In urban dwelling, we don’t waste space. Particularly, when that space is an outdoor patio with a grill! A door off our Cobble Hill, Brooklyn bedroom leads to a small concrete space — the merits of a basement apartment! We loved the sunlight and fresh air, but knowing it could be so much more, we transformed into a teak patio and vegetable garden.
Taking a cue from New York City itself, we built up instead of out, adding planters into a side wall and by choosing plants that grow tall like skyscrapers. The baby tomato plants pictured above reached about 7′ in height. We planted just about every upright growing thing we could as we didn’t know what to expect to make it through the spring, but it turned out these overzealous tomatoes blocked the everything else from the sun. I see summer 2015 full of tomato quiche, tomato and mozzarella, tomato…
Building the planters was a relatively easy process. We used the floor as the ground and built both a decorative front piece and braces throughout to help support the weight of the soil mixture once added.
To transform the concrete patio into a teak hideaway, we found a very affordable and easy to build solution from the outdoor flooring section of Ikea. The flooring pictured here is from their Runnen collection.
At Ikea, we also found a teak table with two chairs to match. The great sell about this outdoor dining table is the very flexible nature of its size. It can be as narrow as pictured above and has two leaves to seat four to six people.
The final touch to our backyard was an outdoor lit tree that we picked up at a Restoration Hardware outlet.
