5 Container Gardening Options for Apartment Gardeners

If you're an apartment, balcony, or just a small space gardener, you're cramped for space. And so in today's video, what we're going to do is go over five different container options and their pros and cons so you can make the best choice for your small space garden. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. And this is where gardening starts for most people, myself included. A lot of the early Epic Gardening videos were filmed on a balcony, much like this fake balcony of my porch on my house. But this is what we're going to use as the example. You know, don't think that just because of the space you have, you're limited severely on what you can grow. Yes, there are limitations, and we're talking about that in today's video, but with some creative containers, you really can maximize your space. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button for Epic Container Harvests and let's get into the video. Our first container option, which is also the most basic would be your standard thin rectangular planter. This is great because it just fits really nicely on any balcony railing that is flat. So these are two by fours and it's very, very easy for this to rest here. Of course, maybe some wind might knock it over. You might want to watch out for that, but in general, it's pretty stable. Now these can come in wood. These can come in plastic. The benefits of course of plastic is that it's going to last a lot longer, but it will become brittle because it's being blasted by the UV and you know, eventually it will kind of fade and look a little bad. And there's some sustainability issues there. The downsides of wood is that eventually that will rot and fade. And you know, there, there may be some issues just with the longevity of it, but it kind of is up to you. Now the thing you really care about here is that there's a drainage hole. So we have one drainage hole here. You can drill more, but with a balcony garden, the thing you don't want to do is rain down, you know, plant water on your neighbors. And so you do want something like this just to capture, you know, assuming you're watering correctly, you won't be overwatering too much, but you know, you get some rain or you do whatever and you do get some drainage. So it's important to have that. But these can grow quite a bit of produce. As you can see here, I have a very classic kind of pretty looking herb garden. We have parsley, oregano and thyme. These are my little kitchen favorites that I like to come out and clip. They work really nicely. So just this one planter right here is growing enough herbs to save me like $10 to $15 a month I would say at the grocery store. Cause herbs are really expensive at a grocery store. So that's number one. The most basic, but hey, sometimes basic is the best. Option number two is what I'll call the sit on top railing planter. Now if you have a flat and or a round balcony railing, then you can make these work. You just have to buy the one that obviously fits to that type. I have a flat, so I have a two by four right here. What I particularly like about this one is take a look. You have one depression right here and then another one right here. So this can actually fit a two by four or a two by six. So it's a little bit modular and I'll leave links for all this stuff in the video description. What's nice about this, number one, it's more stable. It's much harder for the wind or any sort of debris to knock this over. So you have a little more stability there, especially if you're up on a high balcony. You know, you're living life like a king up in the baller heights on these big condos. Now the other thing I'll say is that it's typically a bit deeper. You can see we've got quite a bit of soil coming down here. Now it's interesting that soil runs to here, here and here. And then you have some drainage holes in the bottom. What I like about this one is that the drainage holes were little plugs so I could pop them in or pop them out. I was noticing specifically where I placed this one was getting a lot of runoff off the roof, which I didn't really want. So I had to move it, but also I had to take the drainage holes out so it actually would drain. Otherwise these things would just drown. But I would say these are fantastic. If you want a nice, secure, clean look. It looks a little bit more spiffy than I would say the standard one that we just looked at because it has a bit of a sunken appeal to it. And you can grow a little bit more in this. Option number three is going vertical, right? So when we're making use of our apartment garden space, you really want to make use of every possible dimension that you can. And of course going with a vertical hanging planter is a good idea. A lot of people have trouble with this particular style. The reason I'm showing it is number one, it's available to most people. You can find it at your garden center, probably anywhere you are in the country, maybe even the world. And number two, it's pretty cheap. So if you can mitigate some of the problems I'm going to talk about with this, then you'll be in a good spot. And the number one problem is that, think about it, it's being blasted by the elements, wind, et cetera, sun, from all angles. And this is a porous coconut fiber type of protective barrier for the soil. That's, that's very, very porous. It's going to let out quite a bit of moisture. And your number one problem when growing in something like this will be overwatering. So you can also get plastic hanging planters, wooden hanging planters, metal hanging planters. The material does to some degree matter because it affects primarily the watering. So when you're growing, you just have to be mindful of that. And then number two, it's what you're actually planting in this. You know, if you're planting something that grows upwards, you want to make sure that in your particular growing space, light is actually coming in at that area. Otherwise it's going to have a hard time. Or you might just want to plant something that does well in the shade. What a lot of people, myself included, will do is we'll plant something that trails downwards, right? So maybe a nice string of pearls you could throw down here. You could do a nice string of bananas. Or if in the edible world, you could do peas actually. Peas won't quite go all the way down because peas have a natural tendency to climb. But what you'll find is peas will kind of come down like this and go up and then down and up and then down. It looks kind of weird, but it still works. And I got quite a bit of peas literally in this basket right here doing just that. So there's a lot of different options here, but I just want to stress, look, I have my hanging planter and you can't see it, but below is the railing planter we just looked at. And now in the same exact vertical space, we've doubled the amount of things that we can grow. Option number four. And in fact, one of my favorite containers of all time, the subject of my next book coming out in 2021 is grow bags. Grow bags are so powerful, whether you're a small space gardener or otherwise. In fact, I know many people who even farm in grow bags, but that's another story. Let's talk first about why these are so good. Then I'll show you a couple of different options, including some really cool ones right here. But why are they so good? Well, here's your standard container, right? Now what happens when you put a plant in this container? Let's say a beautiful tomato. You put a tomato in here. Boom, right? It starts to grow. It thinks it's in the ground and it goes like this. The roots throw down and then they start to hit the bottom here. So they say, Hmm, that's weird. But there's still neutrified water down there. There's still water. There's enough oxygen, hopefully and there's still soil and everything a plant needs to grow. And so the roots are still going to spread. So what they'll do is they'll kind of circle around, they'll hit the side, they'll grow up the side. Remember in the side, you've got side of the plastic, there's a little bit of water with nutrients, there's soil, hopefully enough oxygen. It's still going to grow. And so it's going to keep going around in a circle and you're going to get root circling and you're going to get a root bound plant. That's why when you pull a lot of plants out of their nursery pots, they're root bound because it's a plastic pot. Now, why is a grow bag a better option? Well, the reason why is because it's porous on all sides. It's made out of a fabric. And so when the roots hit the bottom or the sides, that root tip is exposed to a bit too much air and a bit too low humidity for its liking. And so the root tip dies. When the root tip dies, that sends a signal back to the plant saying, yo, this one died. And in fact many ones around the whole perimeter of this container died. We need to do something. And so it'll throw out more branches of roots. And so when you pull the average container plant out of a grow bag, you're going to find a beautiful fibrous root system that preserves it, right? You're not getting any root circling. You're not going to get the roots choking themselves out. That's why I like the grow bag in general. But specifically for apartments, they're nice. They fold up. Let me show you this one right here. This one's a reinforced one from Gardener Supply. So this one's a little more flimsy. This one's reinforced. So it doesn't like fold in on itself very much, which I kind of like. And it holds water a little bit better because again, it has this reinforced exterior. This one is very cool. A little more expensive. Then this one right here is again from Gardener Supply. This one is a multi-pocket grow bag. I used to have a beautiful combo planting of edibles in this, but right now I just have a little bit of cilantro that's hanging on. I'm going to replant this pretty soon. The thing that's nice about this, one massive soil right here can plant one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, different areas. And in fact, I had 10 plants in here because I had herbs in these three herbs in these three and I had chard, bok choy and mint up top. And it was a beautiful combo planter. So as an apartment gardener, remember your floor is still an option. So if you have a space that's getting exposed to sun like, like right here, you can still grow and grow bags are a fantastic choice. Option number five is the one area of a small space or apartment garden we haven't talked about, which is the side of that structure. So what you're looking at here is just a shoe rack. This is a shoe rack from like Ross or something. It's $10. Very, very, very cheap. It even comes with its own hangers. How nice of them. Now this is four by six. So there's 24 different pockets here. And man, these are big. I mean, that's a pretty big pocket. Can you grow a tomato in there? Probably not. But can you grow herbs and flowers and lettuce? I mean, this would be a fantastic, you can grow 24 heads of lettuce in this thing. It's crazy. So what I would recommend for this is, first of all, you got to locate it in a spot that gets some good light, right? But the next thing you want to do is pour some water in and see if it drains out. Depending on the one you get, it might drain out pretty well and it might not. This one didn't. So what I did is I cut little slits, just two or three little slits with scissors right at the bottom here. And what that allows us to do of course is drain. I didn't cut any at the very, very bottom. So it'll drain into the next one, right? And what's really nice is this one's so popular I actually put it in my book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening. So it's in the Vertical Gardening chapter of the book. But I think it's such a great idea because it's dirt cheap. So cheap. One bag of soil will fill all of these and then you're 10 bucks. You're in for like 20 bucks maybe. And then you can grow from seed, save yourself even more money and you're in a really good spot. So there's so many different options for a container garden in an apartment. Just because you live in a small space does not mean that you can't grow quite a bit of food actually. No, you can't provide a hundred percent of your own food like someone living on a homestead. But really it's about practice. If that's something you want to do in the future, then practice now and get your reps. Or if you just want to grow a couple herbs, then do that. I mean, there's nothing wrong with either of those options. And hopefully these containers gave you some good inspiration, maybe something you didn't see before. Now one thing I'll say is if you're watching this video the day it released or somewhere close to that, we just recently passed 500,000 subscribers here on YouTube, which like blows my actual mind. Sometimes I look at it and I'm just like, there's no way that's a real number. It's so big it looks fake. So I just wanted to say thank you to all of you guys. It's so crazy to me to think that this many people are interested in growing food in small spaces in really any way at all. It's just mind boggling to me, how many of you have engaged and sent me messages of, you know, gratitude or questions or just anything really. And I just wanted to say thank you so much. It's changed my life in an incredible way and in a way that you'll see very, very soon because I started a second channel called Epic Urban Homestead, which I'll link in the little pop-up whatever thing here. Um, so if that doesn't give you a little hint of what's to come, I'm not sure what would, but I encourage you to go check that out. It's, nothing's going to be up there, but when something's up there, you'll know and something will be up there and it will be epic. So until next time guys, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.