What do you associate with gardening? Do you associate gardening with the wonderful smell of nature? Perhaps you associate it with your childhood. You may have fond memories of gardening and you cannot help but appreciate it more when you can already do it for your own home. In the world of concrete pavements and tall buildings, a place where gardening can still be done seems to be unlikely but there are still some spots in your own home that can be transformed into a garden-like your balcony.
You do not need to see the garden of someone else to become inspired. As long as you love gardening, you know that you can do it on your own with some tips, of course.
What You Need
There are some things that you need in order to follow this tutorial:
- Your very own balcony – You cannot expect that your next-door neighbor will be happy with the thought that you are going to do gardening on his balcony, right?
- Pots and soil – This is where you are going to put most of the plants you would use to decorate your balcony.
- A wide assortment of plants – The plants that you would put will depend on the season and how well they can grow.
- Gardening Tools – How can you proceed into decorating your balcony garden without all the right tools that will make it easier for you?
- Some Decorative Materials – There is a wide array of decorative materials for your balcony garden available depending on the design that you want.
Step by Step Instructions
1. Choose Your Base – To Start
You need to place your plants in pots. Without the right pots, you will not be able to start so it is best to choose the right pots first.
- Consider the size of the plants that you are going to place.
- It is best to stick with only one color when it comes to the pots you will choose.
- Strategically place the pots in places where you believe that they will look great.
2. Check the Capacity of Your Balcony – To Be Sure
When it comes to your balcony, you cannot only consider the size, you also have to consider how much weight it can take. Too many plants can amount to a lot of weight and you do not want your dreams of building a great-looking balcony garden to be fruitless just because you ignored this fact.
- Contact a structural engineer.
- Ask the structural engineer to measure the amount of weight that your balcony can support.
- The weakest part of the balcony is always in the middle.
- Keep that in mind when you are creating strategies on where to place your heavy plants.
3. Start Small – To Maintain
One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when you are trying to transform your balcony is placing too many plants that you cannot maintain. Remember that the number of plants that you are going to place will grow as you fall in love with gardening even more.
- A base of evergreens will help maintain the allure of your balcony garden.
- Search for plants that do not require regular upkeep.
- Takedown notes about each plant that you place on your balcony.
- Record your mistakes about the plants.
- Choose more plants depending on what you have recorded.
4. Have a Theme – To Follow
As a general rule, you may want to have only three colors in your garden. This will allow you to follow a certain theme. The reason for this is because you do not want your balcony garden to look too busy. You do not want it to look like it is not being maintained when you are actually doing your best to make it look amazing.
- Research about the plants that you are going to pick out.
- Choose plants that have the same colored flowers.
- Depending on the season, you may change the colors that you use for your theme.
- Using complementary and contrasting colors will always work.
- Green should always be a part of your color palette.
5. Use Top Dressing – For Various Purposes
If in case you are not familiar with top dressings, these are items that you can place on containers in order to aesthetically improve the appearance of the containers and the plants. The top dressing may be composed of pebbles, wood bark chips, and much more. A top-dressing can also improve the staying power of water inside the container since water will not evaporate too quickly.
- Choose the top dressing which you believe will work best for your plant.
- For fruit and vegetable plants, it is best to choose agricultural grit.
- Place just the right amount of top dressing that will not overpower and smother your plants.
- If you feel that your top dressing does not match the pots that you have chosen in the first place, then spray paint the pots ahead of time.
6. Enjoy Doing It with Love and Care – To Make Your Plants Grow Well
Do you honestly believe that your plants will be able to grow without your constant affection and passion for gardening? Without dedication, you would just let your plants die and rot after some time.
- Remember that the more plants you have, the more time you have to a lot to maintain them.
- Some plants would require that you will water them a lot while others can only be watered from time to time.
- Take time to read about fertilizers and sprays and how they can help your plants.
Conclusion
Did you enjoy the things that are mentioned above? When you start paying attention to your balcony garden, you know that your balcony’s beauty will increase. Just imagine hanging out on your balcony after a hard day’s work. Seeing the fruits of your labor will be enough to make you smile. Your balcony garden isn’t something that you have to do but it may be something that you want to accomplish for yourself.
If you have other suggestions, feel free to share them through the comments section below. Share this article too for other people you know who are searching for ways to fix their balconies too.
