The Balcony Pot and Soil Plan

Plan a container garden that fits the space and the budget: a row of pots that keeps the door and a path clear, each tapered pot worked as the shape it is, one total of soil with room to settle, quarts read as dry quarts, whole bags at the lowest price, and the wet weight written down for your building owner

TinyPlot's free Container Soil Calculator treats every pot as straight-sided, and the Room Layout Planner counts floor area. Most pots narrow toward the base, so a pot entered at the size on its label, the rim, comes out high; floor area cannot see a door or a path; and none of our tools asks what the soil weighs wet, which on a balcony is the first question. This plan puts them together. In its worked example six pots on a 12 x 5 ft balcony hold 89.6 liters of mix where the calculator at their rim sizes says 118.6. With 10% for settling the balcony needs 98.6 liters: one 1.5 cu ft bag and one 2 cu ft bag for $32.98 at example prices, where running the calculator once per pot size and adding the bag counts bought five 1.5 cu ft bags for $74.95. The area check calls the balcony Comfortable at 13.1% covered, yet once the door and a 32 inch path stay clear, one herb pot has no place. The soil alone weighs at least 89.6 kg wet, and that number goes to the building owner as a question. Every figure is computed by code from the site's own tools and is an example for you to replace; the settling allowance and the wet weight per liter are rules of thumb, and quarts come from NIST's table. The plan never says what a balcony can carry: that is for the building owner or manager and their structural engineer. Included: seven steps, a balcony sheet, a pot sheet, a bag sheet, a note for the building owner, taper and bag reference tables and a quickstart, plus a personalised sheet worked from the numbers you entered in the calculator.

Look inside

Two full pages from the plan, exactly as printed. Click either to read it at full size before you decide.

What is in it

• Step 1: a row of pots against the wall that keeps the door and a door-wide path clear, with nothing climbable at the railing
• Step 2: measuring every pot inside, to a fill line an inch below the rim
• Step 3: the taper, worked as a cone or prismoid with its top cut off, never at the rim size
• Step 4: one total of soil plus settling, rounded up once
• Step 5: reading quarts as the dry quarts on the bag (NIST)
• Step 6: whole bags at the lowest price, every size and mix compared
• Step 7: the wet weight, pot by pot, as a question for your building owner
• Four working pages: balcony sheet, pot sheet, bag sheet, note for the building owner
• Reference tables: what a round pot holds by taper, and bag sizes in liters, cubic feet and dry quarts
• A quickstart, and a personalised sheet worked from your own calculator inputs

The plan picks up where the free Container Soil Calculator and Room Layout Planner leave off. They give a volume for a straight-sided pot and a share of the floor; the plan works each pot as the tapered shape it is, keeps a row of pots against the wall with the door and a path clear, totals the soil once with room to settle, reads quarts as dry quarts, finds the cheapest mix of whole bags, and writes down the wet weight as a question for your building owner. Every figure in it is an example for you to replace. It is not structural or electrical advice, and it never says what a balcony can carry.