RIVER CITY JOURNAL: PLOWING ON THE BALCONY NOT LIKE THE BACK 40

You can take us away from a garden spot, but that won't keep us from finding a way to do a little flower farming.

Springtime yanks at some hidden strings within us. Call it a primal urge to survive. Call it planting fever. Call it too many garden catalogs in the mail.

Whatever, my wife and I have been hit hard this year, the second with no yard to mow, no shrubs to prune and no bedding plants to tend. Our urban landscape as downtown dwellers hasn't kept us from turning into Farmer Marge and Rancher Joe. Just wait till you hear what we did.

First, you should know that we aren't novices at urban gardening. Almost 30 years ago we moved to New York City and discovered that transplanted Midwesterners who were brought up with large gardens and yards never lose that special feeling for warm, moist soil as the days grow longer.

I will admit that farming never appealed to me. Growing up on a farm in the valleys and hills of the Ozarks, I thought a milk cow was God's curse for sleepy-heads. I vowed to devote my life to anything that didn't involve farming -- or math, for that matter. And here I am.

Both of us remember the gardens of our youth. In my case, I thought the garden was mostly a hideout for copperheads. I prayed for rain, lots and lots of rain, so it would be too muddy to hoe. Our garden was all vegetables, while Farmer Marge's home garden was a nice balance of a few vegetables plus nasturtiums, zinnias and cockscomb in abundant profusion.

As wide-eyed newcomers to New York, we quickly realized that the biggest crop was concrete. Even relatively pastoral Staten Island was mostly paved over. We did find that the small parking lot behind our apartment building -- the one that overlooked the roof of the walk-up where Paul Newman lived when he first went to Broadway -- had a dog run enclosed by a chain-link fence. Long ago pets had been banned from the building, so the former dog run was ripe for tilling. Farmer Marge went out one spring evening armed with a screwdriver (for plowing), a bucket (for watering) and a packet of zinnia seeds. A few weeks later the dog run was ablaze with showy flowers. Our neighbors called it a miracle.

But that wasn't all. We bought a couple of small flower boxes and put them on the fire escape outside our bedroom window. They soon were full of blooming nasturtiums. Later that summer we were driving out of the parking lot and looked up at the building. Nearly every landing of the fire escape had a patch of color on it. Seems like the farming bug infects lifelong city folks too.

This year our garden space is a half-circle of a balcony off the second-floor living room. It is about five feet wide and three feet deep. We found three good-sized planters, bags of potting soil to fill them, a bag of gravel for proper drainage -- the most important part of a successful garden, according to Farmer Marge -- and packets of zinnia and nasturtium seeds. As we wheeled our laden shopping cart toward a cash register, we realized we had a garden in a cart.

You know what? In this age of prepackaged everything, no one looked at all surprised that we would buy not only seeds to plant, but the garden in which to sow them. Right off the shelf.

The addition of three metal planters to fit along the curved railing of the balcony completes this year's acreage allotment. The plowing, fertilizing and planting are done.

"The seeds should germinate by next Friday," Farmer Marge said. She knows all those technical farm terms. Yes, the seed packages said the seeds should sprout in six or seven days.

That doesn't keep either of us from checking the planters at least twice a day. Just in case.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.