Vegetables can be grown with a design to suit your garden, patio, balcony

There are numerous designs that one can create when growing vegetables. The shapes of growth, fruit and leave colours all influence the overall design, creating a peaceful and yet vibrant scene on your balcony or patio. Vegetables allow the designer to have room to experiment.

How to choose vegetable plants to use

1. Only purchase those vegetables and herbs that you would want to consume

2. Mix proven good combinations such as tomatoes and basil or cucumber and dill. These combinations work!

3. Buy rapid growing vegetables that ripen early such as radishes and lettuce.

4. Purchase space saving compact vegetable varieties.

5. Give preference to vegetables tat produce visually stunning designs. Runner beans, courgettes and pepino melons produce very pretty flowers.

6. Aim for vegetables that have interesting shapes such as lettuce, spinach beat and sage.

7. Consider the colours you would want in your balcony or patio. Tomatoes and gourds have lovely magical colours

8. If you want a pleasant aroma coming from your vegetable pot. Then purchase Basil. Thyme and mint...

Unlike normal garden flowers a, a vegetable garden will need to be constantly changed, as gaps develop (due to consumption of the tasty fruits). These gaps need to be filled in by new vegetables thus there can never be a dull moment in your garden.

Planting on different levels

Utilize all available space on your balcony, garden or patio by planting your vegetables in hanging pots and climbing frames. Beans, cucumbers and gourds thrive in sunlight and a perfect position for them would be along a house wall. They will be visually appealing and produce an abundant harvest.

Upright tall growing vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers and pepino melons should be placed in the background. Place medium tall and hanging species such as lettuce, mange-tout and summer flowers in front of the vegetable pot. This looks marvelous!

Night shade species produce splashes of colour in the balcony box or vegetable pot. For a box 80 cm in length, add:

  • 1 Cape gooseberry1 pepper mavras with violet fruit and bush like growth

  • 1 pepper Triton with yellow fruit and bushy growth

  • 1 sage

  • 1 lemon Thyme

  • 2 thymophylla tenuiloba

Do not stand this arrangement outside before the end of spring and place in a sunny warm position draught.

Lambs Lettuce in a terracotta box

For a 40 cm terracotta box : Sow lambs lettuce in seed trays which contains pots with a diameter of 4cm. Prick out the young plants after about a month in to containers, keeping them 10 * 8 cm apart. Place them in a bright position.

Sweet corn and broccoli, lettuce and herbs

A vegetable and herb mixture looks just like a professionally designed beautiful flower arrangement. Sweet corn planted in a box does not grow as long as the one that grows in the garden, but this does not mean that it will be invisible.

For a 60cm box:

4-5 sweet corn plants Early extra sweet

1 batavia lettuce

1 blue broccoli - Rosalind

1 dill ( Farnblantt)

1 red leafed basil Dark Opal

1 ornamental sage - Salvia farinacea Mina

Plant the sweet corn, dill and sage in the background in the background. In the front of the box place lettuce, broccoli and basil. These vegetables and herbs grow together in harmony.