Small Garden Plan: My Balcony Container Vegetable Garden
Using the free demo of GardenCAD, this is the plan I drew for my main garden in 2009: A balcony full of greens (lettuce, chard, watercress, and spinach), vegetables, alpine strawberries, and herbs. My balcony faces westward into the condo development’s front yard, the de facto local dog park. Love dogs, but think it’s a good thing my edibles will be growing on the second level.
The balcony gets enough sun to be insufferably hot in the summertime, so the plan is to provide some shade by training nasturtiums up a folding-screen trellis. Have trellis, will grow peas, so I’m going to set some containers there, as well.
I’m afraid the plan’s not to scale, but I also don’t think it’s too far off. We’ll see how far optimism has led me astray this year: I’ll be taking photos of the real balcony set-up, once it develops beyond a small cold frame and a stinking batch of compost tea.
Have a garden plan of your own? I’d love to see it, and I’m sure the folks at GardenCAD would, too. I have only scratched the surface of the software’s capabilities and I can tell you, now that I’m getting used to its ways, I’ll be using it every year. Give it a go yourself and tell me what you think.
