{"slug": "3-principles-for-creating-a-backyard-in-the-smallest-of-spaces", "title": "3 principles for creating a backyard in the smallest of spaces", "summary": "Amelia Greenland, a Bay Area landscaper, grows lettuce, kale, mint, and strawberries on her small second-floor balcony using grow bags and railing planters despite limited sunlight. Experts advise small-space gardeners to define their goals, choose appropriate locations, and use containers to maximize patios, balconies, and rooftops.", "body_md": "**Getting your**\n\n[Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...“As you can see, I have to make the most of our space,” Amelia Greenland says about her cozy two-bedroom apartment in Alameda, which she shares with her 4-year-old daughter and their two cats.\n\nImpressively, Greenland also is using her apartment’s limited outdoor space to grow food – lettuce, kale, mint and even strawberries. She’s doing it on a second-floor, southeast-facing balcony off her living room that doesn’t get direct sunlight. Still, she has created a small oasis of green for herself and her daughter. She’s growing the herbs and greens she throws into eggs, salads or dressings in four five-gallon “grow bags” and a set of ingenious planters that are designed to straddle the narrow metal railings of apartment balconies.\n\n**RELATED: Our happy place: Why Bay Area residents love their backyards**\n\nIn her professional life, Greenland landscapes other people’s backyards for her company Sustain With Me Landscapes. The former public school biology teacher and nutrition and culinary arts educator is given sizable pieces of land on which to arrange other people’s displays of native flowering plants, build raised beds filled with vegetables or create small woodland areas and orchards.\n\nBut like a lot of Bay Area residents, Greenland is not in a position yet to be able to afford to rent or buy a home with a yard. So she’s making do with the outdoor area she has, a three-food-wide strip of balcony, a portion of which is occupied by a storage bin that she needs because of limited closet space elsewhere in her apartment.\n\nNo doubt, there are a number of Bay Area apartment and condo dwellers who would love to have backyards so they can garden. But if the backyard dream isn’t immediately available, they can still indulge their green thumbs. There’s actually a lot they can do with patios, balconies, rooftops and even window boxes, as local nurseries and landscapers like Greenland will attest – not to mention countless Pinterest posts and DIY YouTube videos.\n\nWhen it comes to gardening in small spaces, people can raise a surprising variety of plants in pots and planters, from popular herbs to fruit-bearing trees, says Gracie Olson, an edible gardening expert at SummerWinds Nursery in Campbell.\n\nThey can start modestly with just a few pots, and grow some of the usual – herbs, ferns or flowering annuals like pansies and impatiens. They can also get more ambitious, using five-to-15-gallon containers to raise larger bushy plants like azaleas, hydrangeas and camellias or to create a compact kitchen garden with tomatoes, peppers and even sweet corn.\n\nBy artfully arranging pots and plants of different sizes, shapes, colors and species, it’s possible to transform an otherwise concrete balcony and patio into a visually compelling natural space. By planting natives, or by setting up a small burbling fountain, people also can make their outdoor retreat inviting to bees, butterflies, birds.\n\n**RELATED: New for the backyard herb garden: cannabis**\n\nBay Area nurseries like SummerWinds teach specific classes on making the most of limited square footage. Here are three basic principles for gardening in small spaces.\n\n#### Know exactly what you want\n\nLike the garden experts at South Bay-based Summerwinds nurseries say, “Start with how you feel.” Gardeners should figure out whether they want their patio or to be a second dining room, an outdoor retreat or a place to make an aesthetic statement. As with a tiny house, there’s no space for different distinct areas. But like a tiny house, even a balcony or patio can accommodate several functions, though every square foot and every element should have a purpose.\n\n“A thoughtfully placed container, a vertical accent or even one standout plant can completely transform how a space feels,” the SummerWinds guide says.\n\n#### Location, location, location\n\nOf course, every gardener has to consider consider soil conditions, water access, weather and amount and direction of sunlight when figuring out what to plant. But planning for location becomes even more necessary when space is limited.\n\nWhen apartment dwellers approach Olson for advice about what to grow, she first asks about where they live because “it’s all about lighting and it’s all about where they live because there are so many microclimates in the Bay Area.”\n\nFor example, she says that Los Gatos is hotter and colder than Sunnyvale or Mountain View, while those cities also get a breeze in the north. As an advocate for growing edible plants in containers, Olson also said that the type of sunlight a balcony or patio gets dictates, say, which type of citrus plant she would recommend. Dwarf Meyer lemon trees, which can do well in containers, need hours of direct sunlight, she said. So do kumquats.\n\nBut if that kind of sunlight isn’t available, Olsen could recommend another type of citrus that’s becoming increasingly popular with customers who love cooking Southeast Asian dishes. That’s the makrut, or Thai lime tree, whose aromatic leaves are an essential ingredient in Thai curries and soup.\n\n**RELATED: Ziplines. Glamping. Pickleball. Inside the trends shaping Bay Area backyard design**\n\n“It doesn’t need full sun,” Olsen said. “It could be morning sun or filtered sun; you’re not growing it for the fruit, you’re growing it for the leaves. So, if you do a lot of Thai cooking, that would be a good one.”\n\nAnother major issue with location is water, whether a spigot is available on a balcony or patio to attach a hose. Otherwise, a gardener will have to go back and forth inside to fill up a watering can. How regularly and much depends on the water needs of their plants, and low-water plants could be a consideration. “I have to come out and hand-water everything, and since it’s getting hot, I’m watering a couple times a week,” Greenland said about her herbs and vegetables.\n\n#### Go vertical — for privacy and much more space\n\nUsing homemade or store-bought shelves, mounted planters, trellises and netting to create vertical spaces for gardening has become increasingly popular. It allows gardeners to grow a surprising variety of plants, including vegetables.\n\nAs British gardening guru Derek Fell writes in his book “Vertical Gardening,” “Successful vertical gardens can be created that are freestanding or placed against a wall where reflected heat can encourage earlier yields and protect from late frost.” Even within a 12-inch-wide space, you can “grow an attractive curtain of climbing vegetables, fruits, or flowers,” he writes\n\nFell says there are climbing varieties for most major vegetable families, including climbing zucchini and climbing spinach. He recommends using more compact, non-climbing vegetables, such as lettuces and peppers, as foundation or “footprint” plants. Or these non-climbing plants can be grown in tower pots and stackable planters, which are widely available in gardening stores and online.\n\nFell also recommends using tall plants for support, including okra or sweet corn; dwarf varieties of corn are known to do well in containers. These tall plants add to that “curtain,” which can give people a sense of privacy on a patio or balcony that’s within several feet of a neighbor’s, added Olson, who says she likes mixing okra with zinnias in containers Design-wise, a trellis, pot tower or even a living wall both create more space and an illusion of more space by drawing the eye upwards. Depending on the season, different plants also be switched out among the pots, while a spiller plant, like ivy geranium, or a vine can add visual drama.\n\n“A great vine in a pot that’s for morning sun or filtered lighting is the flowering maple, or abutilon,” Olsen says, describing the plant with large, lantern-like leaves that bloom in summer and fall. “The thing is, the hummingbirds love it.”\n\nGreenland also likes the idea of using vertical gardening to cover a big bare wall that’s otherwise “doing nothing.” And while she would consider a wall-mounted hanging planter herself, she notes that some landlords, including her own, probably wouldn’t appreciate tenants drilling holes into their walls to anchor them.\n\nStill, she envisions other ways to vertically garden. If she had more sunlight, she’d have a trellis filled with “tomatoes, cucumbers, kind of grow whatever,” she said. In the meantime, she’s trying strawberries in one of her containers, even if they, too, could use more sun. “They’re an experiment for my daughter,” she said.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/3-principles-for-creating-a-backyard-in-the-smallest-of-spaces", "canonical_source": "https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/07/08/3-principles-small-gardens/", "published_at": "2026-07-08 12:30:19+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-08 12:31:31.120790+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Amelia Greenland", "Sustain With Me Landscapes", "SummerWinds Nursery", "Gracie Olson"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/3-principles-for-creating-a-backyard-in-the-smallest-of-spaces", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/3-principles-for-creating-a-backyard-in-the-smallest-of-spaces.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/3-principles-for-creating-a-backyard-in-the-smallest-of-spaces.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/3-principles-for-creating-a-backyard-in-the-smallest-of-spaces.jsonld"}}