These are some links to blogs, articles and supplies for balcony gardens that I snagged from another website's forum that might be of interest here. I discovered when attempting to post this that some of these links are banned from this site for some reason, but you can google them using the info provided here. ______________________________________ Turn Your Patio Into A Voluminous Vegetable Garden by: Jill Homer My first apartment was a second-story condo in an urban complex, far displaced from the groomed suburban landscapes and sprawling gardens I had grown up with. My only connection to the outdoors was a small porch, surrounded by brown siding and a fading carpet of artificial turf. To add a little color to the patio, I adopted a few small tomato plants from a friend who had started his garden indoors, and planted them in large pots near my railing. To my surprise, they started to grow. Soon I had filled the 5 x 10Â space with more than a dozen ceramic pots, plastic containers, and beach pails filled with peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and pole beans. Before I knew it, my porch was a curtain of green and my meals regularly featured home-grown vegetables. cont'd http://www.rentaldecorating.com/gardenpatio.htm **** Question: My husband and I recently moved to an apartment. I am seeking ideas for inexpensive vegetable patio gardening. There isn't much direct sunlight on our patio. Hardiness Zone: 8a Michelle from Dallas, TX Answer: Michelle, Growing vegetables on your patio certainly doesn't need to be expensive. The lack of sunlight, however, could prove to be a problem. For successful growth, most vegetables will need a minimum of 5 hours of direct sunlight a day. Some will need even more. "Leafy" vegetables (cabbage, lettuce) will tolerate the least amount of light, but vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots will need more sun. You'll have to experiment to see what grows best. To maximize the light you have, use strategically placed shiny materials and light colored rocks around your containers to reflect light back onto the plants. The most inexpensive way to start vegetables is from seed. Varieties labeled "patio, bush, or dwarf" are often bred specifically for container gardening. Saving seeds from year to year will cut down on expenses even further, but you'll need to start with heirloom seeds and avoid hybrids if you want offspring true to the parent plants. Just about anything that can hold a soil can be fashioned into a container: pails, trashcans, dishpans, plastic detergent or cat litter containers (cut down), wooden or wicker baskets, or even old leather or rubber boots. I like containers made from plastic materials, even though they tend to deteriorate over time with repeated sun exposure. They don't dry out as fast a terra cotta, transfer heat or rust like metal, and you can usually recycle them when you're done using them. If you use plastic containers, try not to spend much on them. Crops with shallow roots, like radishes, beets and onions, will grow just fine in old cake pans. Provide cages or trellises for climbers like beans, peas and cucumbers to save space, or plant them in hanging baskets and let their vines trail downward. If you don't have anything suitable on hand, shop around at flea markets, rummage sales or dollar stores. Make sure your containers have adequate drainage holes on the bottom. In regards to a growing medium, plan on using a very light soil or a soil-less mix-something that will drain rapidly, yet hold nutrients and keep the plant's roots consistently moist. You'll need to water your vegetables daily and feed them frequently with a 1/2 strength liquid fertilizer like fish emulsion. http://www.sustainable-media.com **** BALCONY OF DREAMS - A great little balcony garden blog by someone who has made a hobby of finding interesting spaces around the world http://balconyofdreams.blogspot.com/2007/01/tokyo-architects-balcony-garden.html **** Balcony Gardens bring another dimension to your life! Being an apartment dweller shouldn't keep you from having a garden. Many types of gardens can be created on balconies. With the addition of floral color, a balcony becomes an entertainment center just right for relaxing. Turf, small shrubs, and dwarf trees can be used to create a suburban landscape in miniature above the ground. Balconies even offer the opportunity for food production, with flowering fruit trees and container-grown herbs and vegetables. Whether transforming a high-rise penthouse or a simple second-floor terrace into a garden, a set of guidelines will aid in creating your "garden on high." First, consider how you wish to use the area. Are you looking for a colorful relaxation area or just privacy from an adjacent high-rise? Second, evaluate the microclimate. Toward which direction does the balcony face? Note how much sun the area receives and for how long. If the balcony is recessed, does direct sunlight reach it at all? If the situation is very open, will you and your plantings be subjected to buffeting winds and scorching sunlight? Look at the area with a very critical eye before putting a lot of money in to the project. Some minor remodeling may need to be done to make the area inviting to both people and plants. Safety considerations are another important factor to think about. Most balconies are required by building safety codes to support 60 pounds per square foot. Be sure to use a lightweight growing media which can reduce weight by up to 60% over standard garden soil. Avoid using heavy containers; plastics and cedar wood are recommended for low-weight situations....cont'd http://www.scotttorrance.ca/Quickstart/ImageLib/0008crop2_fmt.jpeg ** The website that hosted this article is banned from GardenWeb (it's called Gardener's Corner). If you want to finish the article you'll have to google it. I usually cut and paste the first sentence into a google search to locate a specific article.** ***** Bed of Grass http://www.scotttorrance.ca/Quickstart/ImageLib/0008crop2_fmt.jpeg www.scotttorrance.ca/home.html ***** Rooftop Garden site with Balcony Garden section: http://rooftopgardens.ca/en/balcony ***** Apartment Balcony Decorating Ideas (Oh My Apartment): http://ohmyapt.apartmentratings.com/apartment-balcony-decorating-ideas.html http://ohmyapt.apartmentratings.com/apartment-gardening.html ***** Article and website: Living On The Edge - Balcony Rooftop Designers Guild ***** Supplies: For small plants another type of vertical container: http://theverticalgarden.com / All Kinds of Railing & Fence Planters: http://www.hooksandlattice.com/rapl.html Teak Planter Boxes: http://stores.ebay.com/DIAMOND-TROPICAL-HARDWOODS_Teak- Planter-Tree-Boxes_W0QQcolZ2QQdirZ1QQfsubZ970795QQftidZ2QQtZkm Hammock Chair http://www.hammocksource.com/Hammock_Chair_girl.jpg A comfortable, inviting place to sit would be important for me. Either a cafe table and chair, or better yet...one of these hammock chairs (and stand) particularly the ones that are full enough to also allow you to pull your feet up and then stretch them out with the hammock stetching the length of your legs - __________________________________________________ Connect with other apartment dwellers in your area who are avid or closet gardeners by starting a Meetup Group around this topic: http://www.meetup.com /

Hi Anthony, Like Mark, my prices are based on retail, not wholesale. You are essentially a contract grower of specialty produce. If chefs want specific varieties, they must pay a premium, and truly high-end restaurants (that's my market, as well) will just pass on the cost to the guests - don't short yourself. I have worked in high-end restaurants for over 25 years, and been a supplier to them for as long. If your quality is good, don't be afraid to charge what it's worth - it is a lot of labor and a lot doesn't get sold to the best restaurants, because they only want the best, and that is expensive to create. Chefs want clean, unblemished, uniformly sized produce, because it is cheaper for them to process into an elegant presentation. Generally they prefer smaller rather than larger sizes - haricot verts instead of large green beans, slender short carrots instead of large ones - because it means less prep time in the kitchen so less labor cost. They prefer, and know how to recognize, freshness, so harvest your most perishable crops early on the morning of delivery day, and field chill if necessary. If you bring them bug-eaten leaves, crooked carrots, or 10 pounds of potatoes that weigh 1/2 oz and 2 lbs in the same bag, or anything that needs to be washed, they aren't happy. Do your first sorting right in the field into 3 categories - best quality, very good, and the rest. As an example, my purple carrots are grown in beds that are 30" wide and 20' long (50 sq. ft) where the soil is sifted 18" deep, so they all grow straight and fast. I wash them by hand, sort them by size, cut the greens at 1 1/2 inches from the top of the carrot (I sell the tops separately) and sell them 12/$5. They are ready to cut and cook when they arrive. I have a replacement guarantee for any produce that gets returned because of quality issues, or I credit the next order if they don't want a replacement. I deliver on Thursdays and Mondays only, because they are too busy on weekends and Monday they have time to spend talking about the week ahead. I expect payment within ten days, or impose a service charge. Most pay on delivery. For your first year, one restaurant may be all you should commit to, and market the surplus to the others as you have it. Tell the other restaurants that this is your first year doing this type of marketing, and you don't want to sacrifice quality, but you will keep them apprised of any surplus specialty items and they will have first pick. Chefs are very pressed for time and don't like any BS, so be upfront and direct - they'll appreciate it. It is more important to meet the expectations of volume and quality in the beginning, and create a reputation that will allow you to maintain a premium price for your produce. If it's really good, the chefs will be calling you. The only discount should be for produce that doesn't meet your highest standards, and if you can find a non-restaurant market for that, such as caterers or gourmet grocers, it will serve your reputation... chefs talk to each other all the time. I grow in Maine, and most of my markets are local, but I have sold my produce in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, D.C., and Palm Beach, and they pay air-freight shipping rates. Ask the chef you are working with how many people he serves per week (in the trade we call them "covers", i.e.; "we did 158 covers last night," which means they served 158 entrees, not people. Remember that, in most fine dining, dinner is a salad or appetizer, the main meal, dessert, and beverages. You should try to have something from your farm on every plate, even if it is garnishing material like Blue Basil flowers. Even in urban markets, restaurants are seasonal - there are way more rich people in New York in the winter than in the summer (a lot come to Maine), and your area will have seasonal variation too. The chef should be able to guide you towards when demand will slow. Remember too that you have a good market around the winter holidays, so it pays to have something to offer between Thanksgiving and New Years, and Valentines Day can be a nice winter income pop if you plan right. These days, "high-end" in the restaurant industry assumes that each guest will pay $80 or more for dinner, and often way more... some of my clients charge over $200, not including drinks, per person. The very highest-end restaurants routinely get $400 per person, and I have served tables that spent over $10,000 per person - it is a very different world for the 1% crowd. High-end restaurants have a lot of overhead, but they aren't hurting like the mid-range restaurants are. This is the market you want to shoot for, because they have a stable clientele who don't worry so much about economic fluctuations, they just want the best, and will pay for it. There were only 20 restaurants in America last year that received 5-star ratings from Mobil, considered the most stringent reviewer. There are hundreds of 3-star. You want to be selling to 4- and 5-star restaurants, because that will get you adequately funded for retirement.Your preference should always be to service the most expensive restaurants. They are buying from farms like ours. Try to get your farms' name printed on the menu in any restaurant you sell to, this will serve both you and them in that it promotes the perception that they are concerned about local organic food - a very strong selling point these days. Put their names on your own marketing, and at your stand, if the chefs agree to it. Use press releases for marketing as well - if there is a culinary benefit, or the chef is doing a special event, donate something and get it publicized. Sid Wainer is one of the largest purveyors of specialty produce in New England, his website will give you some insight on pricing of some specialty items. Professional cooking magazines will also have good references to follow up on for pricing - much of my garden planning revolves around culinary resources rather than seed catalogs. Publications aimed at the retail consumer market will be of less usefulness - Saveur being a notable exception. I use Fedco for the bulk of my seed order, they are a Maine company that has principles I respect, and carry a lot of good seeds at fair prices, with substantial volume discounts. I also use Baker Creek, Johnnys', Ornamental Edibles, Kitazawa, Seeds of Italy, and Graines-Baumaux in France, and many others. I do not sell large potatoes, "utility" onions and carrots, standard green broccoli or cabbage - the return isn't worth it, and chefs can get it cheaper elsewhere. Once you calculate your plant needs for one restaurant, at least double the number of plants. Stagger planting dates, and take advantage of micro-climates to stagger the harvest further. Explore using different growing techniques as well as unusual varieties, and invest in season-extension and crop protection technology - hoop houses, row covers, IRT mulches, drip irrigation and the like will make your life easier and your product more reliable. Buy varieties based on flavor, color, and heirloom qualities for the most part, but buy common cultivars for experimenting with growing techniques. Look for things like white celery, cornichons, treviso radicchio, sea kale, Egyptian onions, and any unusual colors - carrots are the big thing right now, but black and watermelon radishes, blue peas, orange or Romanesco caulflower, or white strawberries will appeal to chefs with "foodie" clientele. I have ways of growing radishes, carrots, and garlic that are unusual and offer a product unique to my farm, I also market a lot of unusual greens and edible flowers and micro-greens - anything that makes you stand out in the mind of the chef when he wants something unique will bring in $ and more clients. Eventually, you should be intensively working about 5 acres for specialty produce, making a good living, and not need the farm stand at all. Plan to have some of your farm dedicated to ornamental products as well - cut flowers in summer, unusual pumpkins and gourds in fall, and greens in winter can all add to the bottom line. The dining room manager or GM will give you guidance on what they might buy from you instead of a florist. Here is a link that might be useful: Manzano seed

I think your observations and conclusions are absolutely correct, and they mirror what Samuel Fromartz wrote in his recent book, Organic, Inc. He related the story about a "successful" CSA couple (Pennsylvania I think) who gross $35,000 the first year. Their net profit was $20,000. Twelve years latter, they netted $250,000 but their profit was only $22,000. I suspect there is something deeper here that I might not be able to articulate very well, but here goes Many of us "country, farm, back-to-nature, all natural, etc." types seem to have an inherent distrust of big business. Indeed, some of us have headed for the country life to rid ourselves of the corporate industrial urban life. Then we start making a little bit of money selling what we grow, and think, "Wow, I could make a living doing thisÂ" As our business grow, we run into just what you have: rising insurance costs, cut throat competition, the other guyÂs cheap labor costs, escalating gasoline prices, etc.  the list is endless. What many of us fail to connect is that this is just what big business faces too. Maybe, just maybe, big business is not the evil empire that so many of us have concluded it is. It, like us small business owners, are just trying to stay even. In the end, market growers might do better if it is treated as a sideline or hobby. Once it becomes our only source of income, I suspect we start doing things we might have found distasteful when we were younger and more romantic. Finally, I am reminded of that old quote: "If a man is not a socialists by the time he is twenty, he has no heart. If a man is not a capitalist by the time he is 40, he has no brains."

Yesterday I had the pleasure of going to the Maine Organic Farmer's and Gardener's Association "Spring Growth" Conference. The main attraction was Anne and Eric Nordell, talking about their low till methods. They have written columns on the subject for the last 15 years or so in Small Farmer's Journal, and reprints are available. Their farm is in the zone 5 hills of northern Pennsylvania. Their method is entirely horse powered, so that reduces wheel compaction. Not all of us have that option though. They consider the cover crops to be the main method of tillage. They have twelve fields, a half acre each, and in any one year, six of them are in cover crops. They call this the "Bio-Extensive" method. The purpose of this tillage is to improve deep soil structure. Contrast that with the shallow cultivation used for weed control. There is a rotation that begins with a field geting a year of cover, interupted by a bare fallow with repeated light cultivations to germinate and dispose of weed seeds. There's usually a legume in there somewhere, maybe several, as well as bulk carbon growers. After the fallow, they spread a light (2 yd/ acre) application of compost, then plant a fall cover that will be winter killed, usually peas and oats. One favored method of planting is to broadcast, then hill the soil into 5" ridges, much like small raised beds. The method has to be adjusted to make sure the path also gets cover. The next year, this field would be planted to early crops. Weed control was accomplished with the summer fallow. The cover was winter killed. Even though the field is wet, they're able to get in and plant, because they don't need to work the soil other than scratch the dry (or drier) top of the ridge. They either use a cultivator with a coulter and a sweep to clear a narrow planting zone on top of the ridge, or a coulter and a tooth to clear just enough to transplant into. This moves the mulch left from the winter cover into the paths and lets the soil warm around the planted row. After the crop matures, the field is planted to cover again. That cover will overwinter and resprout in the spring of the third year. Again, there will be a variety of cover crops grown in sucession, separated by open fallow periods to wear out the weed seed bank. At the end of this year, the winter cover may be something that overwinters again. Six weeks before planting a late crop the next year, the cover is killed, usually by just disking. It may get disked repeatedly durring the six weeks leading to planting the cash crop, and by planting time, even without moldboard plowing, the dead cover has been broken up and incorporated into the top inch or two of the soil. This helps rain soak in and reduces evaporation, which helps as they have no irrigation system. And that's four years. Do it again. But there are many variations. Sometimes covers are planted by skim plowing after broadcasting seed into stubble. Sometimes garlic is planted in a furrow cut onto the top of a fall ridge, already a foot tall with winter cover. The order of cover crops and fallow is moved around to deter different weeds (spring versus summer). Sometimes ridges are used and sometimes they aren't. Some paths (garlic) get an extra cover of straw mulch. Some paths get more tillage to control weeds. Some get a line of cover crop planted in them while the cash crop is still growing in the rows around it. And they keep expirimenting. So the system isn't exactly no till, but it is low till, and shallow. They have a very few specialized tools, such as a rolling chopper made by mounting about ten coulter wheels on a disk axle, but do most of their work with ancient horse cultivators, disks, and walking plows. They say they spend about four hours per field per year hand weeding. Dan