic feet of soil.  That can easily make it 60 or so pounds.  Most U.S.-constructed balconies can only support 50-100 pounds per square foot, and I would be super conservative here when it comes to safety.  So, calculate the square footage of your area by multiplying your length by width and multiplying by 50, which is the lowest of the maximum weight.  That will give you the most weight your balcony can likely support.  Realize you, the gardener, have weight.  Realize that when you water, you are adding 8.34 pounds per gallon.  Finally, realize that heavy containers could concentrate the weight in one specific area.  Multiply that number of gallons by 8.3454 to determine the total water weight in that setup.  If you go the hydroponic route (which we’ll cover in the future), how many gallons are your water reserves?  A 55-gallon drum of water, for instance, isn’t a good idea, as it will focus 459 or more pounds into just about 4 square feet of space.  Finally, your plants will have weight, as well.  Calculate a pound or more for each plant. Stay within the weight capacity of your area.

HOA/LANDLORD: Your Home Owners Association or landlord may be the most significant determinant of what, if anything, you can grow.  Where will that dirty runoff water flow if your pots have to drain?  On your neighbor below?  You don’t want it staining the side of your building.  Does your HOA allow plants on balconies or patios?  If so, what are the rules for that?  You may be unable to trellis up viny plants or be restricted by pot size.  HOA gardening policies can limit what you can grow to a narrowly ranged plant palette.  It may prohibit attaching anything, including containers and planters, to railings.  Boards can adopt reasonable rules to protect decks from damage, including limits on the size and number of potted plants and prohibitions against planters. Even though condominium balconies are for the exclusive use of the unit to which they are attached, they are still common area structures. 

If you live in too restrictive of circumstances, you may need to reign your grand plans in and look at growing indoors and around windows, supplementing with grow lights, fans, or grow tents (which we’ll cover in the future videos). Even with these restrictions, you can sometimes grow non-traditional vegetable garden plants and not your typical tomatoes, peppers, and peas.  After all, the only visible part of a sweet potato plant is its pathos-shaped leaves and vines. 

GROW AREA: You may want to plant corn, but that won’t actually work in your grow area.  Choosing the correct plants for your site and allowing them the proper space above and below ground and away from each other is the key to a successful home garden.  Some plants need to be separated off on their own to achieve maximum maturity and growth.  Other plants, like corn, need to be planted relatively close to each other to allow cross-pollination. 

WIND: Airflow is often overlooked and doesn’t factor into many people’s plans beyond water, sun, and soil, but most every plant requires and thrives from gentle airflow.  Breezes allow the plants to access the C02 they need to grow and can carry pollen, which is critical to fruit setting.  You may think you have good airflow on your balcony, but you should assess this before planting anything.  The easiest way to measure this is with an incense stick or candle.  If the smoke travels mostly straight up or the candle flame doesn’t flicker much, you don’t have very good circulation of air.  You may need to add a small fan at certain hours to keep a nice airflow around your plants.  Conversely, if the wind is too strong, try and block it with heavier pots, bamboo screens, or sunshades.  You will also want to ensure that your planting containers are not top-heavy but have most of their weight at their base.

INSECTS, PESTS, & ANIMALS:  You must also consider what insects, pests, and animals can access your growing area.  My property buttresses up against a wild area, so I know animals like mice, rats, squirrels, and rabbits may be a problem.  Because of the harsh and dry desert climate, insects are less of a problem. They’re still a problem, but not as much as a humid and wet environment.  Companion planting and companion animals are suitable methods of insect, pest, and animal abatement.  If you are growing berries or sunflowers, birds will be pests.  Most other plants, though, and the birds will eat caterpillars and insects that would damage your plants.  Some plants will attract rodents or rabbits.  These will attract birds of prey.  Assess what can get into or around your growing space.  

Avoid poisons because of the damage they do up and down the ecosystem, and favor old-school traps where possible.  We will be doing a whole video on these issues with rodents later in this series, but the critters unique to your environment are something you should consider now.  If you are on the 40th floor of a high rise, there isn’t much that will make its way up to you in the form of insects or snails, but you still need to consider what you bring into your environment.  It is easy to bring in a million insect eggs on a pound of dirt.  Ridding yourself of an infestation can be more challenging than merely preventing one.

SOIL/GROW MEDIUM

If weight is a serious factor of your location, you may need to look at a self-wicking type of garden, hydroponic setup, or some other type of system where a void is created in the growing area, which still allows for adequate root growth of the plant but significantly decreases the weight.  Dirt is not soil, as the soil is a living thing and dirt is typically void of good organic material.  If you were to use light perlite or coconut fiber, you would have to provide supplemental nutrients, but your weight would be very low.  If you decide to grow hydroponically, you will likely need coconut fiber plugs or clay pebbles for roots to take hold.  Remember, all of these do have weight considerations.

Whatever medium you use, consider a Rapitest Soil Test kit to understand the nutrient profile of your grow medium.  This will provide you with your soil’s pH, Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium levels.  Certain plants will favor certain types of soil. 

We will be vermicomposting, composting, and looking at other soil amendments that can be purchased and made in a future video.  For now, you need to understand the types of grow medium you plan to use and source it.  For most, the preferred method is commercially purchased potting soil mix in bags. This can easily be supplemented with general, multipurpose fertilizer, compost, or worm castings.  I am going to have a combination of different grow mediums in my areas to demonstrate the fullest range you have available to you.  You may want to consider some combination of hydroponic towers, grow walls, and regular pots for your growing area.

To offer you the fullest range and understanding of the options for soil and growing format, I will be doing a broad range and mix in my three areas.  Not all of these options will work for you, but I will explain each method as we implement them for future courses.

SUN

This is the part of the video where you can take an actionable step.  In this segment, we’re going to map out where the sun directly hits your patio at different times of the day.  Based on where the sun hits directly, we’ll determine which plants to put in which areas.  It’s important to note that with apartments that may not get direct sunlight, that’s ok.  There’s plenty of plants that grow without direct sunlight and we’ll cover that in future courses.  For those that do get direct sunlight during the day, here’s what we’ll do.  We want to measure the time at which direct sunlight hits different sections of the grow area.  For example, if you plant a full-sun vegetable like tomato or pepper but don’t get full sun during the day, you will need to supplement the natural light.  If you get no sun but plant kale or asparagus, you can still get high yields despite your sunlight disadvantage.  

First, we must determine where the sun hits our patio at different times throughout the day.  We will call this a sun map.  Let me show you how to create a sun map.  Start by doing this: measure out your growing area and draw it on paper.  As you can see, the area I measured is 7 feet wide by 10 feet deep.  Print out 4 pieces of paper with this diagram.

Next, we’re going to track the position of the sun over your grow area by the time of day.  So what I want to do is track where the sun is at least 3 different times of the day.  I chose increments at 9 am, noon, and 3 pm, representing morning, afternoon, and early evening.  Label the top of each sun map with the time.  At 9 am, you will want to denote the approximate location of the sun relative to your grow area.  To do this, mark its location on your sketch.  Then using a highlighter, highlight using a yellow marker areas where the sun is directly hitting your balcony and use the orange highlighter to show areas that are getting indirect sun.  Use as pencil, pen, or brown marker to denote full shade or dark areas. Repeat this on the second map at 12 and the third map at 3.  

The sun may be behind the building you are in or difficult to see.  If that is the case, you may need to walk away from your building in a straight line directly in front of your grow area on your balcony to understand the sun’s location.  We do this to understand where the sun is at different times of the day, even when it may not be shining directly on our grow area.  Even without direct sunlight, light intensity is effected by time of day.

From this map, you should now be able to glean an accurate approximation of the number of hours of direct sunlight you will receive.  Please note that you will gain hours of sunlight during the summer and lose them during the winter, but our primary goal here is to determine our orientation to the sun to determine how much sun hits what areas throughout the day.

The next step of this process is to compile this information on your fourth and final sun path map.  If two of your maps have a yellow highlighted section, highlight this section in yellow on your fourth compiled map. This is your full sun area which has 6 or more hours of direct sun.  Mark areas that had both partial light and some full sun in orange.  The orange areas are your partial sun areas which receive approximately 4-6 hours of direct sunlight, and those grey or brown areas are areas of no direct sunlight to less than 4 hours of it.  

You can still grow things in full-shade areas, but you might need to supplement light.  This map will inform your decisions about where grow lights may be needed and for how long they should be lit.  The amount of sunlight you get will vary by season.  For example, in the winter, the sun will be lower on the horizon.  In the summer, it will be higher overhead and for longer.  Each apartment balcony will have different considerations based on season.  You may need to move plants in the summer closer to the front of your balcony as the sun will be high overhead.  In the winter, plants in the back of your patio will get more sunlight as the sun will be lower on the horizon.  

Suppose you are finding that you aren’t getting at least 4 hours of direct sunlight per day and, hopefully, more, you will need to supplement your light through artificial means.  That may not be allowed by your HOA, and it carries an electricity requirement.  It may also change your plans for what you can grow, and you may have to favor fall vegetables with lower light requirements.

The final consideration here is harsh reflections of light from sliding glass windows or other windows.  I have some areas in my garden that just fries at certain hours of the day from the reflection of the summer sun off my windows.  Take note of and mark any glares or harsh reflections you see in your growing area during these measurements.  These can be both a blessing and a curse.  It’s also an opportunity to reflect light to more shaded areas.

In the following video of this series, I will show you what I chose to grow, where, and why.  Then we will start building out the systems, containers, and structures we need to outfit my 3-sections.  As we explore the different methods, you can make modifications to your map. You may find that a side or back wall is perfect for a vertical hanging garden.  You may decide that you only truly have room for a grow tower.  You might be able to use railings or large pots.  As you watch each video in this series, think about the practicality of each plant and method we cover.  Then, you can build along with us the systems that are going to work best for you and your living space. 

First, complete this sun mapping exercise, then join us for the next course in this series, where we take that a step further.

Thanks for growing with us, and stay safe out there.