A Tight Squeeze

Just to show you how much you can fit on the patio. You can see the large tomato, corn and aloe plants growing among all of our smaller plants. This was our first apartment together. We would fit two dogs, a cat on a leash, a snake and the two of us out here during happy hour. (Sorry for the quality. Old phone pictures I found)

This wasn't a planned patio garden, and a lot of it was done on the cheap. But I would get so many compliments from the other residents. We were fortunate to have a south facing porch with a well-placed red oak to protect the plants from the worst of the Texas sun.

Eat, drink, be merry, and get dirty!
Margie

The Not-Quite-So-Protected Indoors

I'm learning a couple of things from growing plants inside during the winter:

1. I need to be patient and not start seeds so early. I think I am still on Texas season time.

I got this fan for $25 and it has a wind
option that produces random breezes.

And 2. Plants can still get sick/pests inside. My chives and a couple other plants got mites and aphids. My rosemary got powdery mildew (powdery mildew looks just like it sounds: a white powder on the leaves). It makes sense why, though. It's warm inside. There is more moisture around the plants. And the big thing: there is very little air circulation. Once I moved the plants outside they perked up quite a bit.

Well, it got cold again, and had to bring the warm season veggies in. I tried putting a fan in the room to move the air a bit, and holy crap the plants I moved back in perked up! My tomato grew about 2 inches overnight! So, fan in the room. Do it!

As for the bugs, I use organic liquid hand or dish soap. A small drop (seriously, barely squeeze the bottle so a tiny drop comes out) of that in a tiny spray bottle will dissolve the waxy outer coat of the pests and dry them out. The other option is to wipe down the plant gently with your hands to manually remove the insects.

For the powdery mildew I wipe the plant off gently with my fingers and some of the soap/water. I planted the rosemary I had inside in the ground a month and it hasn't died yet. The room I stored it in got a lot of sun, but I think it enjoys feeling the direct sun and wind on its leaves.

Eat, drink, be merry, and get dirty!

Margie

My First Blog!

Here it is! With a catchy title and everything! Welcome to my first post about apartment patio gardening.

I'm starting this blog after a bit of pressure from one of my friends and my boyfriend, J. I recently moved to Washington, D.C., from San Antonio, TX, and one thing I noticed when I got here: there are a lot of freakin' apartments and many of them look sadly bare. One day my friend from Austin asked me for advice on what to grow on her small apartment patio. She wanted some kind of plant that would cover her view of a typical, bleak parking lot, as well as survive a beginning gardener's care and Texas summer. Then she said: “What I'd love is an herb and vegetable garden, but I'm not sure how feasible it is with such a small space.”

!!!!

Such a small space?! Size doesn't matter.....for a vegetable/herb garden. It's amazing in how tiny a space you can see a plant grow. J sometimes gets a little intimidated by how much I manage to squeeze on our balcony and still leave some room for us. I say there is always room for more. ;)

So my lovely friend asked me more questions about how to start a garden on her patio. She then said that she couldn't find much help online about making apartment gardens. Some internet digging turned up plenty of great little projects uran gardeners can do, but there seemed to be little information about how the omst beginner and black-thumbed gardener can get started. And that is why I decided to start a blog on apartment balcony gardening: to show people in DC and other cities that it is possible to have a garden in the smallest of living spaces, how to get started, and feel like you have a small idea of what you're doing.

Eat, drink, be merry, and get dirty!

Margie