Grow food in containers on balconies, patios and rooftops, or take the next step into a community plot.
Most “container gardening ideas” posts are a list of what you can grow in a pot. That’s a different question, and we’ve already answered it: which pot size each crop needs is covered there properly. This one answers the question that comes after you’ve already got pots going: how do you get more out of…
Growing cucumbers in containers: the pot size they need, how to support a vine with no garden bed, and how to tell overwatering from underwatering.
Straight up: our own advice on this site has been that separate pots are the practical approach for herbs. That’s still the right default. But “the right default” isn’t “always true,” and there’s a real, narrower answer underneath the blanket advice: some herbs genuinely do share a pot well, some will limp along until one…
Growing peppers in containers: the pot size and sun they need, why they want more feeding than most advice says, and how to read the watering signs.
Eggshells for fertilizer: how long the calcium takes to become available, why grinding matters most, and why eggshells won’t fix blossom end rot.
Banana peel fertilizer: why the “50 vs 3,000 ppm” comparison you’ve seen doesn’t hold up, what’s verified about the peel, and the one thing to do with it that works.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you before you buy a trellis: half the vegetables people call “vertical” don’t climb. They vine, they sprawl, they flop over and sulk on the ground looking exactly like they did before you bought the trellis. A vertical vegetable garden only works if you match the plant’s actual habit to…
A pot doesn’t forgive a bad guess the way a garden bed does. Get the dose wrong in open ground and the surrounding soil dilutes the mistake before it ever really reaches the roots. Get it wrong in a container and there’s nowhere for the excess to go: the whole root system sits in it….
A community garden plot is the usual next step when the balcony is full. What a plot costs, how long the waitlist runs, how big it is, and how it works alongside your container setup instead of replacing it.
My first attempt at growing garlic in a pot gave me bulbs about the size of a large marble. Not a design flaw in garlic. A design flaw in the pot. I used whatever was already sitting on the balcony, which turned out to be about 8 inches deep, and garlic wants more room underneath…