If you have talked to your landlord about starting a garden and were turned down, you still have a chance to grow your own herbs and veggies this summer. Ask your landlord if having a flower box is acceptable. Unless it is otherwise spelled out in your lease, you should be able to start your own flower box, but that doesn’t mean you only have the right to grow flowers. Many herbs and small veggies will grow just fine in a flower box, but check to see what kind of sunlight and exposure you have and then head to your local garden center with that information and start shopping!

Herbs are often the easiest things to grow in a flower box since many of them don’t require a lot of intensive care. You will need to keep track of when it rains so you don’t accidentally over water some of your herbs of veggies and kill them. You also need to be careful about planting items next to each other that need drastically different care. Your garden center professional or even the Internet should be able to give you some excellent herb combos that grow well with similar light and care instructions so you don’t have to keep close track of when you watered things last.

You should also check with your neighbors that live below you to see if your window boxes are dripping on their windows. If you start to get complaints, you may have to discontinue your gardening efforts or come up with a new way for water to filter down through your box and out the bottom. You can try using a makeshift gutter system to guide the water away from people’s windows. Again, talk to your garden care professional to see what sorts of ideas they have since this is a very common problem.