Living in an urban environment means we don’t have a lot of extra square feet. Luckily, we do have a small balcony with a lovely view of downtown San Francisco. This year I knew I wanted to start a little garden, and a few weeks ago I finally got down to it!

There are a few limitation with the balcony:

• space – it is a balcony so space is limited
• sun – we do not get direct sunlight on the balcony, we get a nice amount of reflected light though
• wind – small baby plants may not be able to handle the sharp San Francisco wind
• temperature – let’s face it, San Francisco is not warm! While it will never hit freezing, plants living here need to like a bit of chill in the air
• fog – will fog affect the plants? I don’t know!

After a fair amount of research I decided to plant a lot of herbs & several types of lettuce plants. Lettuce apparently does best when it is partially, or mostly shaded, so my hope was it would be very happy on my balcony. With a general game plan in place, I headed down to Flowercraft – a great garden center located right in San Francisco – it actually has parking too!

I spent most of a Saturday and some of a Sunday finishing up the planting. During the week I had to find additional hardware to mount the brackets for the flower boxes on the balcony railings. But in the end – I think I have a great start for a balcony garden!

Most of the plants transplanted, chaos on the balcony still – but nothing will deter Norway the Cat from checking it out:

One week later, the boxes are finally mounted and the balcony straightened up:

Catnip for Norway and the most amazing smelling chocolate mint:

Trio of herbs: tarragon, thyme, and oregano followed by rosemary, and a pot of chives that were started from seed:

The lettuce is starting to really take hold:

And arugula, basil (from seed) and parsley are starting to perk up a bit as well:

Hopefully I’ll have good news to share along the way in this balcony garden project! So far things are thriving and there have been a few tips of green breaking the soil in the chive container!