How I Transformed My 140-Square-Foot Queens Balcony Into a Garden Oasis

Use potting soil

Since pots trap water by their nature, using potting soil (instead of garden soil) provides better drainage. Because most of my plants hate being even a little moist (“don’t like having wet feet” is a phrase you’ll run across in plant catalogs), I add a bunch of pumice pebbles to my soil to improve the drainage even more. Perlite also does the trick; it’s cheaper and available at any garden store.

I recommend using whatever brand of potting soil your local landscaping pros use and avoiding the stuff you usually find at big-box stores (it rhymes with Spiracle Glow). I’ve found the professional stuff to be of higher and more-consistent quality, and it usually doesn’t come with added ingredients such as wetting agents and premixed fertilizer that you don’t need. In 2022 I used Valfei’s Potting Soil because it’s what they had at Verni’s, a standout local garden center. It smells as rich as a forest floor, drains like a dream, and the plants all seem to love it.

Improve drainage in large pots

Small pots can be filled with soil alone, but anything above 10 inches or so in height benefits from a layer of coarse, sharp-edged gravel on the bottom to ensure that any extra water drains completely away. I now use white marble chips (also found at most garden centers), because they don’t leach any kind of stain; the red mudstone pebbles I started out with left rust-colored puddles every time I watered. A layer of Sandbaggy Landscape Fabric between the gravel and soil will prevent clogged drainage, which can cause, in Zack’s words, “anaerobic disgustingness.” (The funk of even a small plant whose roots have decayed in standing water is nauseating and unbelievably persistent on your hands. Ask me how I know.) Zack gave me a big piece of fabric from the huge rolls his landscaping company buys, but there’s a thrifty way to get the few square feet that you probably need: Buy a handful of grow bags and cut them up.

All that great drainage you’ve carefully created comes with a minor downside: Every time you water your plants, nutrients leach from the soil and drain away. To add them back in, a diluted 20-20-20 fertilizer is good for most things green and growing. Zack recommends a weekly feeding for container plants, versus monthly for in-ground gardens. My plants have certainly been happier since I started following that advice.

Throw shade

The biggest improvement to my garden’s happiness this year over previous years isn’t down to better soil and smarter fertilizing, it’s down to controlling sun exposure.

I was out on the balcony one June day, fretting over my spruce and junipers, which were beginning to go brown. It suddenly struck me what the problem was. Pots get hot in the sun—really, really hot if they have a ceramic glaze. I was roasting my plants’ roots alive, and no amount of water and plant food could help. So I picked up a couple of rolls of inexpensive reed fencing at the local Home Depot (about $20 for a 4-by-8-foot piece). I trimmed them into pot-height sections with kitchen shears, and folded them over themselves a few times to create multilayered mats.

I then wedged the mats between the outermost pots and the balcony railing. They provide dense shade and insulation against the afternoon sun—pots that used to get almost too hot to touch now stay cool—and the effect on my plants was immediate. The browning gave way to new growth within days. And I rearranged the garden so that the taller pots on the edges cast shade onto the smaller ones in the center, keeping them cool, too.

Pick container-loving plants

Zack helped me fill out my garden with colorful additions. His company landscapes a lot of penthouse patios and corporate rooftop gardens—places akin to the balcony. One afternoon he sent me home with some hardy leftovers from the plantings: five coleus, two sweet potato vines, and an angelonia. I spent a few hours getting them into various containers, kept them watered, and within weeks had the garden you see in the pictures. (I later added a few more things, but these were the main event.) This helped me realize a couple of things:

One, I had previously paid attention only to hardy perennials—plants that can overwinter and return to life year after year. But I now recognize that annuals like the ones Zack gave me have values all their own. They go in fast, tend to be energetic growers and vigorous recoverers, and when they’re done flowering—or when they die with the return of winter—they come out fast, too, ready to be replaced by something else. An all-perennial garden would be a static exhibit; adding annuals to the mix means I can have an ever-changing garden canvas, framed by my stalwart survivors.

Two, I need to get better about planning. One fall I spent $100 or so on a bunch of perennials. They were all appropriate to my conditions and location, but I asked too much when I tried keeping them on the balcony all winter as little more than seedlings. The casualty list included two lavenders, a Russian sage, and a blue fescue. The Artemisia sage barely scraped by, and the same for the pair of blue globe thistles (aka echinops). And even with the arrival of good weather, the thistles weren’t happy growing in pots—something I should have recognized by the fact that High Country Gardens didn’t list “good for containers” among their attributes. (One went to and did well in Zack’s garden, and the other went to the compost bin in the sky.)