After four years of killing things on the roof, I finally did what I should have done at the start and watched somebody who knows what they are doing.

This video is about starting a container garden in the smallest of spaces, which is a polite description of my balcony. I watched it to the end, took notes and then spent a slightly embarrassing sum of money on soil.

What I had been getting wrong

Almost everything, it turns out, and mostly the same thing: I had been treating pots as small pieces of ground. They are not. They dry out faster, they run out of food sooner, and they sit in whatever wind the building happens to send round the corner.

• My pots were too small for what I was asking of them.
• I had been reusing the same tired compost for three years.
• I watered on a schedule instead of looking at the plant.
• I bought what looked nice, not what suited an east wall.

This year’s results

The tomatoes produced, by my count, a respectable bowl. The beans climbed something for the first time. The geranium, naturally, ignored all of this and carried on exactly as before.

A garden in a pot is mostly a lesson in admitting how much a small thing needs.

I would not say I have become a gardener. But I go out there in the morning now to see what has happened overnight, and something usually has, and I find that I look forward to it.

Video: Next Level Gardening on YouTube. Embedded here, not made by me.

Sample content for The Pixel, a fictional personal blog.