Growing Balcony Tomatoes - How to Grow Tomatoes on a Balcony

Growing tomatoes is a very popular form of gardening. But for many people today the reality is that they live in an apartment or a condo, where there is no possible access to a garden, and the only real access to the outdoors is the balcony. Is it possible to grow tomatoes on a balcony?

The short answer is yes. There are a few things to keep in mind when trying to grow tomatoes on a balcony.

There are actually a few advantages to growing balcony tomatoes. If the weather turns bad, either with storms with hail, or the out of season frost, you can easily protect your plants. You can even go so far as to stretch the growing season a week or two by avoiding those late or early frosts at the beginning and end of the gardening season.

Sunlight - You still need for most vegetables to get at least 6 hours of sunlight a day. This may be an issue if you live in an urban canyon, or only have a northern exposure for your balcony. For those cases you may need to resort to growing tomatoes indoors with grow lights.

If you have adequate sunlight, then you need to decide whether you want to grow the tomatoes in a container on the ground or in the air in a hanging tomato planter.
The advantage to growing tomatoes in a ground based container is that you can use a very large container, or even a grouping of them. The job or keeping these watered can be made simpler by using a self watering planter like the Earthbox system or making one of your own.

It is much easier to grow a lot of tomatoes in containers, but because it is difficult to stake or support tomatoes in containers, you are somewhat limited in the varieties that you may want to try growing. Determinate varieties will be more limited in their growth patterns, and will bear fruit over a shorter period of time, so that once they have grown to maturity and been harvested, you can send them on to the great compost pile in the sky. Varieties like Patio are suited for small containers, but you can successfully grow larger varieties like Celebrity in containers as well. This will need some staking and will probably do better if it is pruned to one or two main branches.

If you still want to try growing some of the indeterminate varieties like many of the cherry tomatoes, for example Sweet 100s, you may want to try a hanging planter or even growing tomatoes upside down. If you hang the planter high enough, you can successfully plant some of these bigger vines without it taking over the balcony. But be aware that a fully loaded planter is very heavy, so be sure to anchor it to some strong structural member to avoid injury to either the tomatoes or you.

Maybe the best overall compromise for use on a balcony is a hanging planter that includes a stand. There are a couple of different types of these planters. With a stand, you don’t have to worry about finding some place to hang a heavy container, but it reduces the footprint on the floor substantially because the plants are still hanging, so the need for a staking system is eliminated. They will generally allow you to grow more than one plant. The Felknor Ventures Tomato Tree is from the same folks that brought the original upside down planter, and it will allow you to plant up to three tomato plants. Or if the urge strikes, you can supplement your tomatoes with some other plants like peppers or eggplant. Another very attractive idea is the Upside-down Tomato Garden which not only allows you to have upside down tomatoes, but the planter is designed to allow some other small plants to grow in the top of the planter, so you can add flowers or herbs or some other vegetables like radishes or lettuce. It is truly a small garden right in the patio or balcony, and includes the stand as well.

Growing tomatoes on a balcony is not as difficult as it may seem. Select the right container for your plants, and take a look at our tomato growing tips for more help, and you will be on your way to fresh tasting tomatoes right of your “garden”.